TNA World Champion Leon Slater discussed various topics with Extreme Channel, including his appearances on WWE programming.
Slater said, “I think I am a prime example of using those opportunities to the max, right? For example, if you look at my career in the past three and a half, four years, I’ve gone from a kid on the British indies where you guys have seen me in The Hanger, The Bread Shed, The Frog and Bucket, like all of these tiny venues up and down our country, right? I’ve gone from that to starting at TNA at the bottom. I was on Xplosion every match; I was losing every match. And then I built my way up, and I built my way up to the point within TNA that WWE reached out to us, you know what I mean. Obviously, everybody if they could, would reach out to WWE and be like, ‘Oh, like I’ll show up this Tuesday, this and that.’ But unfortunately, that’s not how it works. They reach out to you, and I feel like for — again, for someone that doesn’t work there and that hasn’t ever signed a deal there, I feel like my run there was as if I’d been working there for two or three years. And I think the difference between me and a couple other people is that I used my opportunity there. I gained the platform, the exposure, countless lessons learned. And I’ve brought them back to TNA. And I’ll be honest; I wouldn’t be TNA World Champion right now if it wasn’t for my time in NXT and those couple of times on the main roster as well. Because like I said, those lessons have been invaluable.”
On people considering TNA a stepping Stone in the working relationship:
“So to anyone that thinks TNA is just the stepping stone, I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think it is a true partnership where people from our side, from the TNA side, get to go over there and learn a complete style. And the same thing with the people from NXT that have come over to TNA in the past. They get to work with people like Nic Nemoth, like Matt and Jeff Hardy, like a Frankie Kazarian. These guys that have been in the game 20, 25, 30, 35 years, you know what I mean? Which is again, absolutely invaluable experience for wrestlers of any caliber. So I think ‘partnership’ is the perfect word to describe what we’ve got going on with WWE right now, for sure.”
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