At 35 years old, Ricky Saints is one in all the older names on the “NXT” roster, but even with the NXT Championship around his waist, he still has to take care of the way in which he’s viewed backstage. “NXT” is often called the developmental brand of WWE, but unlike most of the names Saints shares a locker room with, he’s been wrestling for years and held championship gold in multiple promotion, and in accordance with him, this distinction sometimes gets to him.
“Even to today I actually have a chip on my shoulder and it isn’t just from one thing,” Saints admitted during an appearance on “Busted Open Radio.” “You’ll be able to pull from the response from AEW fans to here, and vice-versa, nevertheless it’s even beyond that. … I’m sitting across the table from an athlete who looks at me otherwise; as if he’s higher than me!”
The champion further explained that he has to take care of these feelings on a regular basis or each time he goes to the WWE Performance Center, and claimed that he simply doesn’t want people to have a look at him as a lesser wrestler or to treat him that way.
“The fireplace that you just see, and that emotion comes from an actual place that remains to be alive; I do not think it’ll ever go away, and I feel that the day that it does? I feel I’m screwed,” Saints expressed. “I appreciate it for that and I’ve discovered a strategy to use that form of frustration that I still have.”
Ricky Saints also commented on the past five years of his profession from NWA, to AEW, to WWE
The past five years for Ricky Saints have seen the NXT Champion take an interesting journey from the NWA to his lengthy run with AEW, where he won the AEW World Tag Team Championship and FTW Championship, before his current run in WWE. Nevertheless, Saints claims he doesn’t have a plan for what lies ahead.
“I do not know where that got here from. … Things just come to me, someday they arrive to me,” he explained. “I do not consider my story as anything crazy or anything like that, nevertheless it is interesting after we go from NWA, to AEW, to now WWE. That is not something that I might ever have predicted.”
Saints did nevertheless add that he does have short term goals along the way in which, and milestones in WWE that he desires to work towards, nevertheless even when he accomplishes them, he knows he still wants more. “That’s something I’m very cognitive of – in terms of how my life has type of panned out here, especially my profession.”
If you happen to use any quotes from this text, please credit “Busted Open Radio” and supply a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.