In an interview with SLAM Wrestling to promote WWE RAW coming to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, WWE superstar Ryback commented on his days on WWE Tough Enough, learning from John Cena, the evolution of WWE NXT, the Performance Center and more.

Highlights of the interview are below:

On his WWE Tough Enough days: “Tough Enough is essentially my first experience into the wrestling world. In junior high school, I was a baseball/football guy and there was a brief period between baseball and football where there was a little bit of an off-season and I would go train with the amateur wrestlers and do all the conditioning, but it was strictly for hobby and just to keep active conditioning, so Tough Enough is my first real true wrestling experience from a WWE standpoint.”

On learning from John Cena: “I’ve learned from John Cena early on that as long as the crowd is making noise, let them make noise. The whole point of this is that this is entertainment, this is WWE, you pay for a ticket, you come out, you want to have a good time. Ultimately, we would like to be the ones that dictate the responses, but sometimes, that’s not the case and if we have a crowd like that that just want to have fun, who wants to do the wave, who wants to chant, then let them chant whatever they want to chant.”

On the evolution of WWE NXT and the WWE Performance Center: “It constantly evolves, we are very fortunate to have that developmental system now with guys from the past and legends of the WWE. Triple H has gone out and brought some of the best wrestlers in the world to NXT and when you’re bringing great wrestlers like that in, it does nothing but step up the competition from everyone around it, it’s a very exciting period for WWE right now, because what it does is when these guys will come to the main roster, it makes everybody work harder. When you have a competitive environment like that, everybody wins.”

The interview is available in full at this link.