WWE United States Champion Finn Balor was a recent guest on the “After the Bell with Corey Graves” podcast and commented on his in-ring style reflecting the character he’s playing at the moment, tweaking his styles based on the feedback in WWE NXT, and more.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On changing his ring style: “I feel I’ve made huge compromises. The compromise in my style, or the change in my style, I feel is so drastically different that it’s almost unrecognizable for me to watch it. The same way where Finn and the Demon are separate, I feel Finn in NXT vs. Finn on Raw is completely different. It’s the same image, same gear maybe some days, but it’s a completely different style.”
On tweaking his ring style based on feedback in NXT: “The one thing that is so underestimated, and I took as a compliment when I came to NXT the first time and I realized wasn’t really a compliment, was that I was told I was too smooth. ‘That sounds like a compliment. That sounds good.’ I don’t think it’s a compliment. Everything should be difficult. It shouldn’t be easy to do anything in a fight. A fight is not easy. You need to struggle before you succeed before people really appreciate it. You need to go through the struggles. In life, you need to struggle for years through high school, college, apprenticeships, to finally get there and then you appreciate it. I feel it’s the same with someone doing a backflip, you don’t really struggle to do it, it’s just a backflip. If I’m thinking about how I apply myself, if I go out there and do the foot stomp first, people are going to go ‘ehh.’”