Journey of a Frontman recently interviewed former NXT star CJ Parker about a typical week at the Performance Center and seeing signed wrestlers drop out of WWE’s developmental system. Here are the highlights.
On a typical week at the Performance Center:
You get there at ten and you’d have film study or in-ring training from ten to one. Then you might have an hour off and from two to 3:30, you’d be in the weight room training with the weights, doing the cardio, strength and conditioning stuff. And then you’d have a couple hours off, you’d come back in the evening for promo class. That’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday, we’d do TV sometimes. If not, maybe a house show somewhere in Florida. Same with Friday. Same with Saturday. On those three days in the morning, at least in my schedule, it’s a little lighter than some of the guys, you would do maybe weights in the morning and shows at night. And Sundays off.
On seeing signed wrestlers drop out of WWE’s developmental system:
Oh yeah, dude. I’ve seen so many. The funniest one ever was this girl, she was probably some kind of model or something, you know how they are. She did like a roll, did another one, stood up and looked at Sara and said “Terminate my contract. This isn’t for me.” (laughs) It’s like damn…haven’t even taken a hip toss yet. You haven’t even taken a back drop on the ground in the middle of Enfield, Connecticut for no reason. But yeah, all kinds of quitters. Can you blame them? Think about it, if you don’t absolutely love wrestling, how on earth could you wake up every single day at eight in the morning, walk into a giant warehouse and fall down a bunch and get back up and fall down and run around and bounce around the ropes? If you don’t love that, you’re not gonna do it very long. It’s almost like “Here…here’s a developmental contract for wrangling bull elephants.” If it’s as hard as I think it would be, I don’t think I would do it very long. I’m not really into that. I’m not really into wrangling bull elephants. But if it was my passion, I’ll wrangle some bull elephants. Those people aren’t passionate about it, of course they’re gonna quit. It’s hard, dammit. It’s not easy.
You can read the entire interview here.
