WWE Superstar Baron Corbin recently appeared as a guest on Chris Jericho’s “Talk Is Jericho” podcast for an interview. Below are some of the highlights.
On his relationship with Vince McMahon: “He’s an intimidating person in a sense, so when you walk in there, I want to emote confidence anytime I’m around him and I think we’ve developed a little bit of a rapport. We’re on that level where I can straight shoot him. If I walk in there, I can go, ‘this is terrible – let’s do this better’ and he’ll go, ‘oh, no, no, that’s terrible – we’re doing it this way.’ We kind of [play] tug of war with each other a little bit, so it’s good. But he [has] put a vote of confidence in me and he [has] pulled me into his office a couple of times, and been like, ‘this, this, this,’ ‘this needs to get better,’ ‘you’re doing great at this,’ ‘you’re not as great as you think you are’. He’s a good guy to check your ego and I had that talk a while ago and he said, ‘hey, I think you’re really reaching for that brass ring. I think you can be something special, but you’re not as good as you think you are.’ So you step back and look at yourself in the mirror and go, ‘okay, how can I get better?'”
On he and Vince McMahon roughhousing with people backstage at WWE shows: “The other day, he got me good. I was just standing by ‘Gorilla’ [position] and looking at myself in the mirror or something and he bodychecked me. I about went into the mirror and I turned around ready to swing at somebody. I was like, ‘who just shoved me?’ and it was Vince and he’s just belly-laughing, but I can’t go do anything? What am I going to do? He just shoved me! Or he’ll sneak up behind you and smack you across the back really hard. It startles you and you’re instantly angry, like, ‘argh! If you weren’t Vince McMahon…’
“It was so funny because then later, he was stopped texting on his phone or whatever and I just snuck up behind him and whispered in his ear, ‘I could have got you back right there.’ And he just belly-laughed… but yeah, you’ve got to give it back to him a little bit.”
On how he found out from Triple H that he was being called up to the main roster: “I mean, that was crazy and that was really funny. It was a moment I’ll never forget because we had done TakeOver in Brooklyn, or not Brooklyn. Dallas. And I thought I had a decent match that night. It wasn’t my favorite match, Austin Aries, it wasn’t my favorite body of work and I was kind of just frustrated, if you will, because it was one of those things, ‘man, it could have been so much better.’ And Hunter pulled me in a back room and I said, ‘oh, no! He thinks the same thing!’ And he never breaks typing on his cell phone to tell me this, but he’s like, typing on his phone, he looks up, he goes, ‘hey, tomorrow, you’re going to be in the André The Giant Memorial Battle Royal.’ And I was like, ‘what?’ And he goes, ‘you’re called up to the main roster’ and he just walked out. I was like, ‘what the hell? How are you going to just tell me that in the middle of a text message and then walk out into the other room?’ It was such a crazy rush of emotions. Like, all that hard work paid off.”
Check out the complete episode of Chris Jericho’s “Talk Is Jericho” podcast featuring the Baron Corbin interview at PodcastOne.com/Talk-Is-Jericho.