Finn Balor on He Was Negotiating for 10 Year Contract with NJPW Before Joining WWE, Questioned Decision To Start In NXT, WWE’s Plans for The Demon vs. The Fiend That Never Happened, Seth Rollins Not Wanting To Change Match Finish After He Got Injured During Universal Title Match, & More

A recent episode of the Insight with Chris Van Vliet podcast featured Finn Balor as the guest. One of the topics discussed included Balor’s thoughts about how he had been negotiating with New Japan Pro Wrestling for a ten year contract and had planned to end his wrestling career with the promotion before making his decision to join WWE instead.

“I started with NXT I think I was 34, which was quite late to start. WWE had came knocking a couple times, and I’d always kind of kicked it back because I was very happy in New Japan, wanted to do my whole career there, and I was trying to negotiate a 10-year contract and there was an issue. This was when I was 34; I was trying to negotiate a 10-year contract to stay there for the rest of my life. Then there was an issue because New Japan was owned by another company and that contract only lasted for four years, so they could only give me a four-year contract. I’d been there like eight years, and I’d seen how when guys got to like their mid-to-late 30s, they kind of phased them out. I thought, well, this will get me to my mid-to-late 30s and I’ll be phased out and I want to wrestle longer than that. I’m 34 and this is 12 years ago in WWE, where the roster was a lot younger, they were signing much younger guys, and I thought, oh, this could be my last opportunity, so that’s kind of the mindset I had. I was talking with my dad about the decision: Should I roll the dice in WWE, or should I stay in New Japan? I’ll never forget my dad said, ‘Son, you grew up watching WWF, that was your dream, you’re in Japan, you’re doing great, you’ve done it for eight years, but roll the dice.’ I’m glad I did.”

Balor also gave his thoughts about how he was not sure about starting out in NXT for his WWE career following him signing with the company in 2014 and how a talk he had with Performance Center coach Terry Taylor made him change his perspective about it.

“Going back to what I was saying earlier about signing with NXT, a lot of people were of the opinion of, ‘Hey, he’s an experienced guy, knows exactly what he’s doing in the ring. Why is he in NXT? He’s wasting his time in NXT.’ You hear this so much and I started to maybe believe it as well, and also, why am I in this Performance Center doing roll after roll and leapfrog after drop down, drop down, and run these drills? I just wrestled (Kota) Ibushi in front of 42,000 people at the Tokyo Dome like four weeks ago, and now I’m in the Performance Center in a factory doing drills with kids who’ve never wrestled. This was going on for about three months to the point where I think I showed up one Monday morning at 8 AM for practice, and Terry Taylor was my coach, who I cannot speak more highly about. He’s absolutely incredible. I said, ‘Terry, I don’t want to be here. I feel like I’m just wasting my career. I’m 34, I need to be wrestling.’ He said, ‘Finn, I’m teaching you a style that you can perform for another 10 years. If you continue wrestling the way you’ve been wrestling in New Japan, you’ll last about two more years, and I want you to last longer than that.’ So he was very instrumental in kind of helping me tweak my style to be more economical with my movements, with my moves, and really to go from being a good wrestler to being a star, and that’s the person who I credit with that, and he taught me so much. I cannot speak more highly about Terry Taylor.”

Balor also gave his thoughts about how WWE had plans for a feud between his The Demon persona and Bray Wyatt’s The Fiend persona in 2017 that eventually ended not happening due to Wyatt getting sick a couple of days before the match had been planned to take place.

“Yeah, I think that was certainly in the works, and something that I always think about and look back on and say, I’ve been very lucky to have had almost every match that I’ve ever wanted to have. But that’s one that I didn’t get to have, and we almost got Sister Abigail versus the Demon, and Wyndham had gotten sick a couple of days before we had to switch that match out at short notice.”

Balor also gave his thoughts his match against AJ Styles at WWE TLC 2017 as the replacement match and his praise of Styles’ in-ring work.

“Yeah, and I think that was like our first match ever. AJ is someone who I’ve looked up to my whole career, someone who I’ve admired. You can kind of look up to people, but not really relate to them, like, you know, I’ve always looked up to John Cena as the pinnacle of being like a WWE superstar, but I don’t really relate to him, in the sense of our journeys have been slightly different, the way we work is different. But AJ, I feel like we’re very, very similar. I was just like a couple years behind them, so someone who I’ve always like admired and aspired to be like. So getting to go in the ring with AJ that night was absolutely amazing.”

Balor also gave his thoughts about his shoulder injury he suffered during his Universal Championship match against Seth Rollins at SummerSlam 2016 and how Rollins did not want to change the match finish after he told him that he was hurt.

“No pain, but I knew there was a big issue, and it actually came out like three more times in the match, because any time I lifted my arm to hit the ropes, it came out. I remember I got whipped to the buckle one time, it came out. So I don’t know if I’ve ever told this story, and I’m not sure if I should, but I remember at one point in the match — so me and Seth (Rollins) — I was very lucky to be in there with Seth when it happened, because Seth is an absolute pro, and we were able to communicate and I was able to tell him, ‘Hey, I’m hurt.’ So we were kind of calling the match on the fly and editing spots and changing spots and talking the whole time, so the match that we’d done wasn’t actually the match that we’d laid out.

I must give Seth credit, because there was a point, we were outside the ring and I was rolling him back into the ring, and I said, ‘Dude, I’m hurt. I don’t think I’m gonna be wrestling for a while. Do you want to switch to finish?’ And he said, ‘No, stick to the plan.’ I just rolled him back in, and we stuck to the plan. I often wonder what that would have done for my career if we had switched the finish.”

Balor also gave his thoughts about how he was accidentally temporarily blinded by setting spray he used for his The Demon body paint prior to his WWE Intercontinental Championship match against Andrade at WWE Super ShowDown 2019 in Saudi Arabia.

“I’ve never told this story before, either. We did the Demon in Saudi Arabia. I wrestled Andrade, and we’ve promoted the match, we fly to Saudi. I’m getting painted, this paint doesn’t feel like the normal paint. What’s going on? I asked the girl that was doing it at the time, I said, ‘Is this the normal paint? It doesn’t feel right.’ She goes, ‘Oh no. They told me I couldn’t bring the normal paint because it has alcohol in it. Alcohol is not legal here.’ I said, ‘Did anyone not think of telling me because I’m the one that has to wrestle in this?’ She goes, ‘Oh no, but I have a solution.’ What’s the solution? ‘Well, if we use hairspray all over you, it kind of sets it a little bit more.’ Okay, well, you’re an expert. So they paint me, they cover me in hairspray. It’s also Saudi Arabia outdoors, so it’s like 100 degrees. So pretty much by the time I’ve gotten to the ring, it’s starting to come off. So then we do the match, it’s a physical match, we’re sweating like crazy. I start as The Demon, I end as Finn in the match. No problem. So we get through the match, no injuries, fantastic, that’s all I’m happy about. Later on in the show was Undertaker Goldberg, and I’m watching a match backstage, in a hallway. I’m like looking at the screen, and I’m like, did something hit a smoke machine in here, it felt like it was being smoked up on the entrance. But it wasn’t, it was just my eyes, because what had happened was the hairspray had ran into my eyes and burnt my retinas. I went blind; I was essentially blind where I had to be linked by the guys, brought out of the building, linked by the guys, just carried up the steps onto the charter. I couldn’t see on the flight. We landed in Germany to refuel the plane. The doc had to leave the plane, go to a chemist, get some special medicine to heal my eyes. Then we flew when we landed in San Francisco, like 15 hours later, and it was just starting to unblur. But I guess all that hairspray had irritated my iris so much that I couldn’t see. That was probably the scariest thing that’s ever happened to me in wrestling.”

Balor also gave his thoughts about the reason for the Street Fight stipulation being added to his match against Dominik Mysterio at WrestleMania 42 was due to him dealing with a rib injury going into the match.

“A similar thing happened this year at WrestleMania with Dom. I had gotten beat up by the Judgment Day. I think I’d been out for a week. Dom was having a match against Penta on Raw. It’s like three weeks before Mania. I do the run-in, I come back, I beat up JD, I beat up Dom, I throw him over the top rope, and I’m in street clothes. I’m gonna do the dive over the top rope, but I’m in street clothes. So, as I’m running, I wear baggier T-shirts, and I go oh, I haven’t done the dive in a while, and I wonder, is this T-shirt gonna get snagged on the top rope, and am I gonna get stuck like Top Dolla? This was going through my head as I’m running against the ropes, so as I’m coming back I see the boys outside the ring. I said I gotta jump extra high and I gotta tuck faster than I normally tuck, because I normally kind of extend a little bit, but I tucked early and as I tucked, I popped a rib right in the air, not on the landing, or when they caught me, in the air. I popped the rib, and I remember the boys caught me, great, put me down. I stood up, I fired up like this, and I said, f*ck, I popped the rib, no! Then again, same situation, three weeks to Mania. How long does the rib take to heal? Oh, sh*t! So then now it was again just this last WrestleMania, it was race against time to get the rib. The problem with the rib recovery is you can’t do anything, there’s no rehab, you can’t do anything really. So it was kind of touch and go, and that was kind of a factor into why the match was changed to a street fight because I was able to rely more on the toys, the weapons and stuff, than have to actually, you know, wrist locks and twists and rolls and stuff like that.”

Balor also gave his thoughts about his time in NJPW as the leader of Bullet Club and how the group generated so much heat with fans that NJPW had to set up a separate phone line because of the fan complaints about them cheating in matches.

“Once I turned heel, I think it was crazy, because we had so much heat. I remember Fale would be carrying me out on his shoulders at Korakuen Hall, and he kind of had to walk through the crowd, and there’d be fans hitting me in the leg, punching me in the leg, giving me dead legs, and then those fans, so many fans, were calling the office to complain about Prince Devitt cheating to win matches that they had to set up a separate phone line to take complaints. Because there’s so much respect, and I guess it wasn’t something that was done commonly, or at least recently in New Japan. So that was like lightning in a bottle, and it was such a short run for me in Bullet Club, but I look back on it super fondly.”