During a recent interview with talkSPORT, Drake Maverick commented on working for NXT after his WWE release, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On the challenge of working in the tournament not knowing his fate: “I never questioned creative and never questioned what was going on. The most nervous I was out of all of the matches was the Jake Atlas match because it was the first one. I was going into work thinking ‘am I gonna get treated differently?, am I gonna have to talk to Hunter [Triple H] and have these weird talks where we sit down and it’s like a counselling session?’ There were real emotions there because it was actually my life – I wasn’t playing a character as I have done in the past. I literally sat there and thought ‘I’m gonna show the world James, and how I feel.’ Nobody else was in the same situation. It was a terrible situation we all went through, but nobody had the situation I had where they said ‘We still want you to do these matches.’ I put my video out and that was how I was feeling at that moment. It was warts and all.”
On people online claiming he manipulated his friends’ pain of their release for his own benefit: “It made me sad some days. I had some bad mental health days because I was…. you look on your Twitter feed – people get this all the time. I get some very untoward things, like that I used some of my friends that I care very deeply about, and that I didn’t think of them or care about them. Again – no one else was in the same situation – and every one of those people that I was accused of using were patting me on the back saying ‘Go get it, man. You’re doing exactly what we would do if we were put in that situation.’ These are trying times, man. It sucks. You’ve got to take care of your family and go balls to the wall with it. It was hard on the brain because I’d never do anything like that, and be so malicious. There are some people out there who would, and that’s where it hurt.”
On the video he posted about his release: “A lot of people who are ‘real’ men will be like ‘Ha, he cried!’ Yeah, I did, and I’m not ashamed, because I care. I care deeply about this job and care deeply about the people I was working with. I just wanted in my life, for the first time, to be like ‘I’m not playing a character today – this is James. He’s vulnerable now, but he’s gonna pull through this.’ That’s how I lived it.”
