Finn Bálor says he spent his first few months at the WWE Performance Center convinced he was wasting his prime. Fresh off NJPW, he couldn’t understand why he needed to go back to basic drills.
Bálor told Off The Ball that his thinking changed after a conversation with Performance Center coach Terry Taylor:
“I remember being in NXT about three months. A couple months previous, I just done the Tokyo Dome in front of 50 – 60,000 people. And all of a sudden, I’m doing bumps and rolls in a warehouse in Florida. Preparing me for what? I feel like I am prepared.
I remember having a conversation with my coach at the time, Terry Taylor. Saying like, ‘Terry, I’m 34. I’m wasting my career here. These are my prime years. I need to be in the ring. I need to be on the show.’ He simply said, ‘Finn, the style you’ve been wrestling the last 16 years, if you continue that, you have like two or three more years left in the tank. I’m trying to teach you a style that’s going to extend your career and get you another 10 years in the ring.’ And here we are 12 years later and I feel better than ever.
So I owe a debt of gratitude to Terry Taylor and a lot of the coaches at the Performance Center as well. Norman Smiley, Matt Bloom, all those guys really helped me kind of adapt to the different style WWE is because it is different. It’s still a wrestling show, it’s still in a ring with four sides, but it’s a very different style.”
Bálor added that without NXT, he believes he would have “burnt up like a meteorite” during his first two years in WWE, and said some of what he learned during that stretch still applies to his work 12 years later.
Bálor’s NXT run became one of the most significant in the brand’s history. He debuted on NXT television in November 2014 and won the NXT Championship the following year by defeating Kevin Owens in Tokyo. He held the title for 292 days before dropping it to Samoa Joe in April 2016.
Bálor moved to the main roster a few months later, debuting on Raw in July 2016. He defeated Seth Rollins at SummerSlam to become the first Universal Champion, but had to vacate the title less than 24 hours later because of a shoulder injury.
Twelve years removed from those early doubts in Orlando, Bálor is still in the world title picture. He most recently wrestled at SummerSlam on Aug. 2, facing Sami Zayn, Gunther and Kevin Owens in a Fatal 4-Way to determine the next challenger for the Undisputed WWE Championship. Owens won the match.