In the first episode of his Can Chris Hero Save Wrestling? podcast alongside Conrad Thompson on AdFreeShows, former WWE NXT superstar Chris Hero opened up on his release from the company.

“I thought, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but I thought I was safe because I was with NXT and our deals were less significant than main roster deals. When you’re not working for weeks at a time and you’re like man, I keep getting this paycheck, it was in the back of my head, maybe the axe falls, then I get my call at the end of the day.

Once people started getting released, I was sending out messages and checking on people, it’s a s****y thing, I’ve been fired before and hurt before, so I know what it’s like to go through those things. All day long, I’m texting people and in the back of my head I’m like, haven’t got a call yet, it was like 5pm or something and I get a call from Canyon Ceman, our Talent Relations guy, hey what’s on going Canyon, yeah, okay, I figured as much.

He had expressed to me that there was a future for me in the company as a coach or a producer and that had been expressed to me for years to the point where sometimes, it’s a back-handed compliment. I had a meeting with Canyon in 2012 and he told me, I think you’d be better suited to being a coach. I got fired up when he told me that then and I’m like, I know I’m going to be a good coach, but I want to work. At NXT, they don’t have a situation where you have the benefits of being a coach and the authority and also have matches, it’s a weird part of their system that needs work.

I told Canyon, I appreciate that, but not until I’m done in the ring, I don’t want to coach talent and resent them when they don’t live up to my standards, because I can’t also wrestle. If I can wrestle and coach, I can be a better coach, because there’s no animosity built up, if I was being forced to quit wrestling, that’s where the animosity comes from, that’s not a situation I wanted to put myself into.”

The show is available in full at this link.