A recent episode of the AEW Unrestricted podcast had Wheeler Yuta as the guest. Some of the topics discussed included his segment with William Regal on AEW Dynamite involving Regal’s slap to him, the process leading to his AEW debut, and career advice given to him by Excalibur.
On the topic of his segment with William Regal during the March 16th episode of AEW Dynamite involving him getting slapped by Regal.
“Oh, it definitely fired me up [getting slapped by William Regal]. That was a real reaction, yeah. Regal’s obviously someone that I’ve looked up to for a very long time and someone that I really appreciate and respect so just to have that moment, the magnitude of it all, he hits me, I look at him and then for a second, I just have like a, oh wow, that’s William Regal, that’s Bryan Danielson, that’s Jon Moxley. It was pretty cool. It’s an unreal experience. It lit a fire under me. I gotta go prove myself so that’s all I’m focused on now.”
On the topic of the process leading to his debut in AEW, Yuta stated:
“Funny you bring them up, so yeah, I had been doing my thing on the indies, doing my thing on New Japan STRONG, Ring of Honor at the time, yeah, but so, I was actually at a 76ers game with Chuck [Taylor]. I was there with Chuck, Chuck’s girlfriend Amy and Bird of all people and the three of us and then I get a phone call from Orange Cassidy, asking me if I wanted to come down and do [AEW] Dark so I guess that they were in the middle of the Arthur Ashe promotional tour so they were together in New York and somehow, a match came about of me and MJF and then somehow that turned into showing a match of me and Rocky [Romero] actually from New Japan. Yeah, that’s how it came about. It was really fast but it was awesome.”
On the topic of career advice given to him in AEW, Yuta stated:
“One of the best kind of little pieces of advice anyone’s given me was actually Excalibur. He said, ‘When you think about wrestling on TV, you kind of have to know that the announcers are explaining everything you do’ and he’s like, ‘One good way to kind of slow things down is imagining the commentary, imagine them talking about what you just did.’ For me, that just helps slow everything down because I wanna move a million miles a minute and go fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. It’s like hey, take a breath, pace yourself, calm down and that was a really helpful thing that he told me.”
Transcript h/t: PostWrestling.com