Thanks to Chuck Carroll for sending in the following:
Chad Dukes of CBS Radio Washington DC 106.7 The Fan and ChadDukesWrestling.com recently spoke with WWE NXT star Enzo Amore. The full interview is available at this link, and the following are several highlights:
Developing his promo work as a journalism major at Salisbury University:
“None of this happens overnight and Rome wasn’t built in a day. I’ve always put the pen to the pad and I’ve always had aspirations of doing what I’m doing today. Basically when you’re a writer and have a mind like mine, my mind has gone platinum multiple times and I have got a heart of gold, my heart’s in the right place. I’ve wanted to do this my whole life, promo material, when you’ve basically got a bible of promo material, I’m telling you I got so much promo material written down, I’ve forgotten more promo material than people will ever come up with. So, it’s all in my back pocket.”
Being a product of WWE NXT:
“I never was in a wrestling ring before I stepped foot into a WWE ring, so I am a product of NXT. I trained under Bill DeMott. I did a lot of my promo work with Dusty Rhodes. Those two guys were so instrumental in my career, I feel like I never could just completely take that step out of NXT. I owe it to the fans, I owe it to the people around me, the trainers, the coaches. That’s what you see in our product, you see people who are hungry and those people who are coming back, pulling double duty, they’re hungry, they wanna compete. The NXT environment is so competitive.”
Getting a shot from Triple H:
“He had started training with my strength coach. From the age of 14 I had been training with Joe DeFranco from DeFranco’s Training Systems out of New Jersey, they do a lot of combine training. I had played college football, I had always lifted and was a huge fan of the sports entertainment business, more particularly the WWE. Huge fan of DX- Shawn Michaels and Triple H. One day I was working out at DeFranco’s gym and Joe came up to me and said, ‘I got a phone call from a guy named Paul Levesque, who wants me to train him.’ My jaw just hit the ground.
“After about a year of him training with Hunter, I made a YouTube video… I was always training so basically I gave Joe a link to a YouTube page that had a compilation of me lifting, running, boxing, and then I cut a promo at the end of it on the Hudson River around the time the Jersey Shore was popular. Came at the Jersey Shore people’s necks, a little disrespect, hit ’em with a little 1-2 combo, the haymaker pancaker and badaboom, the realest guy in the room was born.
“He showed it to Hunter and Hunter just gave me a tryout. He’s our boss and he’s very approachable out here at NXT. He gave me my first opportunity and I’ll never forget the words that he said to me when I met him, he simply said, ‘don’t screw this up.’ He probably wouldn’t remember it, but for me I hung onto those words, because that’s all he said.”
Nick was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and lived there until the age of 18, when he decided to pack his flack jacket and move to New York City.
