Konnor Says He Shut Down Mentally During His WWE Run

In an interview with Wrestling Inc, Big Kon (formerly Konnor in WWE) spoke about his run with Viktor in WWE as The Ascension and how he shut down mentally due to his frustration. Here are highlights:

On shutting down mentally in WWE: “The big thing mentally was that I had shut down for like three years. Literally I was just shut down. Mentally I shut down almost like I had lost faith in this profession. I’m home now, and I’m kind of thinking to myself, ‘what is it that you really want to do at this point in your life? Do you want to call it quits and never wrestle again? Do you want to get back at it and find the passion and love again?’ That was one thing I had lost because all I saw with wrestling, and I can’t speak for Vik on this, but for me personally, all I saw was numbers. I was always about the paycheck which is a horrible attitude to have because if you love something, you’re gonna make money off of it. Mentally in my state of mind especially after last week, it’s probably one of the more humbling experiences that I know Vik and I needed because Outlaw Pro Wrestling and the New York Wrestling Connection set the bar pretty high. The fans, the interaction, it was everything that we needed. It was rejuvenation. It just rejuvenated us.”

On if he’s been contacted by AEW, ROH or Impact: “For me, personally, I told Vik where my head was at, I kind of don’t want to answer to nobody. I’ve been answering to people for 10 years, and it’s kind of nice to just do your own thing. It’s nice to be able to not have to do something you don’t want to do and so right now I’m kind of just enjoying the moment, but as far as offers and things like that, there’s been some cool that have been possibly going on. Of course, you can’t really discuss that because that’s not going to be any fun, but we’re still going to do indies; we’re still going to do signings and things like that, but we’ve got some pretty cool things man that have opened up. We haven’t mentioned it. If we do anything, we want it to be a surprise. We will be back on TV. I’m not gonna say with who, but it’s gonna be great. It’s gonna be awesome. We’re going back to our old ways. We get to be us. It’s gonna be awesome no doubt about it.”

Konnor on the game show version of NXT: “The worst part of my career. Those days were hell man. Oh, they were hell. Legit hell. You can ask anybody that did that NXT version, they can tell you it was hell because you never knew what you were doing. It was always a rib,” Konnor said. “The only reason why they did it, I swear to god was just so the boys could pop themselves. I swear to you. I feel like they were just bored and they said, ‘hey, let’s just do NXT and just make them do stupid competitions where they eat hot dogs and drink soda.’ Like wait a second, I’ve been training for how long? Why did I ever train for stuff like this? What the hell is this?”