Mike Bailey Reflects On His Career Journey, Evolving Into Who He Is Now

Mike Bailey recently looked back at the journey of his wrestling career that has taken him to AEW. Bailey spoke with Fightful’s Grapsody podcast and you can see some highlights below:

On his approach to wrestling: “I’m gonna take a very long detour from my answer if you don’t mind. But I talk a lot in wrestling training about the danger of platitudes and how it’s very easy to give advice that is ultimately true, but also very obvious and impossible to apply. Like, I think ‘be unique’ is one of the pieces of advice that is given very early on and often as a professional wrestler, and unfortunately, that means absolutely nothing. What do you do with that? What does ‘be unique’ mean? How are you unique? Unique in what ways? Again, because pro wrestling is a very human thing, right? If you’re entirely unique and no one can follow what you do, then what’s the point? But it’s been a lifelong and a career-long journey to figure out which parts of pro wrestling I need to really follow strictly and which parts of pro wrestling I can just make my own.”

On evolving and learning over his career: “It took me 20 years of working in front of many, different kinds of audiences, different sizes, different contexts, different cultures, different ways of filming it, different ways it was gonna be consumed and absorbing it all and noting, being mindful about every single little thing that works and every single little thing that doesn’t so that it could eventually just learn to replicate it and understand it and what you see now when you see people Mike Bailey wrestle you see a collection of the best moments of 20 years of pro wrestling and rules and principles applied,” he said. “Which is a career-long journey for every single professional wrestler and I’m glad that the version that you see in AEW right now is a very polished version of the generic pro wrestler that Speedball Mike Bailey was at one point and of the hyper creative mess that Speedball Mike Bailey was at one point that eventually became a polished professional wrestler who is extremely consistent in terms of the quality of my performances that you see today in AEW.”