William Regal Details The Role He Played Behind-The-Scenes In WWE NXT
William Regal was a recent guest on Talk Is Jericho, where he reflected on his involvement with NXT. While he worked as the General Manger on screen, he also had key roles behind the scenes. Regal claimed he was the first person that Triple H brought in, and admitted that it did need a change in terms of NXT 2.0.
"NXT had started, I was the first person, as far as I know, that H [Triple H] pulled in and said, 'what's your vision for this? Right, okay.' We did what we did and it was a great thing for a lot of people," he said. "Now, it was a great success, and I have no ill will at all for anyone. I am really happy. Because it needed some kind of change, because things had changed. This place had come along and different things, so it needed [it]."
William Regal also spoke about his role in terms of going around and looking for talent with Canyon Ceman. The new AEW signee said that he's a great person, while he explained what relationship they had.
"My job, a lot of it was to fill up Network content, or 'maybes.' We may be going there, or 'the TV has just gone on in such and such, we need somebody from there, we need somebody from there.' Canyon Ceman, who I worked for and with, is a hell of a fella, a wonderful fella," he said. "When he came onboard, Triple H said, 'can you just look after him?' I said, 'right.'
"And I said, 'let's start off on the right foot, let me take care of the wrestling and you take care of everything else. You take care of the athletes, and the contracts, and that. I don't need to know anything else, I am going to be the person that just gives myself to these people and helps them in any way. I will make the connections, I will stop people taking you for a ride, and pretty much there isn't anywhere in the world that I don't know somebody.' My ties go back a long way, more than most people could ever imagine with a lot of people. If I don't know somebody, I know somebody who knows somebody. And I am usually on good terms with most everybody.
"So, we did this tryout, and maybe a couple of them had actually seen wrestling. When we were traveling, there was about 20 countries in the world that had any kind of wrestling. Some of them only shot so many months of the year. WWE is in 180 countries, they only know what they see of WWE.
"Some places, we were getting people from wherever Canyon organized because I didn't have anything to do with athletes. I just turned up. If it was wrestlers, I was looking at everybody, everywhere, that's what I did. I studied everybody from everywhere, paid attention to everything. I would just turn up at whatever country, do this tryout."
If you use any quotes from this article, please credit Talk Is Jericho, with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.