Even though he now competes in AEW, Adam Cole will likely remain synonymous with NXT for the foreseeable future.
In his four-plus years on what had been the black-and-gold brand, Cole did it all, and he arguabl carried the show at a few different points. His WWE run is now over, and he never got called up to the main roster.
During a recent apperance on Oral Sessions with Renée Paquette, Cole described how he was somewhat concerned about potentially getting called up to the main roster because he had seen plenty of his peers get frustrated due to their own experiences on WWE RAW or SmackDown. He also emphasized that he wasn’t against it, as he had positive experiences whenever he worked on the main shows.
“For sure, but that’s not to say that I didn’t want to do that and experience it,” said Cole. “I want to be able to look back on my career and say that I accomplished or did everything that I wanted to. And again, even I had a really short stint where I was getting the chance to work on SmackDown and work on RAW, and I got to do the match at Survivor Series, and all of those were very positive experiences as well. It was all crazy, and that’s a whole other story with the whole last-minute thing.
“All of it was very positive. But yeah, there certainly was a fear, and it’s not because of anything other than the fact that I feel like I’ve known so many people who have gotten upset or stressed out by situations they were thrown into. Which again, I’m like that annoyingly optimistic person, that like finds the positive in everything. But yeah, it was something I was a little bit worried about because so far in the 13-and-a-half years that I’ve been in the pro wrestling business, I have not gotten to a point yet where I’m like, ‘I hate this. I am not having fun.’ I’ve been lucky, fingers crossed, the entire time.”
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Speaking of the “crazy” time he faced Daniel Bryan on WWE SmackDown, Cole explained that he wouldn’t change a thing about this hectic situation. When a solid portion of the roster got stuck overseas at a Saudi Arabia show, WWE called an audible and leaned on some NXT stars, and Cole was given the chance to face Bryan, someone he’d always dreamed of wrestling. Despite the fact that he had to rush to the airport and lace up his boots at 30,000 feet, Cole made it clear that he deeply enjoyed sharing the ring with someone he had always looked up to.
“I’ve been pretty open about the fact that CM Punk and Bryan Danielson were two of the guys that got me into, not only independent wrestling, not only Ring of Honor, but the fact that wrestling existed outside of WWE and WCW and ECW. So right as I came into Ring of Honor, [Bryan] was leaving to go to WWE, so I never had the chance to work with him ever. And then when that all went down and that all happened, my god.
“Again, the fan in me was so excited to get the chance to get in there with him, which is really cool. And the funny thing is, I wouldn’t have changed the circumstance at all. Like it was perfect. It was this crazy, chaotic, ‘Oh my god what are we gonna do, okay let’s just let Adam Cole and Daniel Bryan go nuts.’ It was so much fun.”
The full episode is available now:
