WWE Hall of Famer AJ Styles appeared on an episode of his Phenomenally Retro Podcast, where he discussed various topics, including his plans to scout for talent for WWE.
Styles said, “Well, I’m going to go visit the PC. I’m going to check out some NXT matches and uh to see where I can help out. If I can polish up some things that maybe some talent has trouble with, do that. Go see it evolve. Watch that show and go see the the next up and coming hopefully ID Kids. So, uh, just trying to stay busy with that until they say, ‘Hey, we need you here or we got this going on.’ Like, ‘Yep, I’m on this,’ you know. So, it’s 37:5237 minutes, 52 seconds. I’m always going to be on that search and trying to help guys. Uh but it’ll also give me an opportunity to talk with you know uh a lot of guys who make the decisions of what they need. What do we need? Okay, let [clears throat] me search for that. I’ll scour the earth literally for that diamond in the rough, the next big superstar. And I don’t care where they’re from, you know, right? You name it. I if I can go there and they’ll let me, I’ll do it. I want to find that next hungry athlete that hat just loves this, you know.”
On the attributes needed to be a WWE Superstar:
“Like I and you can see it like I was I was thinking about the five like maybe five attributes that you might need to be a WWE superstar and then I realized there’s only four because I put passion as one of them, but if you don’t have passion, you’re not going to have the other four, you know, like it’s not even if you have one or two of the other four, maybe you’re the athlete that I’m looking for, but you don’t have passion, it’s not going to work. Or maybe you good promos, but you don’t have passion. It doesn’t matter. You know, you could wrestle, great. You don’t have passion, it doesn’t matter. You got all this charisma, but no passion. It’s not going to work. You have to be passionate about this, you know, like there just something you could see it in those who have gotten to where they are.”
On the importance of finding passion for wrestling:
“You know, and then maybe they didn’t know what they were getting into. But the more they learned about pro wrestling, the more they enjoyed it. And and like me, you know, I I don’t maybe I didn’t have the passion when I first got it, maybe. I don’t know. But man, you could tell as soon as I got in a ring, I was obsessed. Like nothing was going to stop me. I want to I want to make sure that the guys who want to do this, they have that. They just really They really want to do this. This is what they’ve been doing. I want to do their, you know, hopefully maybe their whole life, but I understand if plans change and maybe you’re not going to NFL, but you’ve always enjoyed wrestling. Shoot, man. But and then you just get obsessed with it.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
