Austin Aries Addresses Reports of Him Being Hard to Work With, the Mixed Reaction to His House of Hardcore Promo, and How He’s Changed Since His First Impact Wrestling Run

– Impact Wrestling star Austin Aries recently took part on a media conference call. Below are some highlights fro the conference call via WrestlingInc.com.

Austin Aries on his promo at House of Hardcore that got a mixed reaction: “People were expecting me to go out there and start launching napalm and burning bridges, and it’s easy to do, right? It’s easy to always point the finger at other people and blame them, but I wanted to go out there and do something that people weren’t expecting and I wanted to take personal accountability, because again, the only thing we can truly change is ourselves,” Aries said. “The only thing we can look at in situations that maybe don’t work out the way we’d like them to work out is, ‘What did I do to contribute to that?’ I can’t change all the other factors in play other than the factors that I bring to the table. For any backlash that I did get from certain people or from certain contingencies on the internet, I got a lot of messages and a lot of comments from fans who really appreciated someone stepping out and doing that and also made them feel like someone understood some of the things they struggle with.”

Austin Aries not feeling he’s changed much since his first run in Impact Wrestling: “From my first run in Impact, I don’t know that I’ve changed a whole lot other than trying to be more mindful of how I handle situations. My convictions are my convictions, my philosophies on how you treat people and how you go about business haven’t really changed,” Aries said. “But now as I come back for the third time, some of the people in positions of power have changed, and the way they want to go about business and the way they want to treat people [changed too].”

Austin Aries on how he tries to be upfront and honest about his feelings: “Unfortunately, when you look in somebody’s eyes and you’re honest with them and you tell them things maybe they don’t want to hear, it doesn’t always make you the most popular person. But luckily for me now I’m in a position where I don’t have to win popularity contests to be successful,” he said. “I can rely on my skill, my passion and my philosophies on wrestling and don’t have to worry about winning the popularity contest. So I try to handle things a little more diplomatically at times, I try to make sure that I’m not letting my emotions get the best of me, but the things that I still hold true haven’t really changed much from the beginning of my career.”

Austin Aries on reports that he was hard to work with in WWE: “I’ll bet you [some of] the [WWE] writers probably didn’t like working with me very much because understand that in that environment, when I’m given something that the writers hand me, if I have any things that I think should be adjusted or things that I wouldn’t personally say, as someone who’s been doing this for 17 years and as a writer it’s not easy for us to just go and change those things, but then to have to march back into the office and have those things changed for them. So the process is a little tedious, and to me it really takes a lot of the artistic and creative freedoms away from the wrestlers. I don’t know any writer that would know my voice better than myself, I’ve been doing this a long time. I’ll say this: if there’s any writers that had any issues with me while I was in WWE, they certainly never expressed that to me. That’s something that was never brought to my attention, so I can’t speak on anonymous reports.”