E&C’s POD OF AWESOMENESS – KYLE O’REILLY
Release date: 3/15/19
Recap by: Jeff Rush
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Pre-interview discussion
-Harlem Heat in the HOF. Edge says Doom were the barrier breaking precursor, but then it was Harlem Heat.
-Brie Bella is retiring. Edge speculates it has to do with having a child.
-Kurt Angle having his last match at WM. They speculated on who he would wrestle – Edge was thinking John Cena at the time.
-Edge’s wife, Beth Phoenix is back performing. Edge says he doesn’t want to spoil anything, but it’s going to be fun.
-Edge asks Christian about his thoughts on Aleister Black and Ricochet teaming. Christian doesn’t think there’s a long term plan. Edge likes the idea as he thinks it will help with their transition to the main roster, saying he felt much better once he was put with Christian following his debut.
-Edge says Chad Gable is a ready made star waiting to happen.
-Christian mentions mispronouncing Asuka’s name on the Fastlane pre show. They do a defensive thing where they make fun of anyone who caught it as being nerds. I don’t know. I think you mispronounced the name of the Smackdown Women’s Champion. Just take your lumps, man.
KYLE O’REILLY INTERVIEW
-Kyle is the third member of Undisputed Era to call in to do the show on time and Edge is super impressed. Kyle made a “Matt Tardy” pun and they were like “oh, this is going to go well.”
-Kyle is Canadian. They discuss the apparently common Canadian phrase “Pitter Padder, let’s get at her.”
-Regarding the art of tag team wrestling, Kyle says he loves to take an entertaining ass beating.
-One of Kyle’s earliest wrestling memories was seeing a poster in a video store of Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off. He figured it had to be a gimmicked plastic shirt and went home and emulated it with shopping bags.
-His first live show was IYH: Rock Bottom 1998. He knew then he’d be pursuing wrestling as a career. The Brood wrestled the JOB Squad on that match.
-Kyle mentions practicing a sharpshooter on a pair of jeans over and over which gets a big pop out of Edge and reminds him of he and Christian Steinerlining pillows and getting mad at each other if the timing was off.
-Edge says there are certain wrestlers with unique movement that is all their own, such as Barry Windham and says Kyle O’Reilly is another such person. Kyle says he never set out to emulate one wrestler so he must’ve picked up little things from everyone. He lists all the usual suspect Canadian wrestlers he loved. He was particularly into selling.
-His Mt. Rushmore of wrestling salesmen: HBK, Curt Hennig, Terry Funk, and Toshiaki Kawada. Possibly Ric Flair as a fifth.
-Originally trained under Gorgeous Michelle Starr in BC directly after high school.
-He felt the only way he could get better was to work with guys with more experience so he headed out in search of that, landing with Davey Richards and Tony Kozina in Washington State in 2009.
-He talks about bouncing back and forth across the Canadian border wrestling in the US and going back to work a day job to make more money. He says he’s really lucky he never got busted.
-He wanted to break into ROH. In Sept of 2010, he had an Evolve show in Jersey, then hopped over to an ROH show and ended up getting offered a job. He mentions Roderick Strong as one of the guys he looked up to prior to arriving in ROH.
-He talks about attending an ROH show with Adam Cole at the Manhattan Center as fans in September of that year and says they ended up performing as a team on the Final Battle show in the same venue three months later.
-Teaming up with Bobby Fish really helped him develop who he was – it’s pretty spot on with what Edge mentioned prior to the interview regarding himself and Christian.
-He loves opening Takeover shows because he feels the crowd is always so nuclear. He says he kinda mastered killing the opening match in ROH.
-In 2014, he got a call from Karl Anderson, who I guess worked for the New Japan office, saying they needed their visa information.
-Echoing Bobby Fish from last weeks interview, Kyle says he never really had WWE on his radar and would’ve been happy to spend the rest of his life in Japan.
-Once he started seeing former ROH and various indie guys win championships in WWE, he began thinking it could be an option. He finally got the call from William Regal on the same weekend he won the ROH title.
-There was a legal dispute and he ended up having to wait six months before coming in to WWE. His mom had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and the delay ended up being a blessing in disguise as he got to spend that time with her. She actually held on long enough to watch him debut in NXT.
-He talks about the grind of the road and says you hear about guys cutting gout each others legs and says you don’t really see that in NXT, that everyone is super supportive of one another.
-Edge says you can tell when he sees Undisputed Era that they are there to make their opponents look good. He says he can also see that they’re having a lot of fun.
-Edge asks about their friendship. He says they goof off a lot and try to make each other laugh and sometimes Adam Cole has to get them to tone it down for a serious promo.
-Kyle is proud of his ability to turn a crowd that’s inclined to cheer them and actually be a heel.
-Edge points out that Kyle has been the center-pin in the tag team realm of Undisputed, teaming with Bobby, then Roderick, now Bobby again.
-Kyle says he always thinks about Edge and Christian and their ability to be funny before the match, but bad ass performers during. He also recalls Christian telling him in class at NXT that he was once in the background of a promo and how, even though it wasn’t much of an opportunity, he made the most of it and stood out and it ended up getting him somewhere. Kyle says it really resonated with him, and Edge says Christian tells that story all the time.
Apparently it was during Mark Henry’s ECW push, where he was bending frying pans.
-Kyle feels the natural camaraderie the group has has to do with them all coming up together, more or less, and the fact that they all have the same level of passion.
-None of them want to see the faction come to an end and the hope os that they can debut on the main roster together.
-He then follows up with my favorite line of the interview, saying at the end of the day, though, it’s wrestling, and eventually somebody’s got to go through the Barber Shop window.
-He says creative doesn’t have plans to break them up any time soon.
-They close out talking more about Kyle being the recurring theme in the Undisputed tag team and Kyle says as long as he’s teaming with one of those guys, life is good. Edge reiterates how much he loves Kyle’s unique style and tells him not to sleep on a singles career.
Recap: This concludes a three week run of Undisputed Era appearances on the E&C Pod. I love listening to Edge and Christian talk wrestling with other wrestlers who are just as passionate. This was probably the most respectable of the interviews, in that things never got too far out of control with any silliness. Personally, I probably enjoyed Bobby Fish’s appearance best. Not so much for the silliness, but because it was fun to listen to the interview transpire, moving from somewhat dry at the start to completely ridiculous by the end. This interview provided some solid insight as to who Kyle O’Reilly is and that was good enough for my liking and certainly made for the best wrestling podcast I listened to this week. Rating: 7.5/10
About Jeff:
Jeff has never been threatened with a squeegee or attacked with a pair of scissors in a hotel room. He’s walked out a few times over money, didn’t realize he was headlining WrestleMania VIII, mistaking it for a house show, is probably not the most over performer in the history of Madison Square Garden, but may have invented the fist bump.
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