A recent episode of What Do You Wanna Talk About? with Cody Rhodes podcast featured Finn Balor as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Balor’s thoughts about him getting a royalty check from New Japan Pro Wrestling while he was working for WWE in their NXT brand and his belief the payoff of his former BULLET CLUB group to the wrestling business was way more valuable than any monetary amount he could have been given.
“I was in NXT about eight months, and I get a call from New Japan, and they’re like, ‘Hey Devitt. Aye! Devitt-chan, we got royalty check for you man.’ I’m like, ‘Woah! I got a royalty check from New Japan?’ I said, ‘Tiger, thank you so much. How much am I due?’ He goes, ‘Ah, like $118.’ I’m like, ‘$118?’ He goes, ‘Yeah man, we need your bank details.’ I said, ‘Tiger, give it to charity. I don’t need it. I’m good. So I feel like the payoff with BULLET CLUB, for me at least, was not financial, but, I feel like it was way more valuable than any dollar amount that I could have been given, from just what it’s given to the business.”
Balor also gave his thoughts about the origin of the name for his BULLET CLUB group in NJPW.
“You want to know a story? Which I don’t think I’ve told actually. Like, about the Bullet Club and where the name came from. I was a young boy in New Japan. Before the shows, we would all warm up in the ring and the young boys would be made to do squats and push-ups and stuff. And then we’d get in the ring with the senior wrestlers and we’d be stretched, which would be like shot on basically and beat up.
Minoru Suzuki was in the ring with me, he was a legitimate grappler. And I caught him with an armbar. He goes, ‘Ah, Devitt, you’re a real shooter.’ And then Tiger Hattori kind of heard that and every day he’d say, ‘Hey, Devitt, you’re the real shooter. You’re the real shooter.’ So this was going on in the locker room for about a year. He’d say, ‘Hey, Devitt, you’re a shooter.’ And he’d just do it like that ‘shooter.’ When the time came about a year later, the office came to me and said, ‘Hey, we want to turn you heel. We want to put you with Fale. We need to get you guys a group.’ So then they decided to put in Karl Anderson and Tama. I was trying to think what ties us all together. And at the time, Fale was using the hand grenade finish — similar to Solo [Sikoa]. And then there’s the Machine Gun. And I was the ‘real shooter.’ So I was like, ‘What links us all together?’ And it was Bullet Club.”
Balor also gave his thoughts about his praise of several former Bullet Club members and how the WWE locker room misses having Doc Gallows being around.
“At the same point, I need to also thank Karl Anderson, (Doc) Gallows, (Don) Fale, Tama (Tonga), The (Young) Bucks … Yeah, 100 percent. I can’t speak highly enough of Gallows, and I can’t express how much the locker room misses him.”
Balor also gave his thoughts about the origin of his “Demonito” puppet in WWE and Lucha Libre AAA.
“That’s a funny story. So I got told I was working against Iguana in AAA, and it was the first time I’d worked against someone who I wasn’t familiar with in a long time, and obviously, when you’re on the indies or when you’re in Japan, you kind of research your opponents and you come up with some ideas beforehand. But in WWE, it’s pretty much like you see everyone all the time. You kind of know all their stuff. So this is the first time that I hadn’t known someone that I was stepping in the ring with so I said, ‘Oh, I better do a little research,’ like I used to. So, I went on YouTube, and it was 20 past 4 in the afternoon, and I typed in ‘Iguana,’ or ‘Mr. Iguana,’ and the first match that came up was Mr. Iguana versus Santino (Marella). Cobra versus Iguana, and I said, ‘Damn, I need something like that,’ and then, like a lightning bolt, it hit me. ‘I need a Demon puppet.”
Balor also gave his thoughts about his belief that WWE’s NXT UK had a “huge negative effect” on the United Kingdom and European indies wrestling scene.
“When NXT U.K. started, which was a huge thing at the time for British and European wrestling, I feel like it kind of took all the talent, and it starved all the indies, and it took a long time for them to rebuild, and for a lot of them, it hasn’t even happened yet, because there’s no one to learn from or look up to. Like the guys Tyler (Bate) and Pete (Dunne) and everyone else who came to WWE. Now the younger kids don’t have anyone to learn from. So, I feel like there was probably a huge negative effect on the (pool) of talent that WWE took out of that territory, you know? But, slowly, it’s starting to rebuild.”
Transcript h/t: Fightful.com 1, 2, 3, & 4, F4WOnline.com
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