Braun Strowman On Why He Has Not Accepted Offers From Any Wrestling Promotion
Former WWE star Braun Strowman chatted with Control Your Narrative, a spin off of the the Free Your Narrative promotion, where Strowman has competed against EC3 under his real name, Adam Scherr. Strowman talked about his release from WWE earlier this year and how some elements of it are still a bit frightening for him.
"It's scary still, I'm not going to lie," Strowman said. "I kind of put all my eggs in one basket for quite a long time. And that basket got thrown away."
Strowman overall doesn't have anything bad to say about WWE or Vince McMahon, thanking the promotion for giving him so many opportunities and accomplishments. He does admit however that the release sent him into a bad place for awhile.
"I had an unbelievable career in wrestling, in the short amount of time I had done it," Strowman said. "I had never stepped foot into a wrestling ring in my entire life. I stepped into a ring July of 2013. September 2015 I debuted on RAW the night after SummerSlam in Brooklyn, New York, and I had five matches under my belt. Twelve matches into my wrestling career, I'm wrestling with the late great Brodie Lee in Merida, Mexico vs. the Brothers of Destruction in front of like 15,000 people in a sold out arena. From that to winning Money in the Bank, the Greatest Royal Rumble, the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal, the Intercontinental Championship, the RAW Tag Team Championships, the Universal Championships. To do all that in five years, I'm still trying to soak that in. Being involved and thrown into the deep end of this industry, coming from the outside world, I caught a lot of flack from it for sure. But I fell in love with the art that is pro wrestling, sports entertainment, whatever you want to call it.
"Everything happens for a reason and I have no hard feelings at all. Everything WWE allotted me in life. And it was ups and downs, hard times, good times and bad times, fun, so much fun. I am so ever indebted to that company and to Vince McMahon, because he gave me a shot at life I could have never imagined. He gave me an opportunity to meet you guys. I would never have met you guys if I hadn't gotten involved in this business. I would never been able to travel the world, see the things that I've done, meet the people I have, fallen in love with the people I've met through this business. And it's something special and I'm so unbelievably humble for the experiences that I was able to experience with WWE. Did it end how I wanted it to? Of course not. And I know that people are always, I've been hearing it a ton, 'well 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 to come back to work. And I ain't going to lie, it sent me into a pretty bad place. You guys saw how it was."
As for his next move, Strowman revealed he had been offered several big money deals, though he didn't reveal who with. He stated he had other things he wanted to do first, most importantly among them rediscovering who he was away from the big time wrestling spotlight.
"Everything happens for a reason. One door closes and it's unbelievable how many other doors have opened. So may different opportunities," Strowman said. "I turned down a lot of money, like an astronomical amount of money to do this. There's days where I friggin think about it and I'm like 'holy s**t.' Every three letter word corporation out there has made me an offer, talked to me about what I want to do moving forward. And I said 'first and foremost, I have something that I want to do.' One was this. Two was just having a chance to breathe and live. Like I said, I was unbelievably blessed for my time with WWE, but it was very time consuming. I went, in five years, I saw my parents eight times. I missed people's funerals, I missed weddings, I missed births, I missed Christmas', I missed Thanksgivings.
"The time was amazing, don't get me wrong. But I'm still a human being, and I have needs when it comes to comfort. I'm very close with my parents, I'm very close with my family and my friends. So it's not only being able to work with my friends on a project, being able to work on an app, being able to do all the other stuff that I have coming out very soon that I'll be able to talk about more. But just being able to live and going back to my grassroots. And this was one of the biggest things to come out of the Narrative, was remembering who the f**k I was."
You can watch the full interview below. If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Control Your Narrative with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.