Buddy Murphy Recalls Rubbing People The Wrong Way Trying to Make An Opportunity in NXT

– Buddy Murphy spoke with CBS Sports for a new interview discussing his recent success on Smackdown, struggling in NXT and more. Highlights are below:

On his recent success on Smackdown: “I was in NXT for a while and saw some success there, but the majority of the time found myself lost. Then it all goes full circle and it has been a crazy ride. That glass ceiling that everyone talks about? Well, I’m smashing it and just doing me, I’m just doing me.”

On struggling creatively when he was teamed with Wesley Blake: “The [fans] didn’t know which one was Blake and which one was Murphy, and that irritated me, so it created this chip on my shoulder.”

On a point when he went over a year without appearing on NXT after the tag team breakup: “That really got me down because what I see today is what I feel like I always had to offer. But I guess maybe some other people didn’t see that at the time. It was a lot of soul searching. I was kind of running through the motions, and to be honest, counting the days left. You can only do so much.”

On going all-out with Aleister Black at the end of 2017: “I was like, ‘I’m going to die on my sword. I’m going to do what I do, and it’s going to rub a lot of people the wrong way, but you might as well go out on your own sword’ … I rubbed people the wrong way because they wanted it a set way, but I felt like I had to do what I loved and I wanted to bring back what I loved. That was the starting point for what you see today. The love for wrestling is back in me, and I think you can see that by the quality that I want to produce. I want to be the best I can be and be known as one of the best in the world and for people to realize that I was always this from the beginning.”

On trying to get on 205 Live: “They kind of like laughed in my face like, ‘No, don’t worry about it. That’s not happening.’ I asked so many times that I decided to just get in a little bit of trouble because I kept asking the same question over and over again and the answer was already, No.'”

On his his weigh-in storyline on 205 Live: “We prided ourselves a lot, all the boys, that if we held that standard than the overall product was going to be that much better. The weigh-ins were real, and I was actually getting down to 205. And to keep it in a real realistic manner, the day before of TV when I had to do a weigh-in, I would hit the sauna for like 30 minutes and really take all the water out of me and look sunken in for the dehydration of these weigh-ins. It wouldn’t be fair to the other guys for me just to come in and not be 205. It was a pride thing, and I think that me coming into 205 a little bit bigger, I think that helped us all. All the boys were like, ‘Well this guy looks like this, I’m going to have to pick up my game.’ You look at Lince Dorado, Ali and even Cedric [Alexander], they have all transformed their bodies because we kept a standard and wanted to be the most athletic looking division.”

On winning the Cruiserweight Championship in front of his family at WWE Super Show-Down: “My family had never seen me wrestle before, and the first match they saw me was winning the cruiserweight championship in front of 80,000 people cheering my name. My family weren’t really supportive of this whole wrestling career and trying to get to WWE because we were so far away in Australia and it wasn’t really heard of. All the stars and planets aligned. It’s a moment I will never forget. It’s crazy, I’ve got goosebumps right now even trying to think about it.”