Ethan Page Is Happy Working Under Shawn Michaels In NXT, What He’d Be Doing If He Quit

Ethan Page is happy to be working in NXT under the auspices of Shawn Michaels, as he noted in a recent interview. Page defends the NXT Championship against Trick Williams on tonight’s NXT debut on The CW, and he spoke with The Takedown on Sports Illustrated ahead of the show. You can see highlights below, courtesy of Fightful:

On working with Shawn Michaels: “I’ll happily say that he’s very collaborative. But, I will also say that everyone in this building is here to execute Shawn Michaels’ vision as our leader and I am happy to have a leader with a plan, a direction, and [for him] to incorporate me in that direction. For me, I feel like he’s doing a great job and to be able to create so many moments for me in my career in such a short amount of time, it’s just a testament to trusting the process of, Shawn is the guy, what he says goes, and if anything ever comes to mind or I want to have a conversation with him, he’s right there and easily accessible. I’m very happy to work under Shawn Michaels, a thousand percent.”

On what he would have done if he’d decided to quit wrestling: “I’ve had this conversation with my wife, I was going to say a thousand times but I’m going to give you an honest probably 15 times, like a genuine, ‘What should we do? I don’t know if this is it, maybe I should look into this.’ The YouTube channel was a really big part of that in trying to almost give myself an exit plan. I don’t know if that hurt me or helped me because now where I’m at right now, I don’t want to say given up on all outside projects. I still have a comic book coming out, I would still like to do YouTube projects, but this was my ultimate goal was getting to WWE.

“Now that I’m here, for me to have anything diverting my focus from here would just be a distraction so I’m at a little bit a different place. If I wasn’t here and everything kind of flopped, I probably would’ve have started a YouTube channel or podcast and just ripped apart professional wrestling and burned a bunch of bridges and made a bunch of money just telling stories I probably never should have told. Anyone’s career that I did not explode on my hypothetical YouTube channel, you can all thank Shawn Michaels for saving your careers because I definitely would have told everything. Anyone listening to this, make sure I don’t retire or you’re all screwed [laughs].”