wrestling / News

Tama Tonga On Bullet Club’s Seventh Anniversary And the Stable’s Early Days

May 18, 2020 | Posted by Jeremy Thomas
NJPW Firing Squad Bullet Club OG Tama Tonga Sent by AXS TV

Tama Tonga did an interview with NJPW discussing the seventh anniversary of the Bullet Club and the stable’s early says in the company. You can check out some highlights below:

On if he thought in 2013 that Bullet Club would still be going seven years later: “Yes. Absolutely. Why wouldn’t I? … I don’t think about things in the short term. I’m a long term planner. BULLET CLUB is an investment to me, and I was always going to make a long term investment with my time and my energy. [I had faith] that it will continue for more than seven years. Forever. I believe in what I do, and BULLET CLUB is what I’m doing. I know what we did reminds a lot of people about the nWo, and I respect everything that came before me, but really, I don’t give a s**t about what they did. I give a s**t about what I do, building this thing with its own identity. We were all outsiders. It was only natural we would come together.”

On the interactions of the eventual members before Bullet Club formed: “We were four foreigners, in a Japanese company in Japan. We spoke English which gave us a common ground anyway, and we were all outsiders. Nobody knew what we were going through better than we did, so it was natural that we would talk to one another and natural that we would be friendly with one another … [Karl Anderson] taught me everything about this business. You have to understand I was very young at the time, very green and really didn’t understand how the game was played, so to speak.”

On Anderson taking him under his wing: “Machine Gun was my mentor. I didn’t really question the whys of it, because I was really still kind of a young boy. So I didn’t fully understand more than doing my job of being with Anderson, and Devitt was the lead guy … Karl Anderson and Prince Devitt taught me and Fale about being a heel. We were completely green. Fale had just come from rugby, me from the military. We didn’t know s**t about wrestling. They told us ‘if you’re getting that reaction, that heat, you’re doing your job. The more they hate us, the better we’re doing’.”

On the philosophy of the group early on: “We had a goal. We were going to make it to the top. We had to maneuver to keep changing the game and keep making an impact, and the best way to do that was to not play by the rules, to get noticed even if some people might say it was for the wrong reasons … That was our job. And when I knew that, I was going to elevate my game and our game as a heel to two or three levels beyond. The one thing that I didn’t know is that sometimes when you’re good as a heel, the people turn you babyface and start cheering. AJ got all of us together and asked how we could make this work”

On AJ Styles replacing Devitt as the head of the Bullet Club: “That was the situation we found ourselves in, and we adapted. We found ourselves with Devitt leaving, and we found ourselves with Styles coming in. We just thought, ‘OK, here’s our new guy’, and he was great … He was very grounded. Very humble, down to earth. He just got all of us together and said ‘however we can make this work, for all of us, let me know’. And I knew then that he was in it for all of us, for the whole group. We adapted with who we had, and it worked.”