Former WWE star Adam Scherr (Braun Strowman) did his first post-WWE interview with the Control Your Narrative YouTube channel and talked about his departure from the company:
“I’m so indebted to that company and Vince McMahon because he gave me a shot and an opportunity to meet you guys. I never would have been able to meet you guys if I didn’t get involved in this business. I never would have been able to travel the world, see the things that I’ve done, meet the people I’ve done, fall in love with people that I met through this business. It’s something special. I’m so unbelievably humbled for these experiences that I was able to experience with WWE. Did it end how I wanted it to? Of course not. I know people always…I’ve been hearing it a ton, ‘You said you’d never wrestle again when you were done with WWE.’ Well, I was forced to be done. I said I would never wrestle for another company when I took my boots off for WWE. I never took my boots off, I never had an opportunity to put them back on and come back to work. I ain’t gonna lie, it sent me to a pretty bad place.”
“It’s a hard thing to realize, the wrestling business is very cutthroat. There are a lot of fairweather friends that came and went through this whole process. Praising and lifting you up when you’re on top of the mountain but when the mountain crumbles beneath your feet, they are standing and kicking dirt on top of you and continue to bury you. It’s a hard reality pill that I had to swallow. Seeing literally my life’s work slip through my fingertips. I always said, I feel like God put me on this earth to be a WWE superstar, and for awhile he did. When the realization of hitting what my rock bottom is, I realized I was put on this earth for more. I was put on this earth to inspire people. What you guys have alloted me to do is to fix myself and what was going on with me and my depression and anger and rage for things in my life that I couldn’t control. You gave me a platform and a place to be able to control myself and tear myself down.”
Strowman also talked about turning down offers from other companies:
“I turned down a lot of money. Like, an astronomical amount of money to do this [Free the Narrative II]. There are days where I’m thinking about it like, ‘Holy shit.’ Every three letter word corporation out there has made me an offer, talked to me, about what I want to do moving forward. I said, ‘first and foremost, I have something that I want to do.’ One was [Free The Narrative]. Two was just having the chance to breathe and live. Unbelievably blessed for my time in WWE, but it was very very time-consuming. In five years, I saw my parents like eight times. I missed people’s funerals, weddings, births, Christmas, Thanksgiving. The time was amazing, don’t get me wrong, but I’m a human being and I have needs when it comes to comfort. I’m very close with my parents. Being able to work on my friends on a project, work on an app, doing all the other stuff that I have coming out soon that I can talk about more. Just being able to live and going back to my grassroots. This is one of the biggest things coming out of the narrative, remembering who the f**k I was.”
