Frankie Kazarian reflects on his short-lived time as a member of the WWE roster.
Frankie Kazarian is currently wrestling for All Elite Wrestling prior to that, he is best known for his time in TNA Wrestling and Ring of Honor. However, there was a brief period in the mid-2000s where Frankie Kazarian was not only hired by WWE that featured on their programming. Frankie had several appearances on the second-tier show for the SmackDown brand, WWE Velocity.
Ultimately, his time in WWE was not long for this world and in a new interview on the wrestling perspective podcast, Frankie reflects on his time with the promotion and why he feels he wasn't mature enough for that stage of the industry yet.
“So for me, when I got to WWE, my short stint there, I never really took wrestling seriously as a business. What I mean by that is, wrestling was my passion. It was what I always wanted to do. What I loved. I worked my ass off, moved across the country to train to do it. I did every show. If you set up a ring, I would be there. I worked so hard at it, and all the sudden I started getting paid to do it. Then all the sudden I got a contact. Then all the sudden I was getting weekly paychecks, and it was just like, ‘Cool, this was all part of it.’ When I got to WWE, I realized quickly, ‘Oh, this is a business.’ At that time of my life, I don’t think I was mentally mature enough to handle the professional wrestling business on that level. WWE is -- they’ve been around forever. They have it nailed. WWE is never going anywhere. I wasn’t ready to be the businessman that I needed to be. So, what my short run there taught me is that, yes, this is my passion, this is my heart and my soul, but I’m a businessman and I need to treat this like a business. So I’ll always be grateful for my time there for that because that was one of those lessons that kind of slapped me right in the face at the right time in my life.”
Ultimately, Kazarian carved out a niche for himself in the world of professional wrestling and has been able to work with legends such as Chris Jericho, Christian Cage, Ric Flair, Mick Foley, and others.
Nowadays, you can catch Frankie Kazarian on all AEW programming. Fightful has live coverage of every AEW program in our results section.
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