Tyler Franks is doing fine without Hunter Drake.
During the early stages of his career, Tyler Franks and Hunter Drake were a dominant tag team in the Alabama scene, primarily competing in New South.
Now, several years later, both Drake and Franks are dominant singles performers in their own right. Drake is the current New South Champion, beating Franks for the title back in November 2024.
While chatting with Jeremy Lambert and Stephen Jensen of Fightful Overbooked's Spotlight podcast for a new interview, Franks was asked to talk about his career trajectory compared to Hunter Drake.
"You see it every time a team splits up. People do the classic Marty [Jannetty] and Shawn [Michaels] comparisons. Not every team has a Marty and Shawn. There are some cases where both guys go on a similar path, maybe one guy flourishes and one guy flounders. Sometimes both guys flounder. When you get brought in as a tag team, and that’s all we were knew for a while, starting there. We came in together, we teamed for the first couple of years we were in the business and were on the road together a lot. Whenever it changes, you’re doing things differently and you’re a singles wrestler and trying to find that groove. It was a lot trial and error trying to figure out what worked for me and what didn’t. Talking about almost restarting, I had a moment early last year. I was really struggling in wrestling and in life, and I was thinking I needed to step away. Not that I think I can’t do things, but I feel like I should be doing things at a high level and I’m not at that high level that I want to be. It was one of those sink or swim moments that I put myself into. After the HOSS tournament last year, I left New South for a couple of months. Initially, I planned to step away because I felt like I needed to find new pools to swim in to refresh things and bolster me. Whatever happened last year, kind of a switch flipped and it was like a snowball effect. One thing went right then two, three, four. It rolled up and luckily I’ve been able to ride that wave and get back to where I wanted to be and knew I could be."
Fans can check out Fightful Overbooked's full interview with Tyler Franks in the video linked at the top of this article.
Furthermore, head over to Fightful's YouTube channel to catch up with our other recent interviews.
