Christian On Zack Ryder's Post-WWE Future, Recent Cuts And Furloughs, Possible WWE HOF Induction
Former WWE World Heavyweight Champion Christian recently spoke with Andrew Thompson to promote the new "Cagefighter: Worlds Collide" movie that will premiere on Saturday, May 16 via FITE.TV. You can see the full interview above or at this link. Andrew also sent us the following highlights from the interview.
Christian was asked about a potential induction into the WWE Hall of Fame, and said it's not something he thinks about. The multi-time champion said he's content with what he's accomplished in the business.
"It's not something that I think about on a daily basis," Christian said of a potential WWE Hall of Fame induction. "Obviously, like you said, if I had a dime for every time somebody came up to me and said I should be in the Hall Of Fame it would be great. But yeah, I don't think about it.
"It is what it is and I feel like the things that I've done, I'm content with what I've accomplished and it's like, everybody gets offended and I appreciate ? I really do appreciate the people who wanna see me in there but it's not like this is gonna be the last year, or next year's gonna be the last year or the year after that is gonna be the last year. So honestly I don't think about it at all. It doesn't bother me. But I do appreciate the people who wanna see me in there."
Christian, who currently works as an analyst on FS1's WWE Backstage show, revealed that the recent ring return by WWE Hall of Famer Edge is one of the reasons why they put their "E&C Pod of Awesomeness" podcast on hiatus. He noted that Edge's wife, WWE Hall of Famer Beth Phoenix, doing WWE NXT commentary and traveling for the job was another reason.
"That was part of it," Christian said of Edge's return and their podcast. "The other part of it was that Beth [Phoenix] was doing commentary with NXT. She was traveling quite a bit more and as weird as it sounds, to kind of put aside? sometimes it'd be an hour, sometimes it'd be two hours, sometimes it'd be two-and-a-half hours but as weird as it sounds, sometimes on a week it's hard, especially when you have kids, it's hard to set that aside when you ? like I said, when Beth was traveling and it made it hard for him when he was kind of doing the solo dive thing, it made it hard for him to dedicate that time and also that he was now training and I knew that.
"But, we had a lot of fun doing it and it was hard to step away from it but we'll see. We got a couple of things going on in the pipeline here so we'll see what happens when everything kind of clears up."
Christian also commented on the WWE releases and furloughs that were made earlier this month. He talked about how it's hard seeing his friends affected by the uncertainty brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Christian predicted big things to come for Zack Ryder.
"It's unfortunate," Christian said of the budget cuts. "The uncertainty of everything going on right now, its affected everybody in some way, and obviously it's hard to see people I know, especially when they're friends lose their jobs but also, everybody that happened to are talented and were there for a reason and I think that situations like this, it can be motivating and I know Zack Ryder very well. I know he's a really motivated individual, and yeah, he kind of has his finger on the pulse of what's kind of relevant. We saw it before with [his] YouTube show and stuff like that before anybody was really doing that. So he's already on to the next thing. He's gonna be fine.
"As a performer and as a person, use this fuel to better yourself and to move on. There's no choice but to move on and to keep moving forward. That's all you can do. It's a tough situation but just hope you come out of this on the other side and everybody ends up being alright."