During a recent edition of E&C’s Pod Of Awesomeness, WWF Veteran Christian talked about leaving WWE back in the day during the Ruthless Aggression Era and why he made that decision. Below is the story:
“It was a combination of different things, why that happened. One of them was being burnt out, with being tired. My body was beat up. I’d been on the road straight since I was 24 years old. I think I was, like, 31, at the time when I left. And also, it just kind of felt like I was stuck in a rut and my situation wasn’t going to change if I stayed there at that point. It was like, ‘we know what we have with him. He’s there, he’s doing his thing, he’s good, and when something comes up, we’ll figure it out.’ But that time never came for me.
Even in that first kind of run, I had a little TV program that I did with John Cena and I was starting to get these crazy reactions and nothing happened from there. I still didn’t seem to move up from there. It was one match. It turned into a triple threat with Chris Jericho on the PPV and kind of got shuffled around again after that, so to me, I was like ‘well, if I was getting those reactions and getting put in that spot and it’s still not happening, I have to do something here to change my situation,’ and that’s when I decided to, when my contract was up, I was probably going to step away for a little while.
You have to bet on yourself sometimes and my contract came up and I decided that it was going to be better, beneficial for me both personally and professionally, to step away for a little while and come back, and, hopefully, be seen in a different light when the time is right to come back. For me, it worked out, because I went away for three years, came back, and I feel like the second part of my singles career in WWE was much better than the first.
Also going elsewhere helps to prove that you can do that, even if it’s on a smaller stage, that you can carry a show, a main event type match. You can get some buzz about you. You can step up your promos. You can almost even branch out a little bit kind of as far as being your own character, in a way.
Do you know what I mean? Like, there are not as many parameters on the things that you can say and do. Sometimes, that helps people develop as well. They can kind of find themselves and what works for them a little bit easier in that sense too and I found that when I walked away as well.”
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