Chris Hero believes there are a lot of things WWE could do better when it comes to their Performance Center.
Former WWE NXT Superstar Chris Hero was a recent guest on POST Wrestling with John Pollock and Brandon Thurston to discuss a wide variety of subjects. When asked about his time at the WWE Performance Center, Hero explained what a weird environment it is based on the mix of people training there.
“It’s such a weird environment because you have the people who eat, sleep, and breathe pro wrestling since the moment they were born, and then you have people that weren’t fans,” Chris Hero said. “They had something that attracted WWE to them, and they got contracts, and you can’t hold it against them, right? There’s a thing inside you that wants to be like; you don’t even like to do this. But at the same time, some of the best pro wrestlers didn’t want to pro wrestle; that’s the history of Japanese wrestling.
“You had guys like Giant Baba and [Antonio] Inoki and such that didn’t want to be a pro wrestler. It’s this thing that existed. It’s like no, I was a baseball player, and it didn’t work, but I’m going to use my skill to my greatest abilities. So it created this — I don’t know, just different fire inside of someone that came into wrestling from outside of wrestling, and now you have like the wrestlers that their careers are tributes to previous pro wrestlers, so it creates a different kind of a clash.
“But what I’m saying is I have all of this in here, and I don’t want to put somebody off by trying to tell them too much or giving them too much homework. It’s like coaching, right? You can’t coach all talent the same, so you have to find something that resonates with someone and then hope that when they go home on the weekend, and they scroll something, they’ll put in a search of something that came up in a conversation with you. But you can’t hold it against them If they don’t do that because everybody’s different; everybody learns differently.
“All the access to footage that we have now that we didn’t 20-plus years ago. It is so I don’t know, it’s just this gut thing inside of us like you don’t know what you have, you don’t understand it. I had a fourth-generation copy of this, and I never got to see the end of the match because the tape was ruined. Now, it’s like, you’re watching matches that haven’t even happened yet.
“Somehow, they’re streaming it from the future, and you’re like, wow, this is incredible. But let me fast forward; I don’t really care. You’re like, oh, man, this is just a different environment, a different culture. So you have to find the people that really have a knack for it and really have that passion to just zero in on these things that will make them the future of pro wrestling, that will make them the big stars because they figured out whatever that one thing was.”
When asked about what he feels WWE could improve regarding the Performance Center, Hero said he believes the company has no excuse not to provide everything possible for their talents to succeed.
“So I feel like that question is a bit of a trap because I have a very high standard of, like I said, all these resources that we have at our disposal now, like it’s incredible,” Chris Hero said. “When you have a billion-dollar facility, there’s no excuse to not provide everything possible for someone that wants to be a pro wrestler.
“Whether they were a fan of pro wrestling, and they want to capitalize on that love, or they were a freak athlete, and how can you channel that into becoming a great pro wrestler or a great sports entertainer, if you will. Same thing — maybe it’s not the same thing, or can you take someone that just has crazy charisma and jumps off the page, and how can you take that and put it through a pro wrestling channel, right?
“Just there is no excuse for that facility not to have every advantage, and I feel that they have some of those things, but there’s a lot more they can do because — I mean, I’m sure there is a budget. I’m sure they don’t have the billions of dollars that WWE has, but when you think about professional sports. You have 28 to 32 franchises that all have these quote-unquote performance centers, and you hear about teams losing people because they don’t have the best facilities or they don’t have the best staff.”
Chris Hero went on to explain how Mark Davis handles things with the Las Vegas Aces in the WNBA and how they can attract some of the best talents in the world without the big budget because of the state-of-the-art performance center built for the team.
Hero also believes WWE should utilize their guest coaches better by preparing the talent in the Performance Center of who these men and women are before they arrive to help train them.
“So you look at the Performance Center, and then you can measure it up against FCW or Deep South or OVW or UPW or HWA, these other developmentals that have come through, and a lot of those places had humble beginnings and then had the WWE gloss kind of put on it,” Chris Hero continued. “Now there’s really nothing stopping them from getting a schedule of guest coaches from all over the world, and they did have plenty of guest coaches when I was there, but there should be a steady diet of these knowledgeable incredible talents that have come through to just to come and sit and talk with people.
“But what happens is people get there to guest coach, and there is no primer for any of the talent. So these people that have done incredible things in the business will walk in that arena, and people won’t know who they are. When I had a class at the Performance Center, I tried to give people a heads-up and be like, Hey, guys, Chris Sabin is coming in as a guest coach next week. Here’s what he did. Here’s where he’s from. Here’s a couple links to some things.
“It wouldn’t hurt to do an hour of research on the weekend so that when you see him, you can have a context to who he is and what he’s done. And especially somebody like Sabin, who’s modern, right, and his fingerprints are all over today’s wrestling. But something gets kind of lost in translation where they’ll bring people in, but they won’t set the table for them in a better way that talent can learn from them and build relationships with these people.
“Of course, I’m speaking to stuff that happened three-plus years ago because I’ve been gone for a while, but I know how it is. And I know they do a lot. I just think they could do more. I just think there should be nothing that they don’t have access to there. And then also it’s the whole different people learn different ways. So how can we get through to this talent differently than we can get through this talent?”
READ MORE: Chris Hero Reflects On His 92-Minute Match Against CM Punk
What do you make of Chris Hero’s comments? Do you think WWE is taking the right path when it comes to training the next generation of talents at the Performance Center? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
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