wrestling / News

Adam Cole Weighs In On His Match With Johnny Gargano at Takeover: Toronto, Shawn Michaels Producing His Matches

August 21, 2019 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas
Adam Cole NXT 7-17-19 Image Credit: WWE

– Speaking with Lilian Garcia on the latest Chasing Glory, Adam Cole discussed his match with Johnny Gargano at NXT Takeover: Toronto II. The interview took place the day after Takeover and Cole talked about how the match was physically challenging but very rewarding. He also talked about Michael P.S. Hayes and Shawn Michaels producing the match, and what it’s like working with Michaels in that capacity.

Highlights from the discussion, and the full video, are below:

On his match with Johnny Gargano at NXT Takeover: Toronto II: “Yeah, I’m definitely incredibly sore from that one. I don’t know how many of those I have in me. But this trilogy with Johnny was so important to me and him. Because we’ve known each other for like, 10 years. So we had talked forever about getting the chance to maybe wrestle on a really, really big stage like NXT. And when I first came to NXT, for that first year and a half, we hadn’t touched at all. And this kind of, this feud started almost as a replacement to Tommaso Ciampa, because Johnny and Tommaso were in the middle of their big feud. So then they needed a big main event for WrestleMania weekend, and they were like, ‘Okay, let’s do Adam and Johnny.’ And then it turned into this crazy trilogy that had its punctuation mark [at Toronto], and ended in that wrestling street fight and crazy steel cage match. But it was a lot of fun. Painful, but a lot of fun and Toronto was great.”

On who produced the match: “The two gentlemen involved were Michael Hayes and Shawn Michaels. Which again, Michael is great, brilliant. Normally, he’s involved in producing my matches. Shawn Michaels is involved in every one of my matches. He’s like a — at the Performance Center, I work with him directly, a bunch of us do. And he’s kind of like a mentor for so many of us right now in NXT. So he takes a liking, or makes sure he has a hand in everything that we’re doing. And lots of times, the best thing about Shawn is, he lets us — it’s not like he’s going, ‘This is what you should do.’ He lets us come up with what we think, and he’ll get excited about the stuff we’ll come up with. But then randomly, if we’re stumped on something or we’re like ‘Oh, this would be cool but we’re not crazy about it,’ he in the matter of five seconds well go, ‘Oh, well what if you did this’ and it’s amazing and so much better. It’s awesome to have those two there to pick their brains. They played a big part in creating what we created [at Toronto].”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Chasing Glory with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.