Talking with Seth Rollins prior to WWE’s upcoming visit to Richmond Coliseum
~By Jonathan McLarty

Just six days prior to its Battleground pay-per-view event, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is presenting an episode of Monday Night Raw from the Richmond Coliseum, July 14. Many big name WWE Superstars and Divas will be on hand to entertain the crowd.
A man whose stock in WWE has risen as of late is Seth Rollins. A former member of The Shield, Rollins has since aligned himself with The Authority of WWE. Rollins took some time to discuss his career with me in a recent interview, starting with his appreciation for the military:

Seth Rollins: We appreciate what y’all do. We couldn’t do what we do without you guys doing what you do. It’s a mutual respect. I’m glad we’ve got fans that walk the lines.

Jonathan McLarty: Do you have any favorite memories from your time on the independent wrestling scene?
SR: The friends that I made there – now being able to see my friends here working with me. Guys like Daniel Bryan, Cesaro, and you’ve got Sami Zayn and Adrian Neville down in NXT – watching people grow and being a part of that. I enjoyed my time on the indies very much.

JM: Did someone put the thought in your ear to pursue working for WWE, or did (WWE) come after you?
SR: This is something I always wanted to do. I kind of had a timeline in my head about where I wanted to be (based on) years in my career. My contract was up at Ring of Honor and I was a Ring of Honor champion – strike while the iron is hot and make the jump. It turned out to be a smart move for me.

JM: Given your position now and your pairing with Triple H, you probably have a lot of time off camera with him as well. Does that open you up to a lot of learning opportunities?
SR: There is a wealth of knowledge in this company. Being side by side with the COO and (13-time) World Champion, the guy who has pretty much done it all in this business, having him as a mentor is something that you can’t buy. If you’re not learning something every single day, you’re messing up.

JM: With your character change, you’ve gotten new entrance music. I know whenever someone gets new music, it takes some time for the fans to adapt to it. How does that work for you, the wrestler?
SR: It took me a little while, even just walking down the ramp instead of through the crowd is a little weird at first. With the music, you have to find out how it flows with your entrance. I think now, after about a month or so, it’s starting to catch on and I kind of like the way it feels.

JM: With your entering from the stage now, does it put you at ease knowing that you don’t run the risk of tripping over the barricade anymore?
SR: Ha! Well, they fixed the barricade. That’ll probably never happen again. The one that I hopped over and ruined my night was a little faulty. They bought some new ones and fixed it up. But yes, it is nice to know I won’t have to deal with that anymore.

JM: Is there any significance behind the blonde streak in your hair?
SR: When I was down in NXT, there were a lot of guys with long dark hair – Roman Reigns, Adam Rose, Bo Dallas. I needed to do something to set myself apart a little bit. If you’re seeing the show for the first time and there are five guys with long dark hair, it’s going to be difficult to remember who is who.

JM: With your winning the Money in the Bank contract, is that briefcase something you have to carry with you when you travel, similar to a championship?
SR: Oh yes, that’s with me all over. It’ll be part of my carry-on luggage at the airport. I don’t know what I’ll end up putting in there to maximize my space. I don’t want to be carrying that big stupid thing empty. That seems like a waste, right?

JM: How exciting is it knowing that you’re the only man in WWE right now that can have a WWE World Heavyweight Championship match at anytime, anyplace, for the next year?
SR: That’s very exciting. There’s no better position to be in, unless you’re the champ himself. It’s nice. You’d rather be the hunter than the hunted.

Source: (Connect with Jonathan McLarty on Twitter (@JonathanMcLarty) or at McLartyPhoto.Zenfolio.com.)

Raw Digitals: Seth Rollins vs. John Cena

*Full play by play recap and screen-captures coming tomorrow!

Seth did another interview with Jan Murphy of chinlock.com about what inspired his WWE career and his future plans with the MITB briefcase!
*Check out some of the best excerpts from this interview and please use the link to read the full article if you wish!

Rollins on A Roll

“He got me hooked when I was at a very young age and I just fell in love with the pageantry of the WWE and the whole process of the entrances and the music and the larger-than-life personalities. I was hooked. I really haven’t looked back since then.”

“I just didn’t have an interest in anything scholastically and I didn’t know what else I wanted to do,” he said, before adding that he and his friends in those days were known to hold impromptu wrestling shows. “At the time, I was farting around with my friends in the backyard and doing stuff we probably shouldn’t have been doing — we were throwing shows for our friends and stuff like that,” Rollins said, admitting that his love of all things wrestling was too powerful to ignore.

While it certainly made sense in the mind of the then-teenager, selling his parents on a career as a wrestler wasn’t so easy.
“They were so apprehensive at first,” Rollins admitted. “They were very upset. My mom, being a good mom, made sure that I did take classes at community college while I was training at first. I probably took a year or two worth of classes. I never got a degree or anything.”

That approach paid huge dividends for Rollins on his way to the top. He succeeded at every stop along the way, including a reign as the Ring of Honor World champ.
Rollins is unwavering in his love and support of independent wrestling.
“I think independent wrestling in the (United) States and in Canada is super important,”…. There’s no way you can mimic that experience of travelling with your buddies in the car and learning night after night from working with guys who are better than you and guys who are worse than you. That is, to me, the ultimate apprenticeship of what we do and really just working your way up and crafting who you are as a professional and as a performer. It’s very important, I think, in what we do.”

“Being the first (champion) is awesome,” he said. “Everybody knows Pat Patterson was the first Intercontinental champion, Jim Duggan won the first Royal Rumble … everyone knows the first so it’s cool to have that honour, to always be the guy who was the first NXT champion and really set the table for what that brand has become. I feel really proud of that.”

“You just outwork everybody,” he said. “That’s the only way. You can talk about all the politics you want and all of the guys who’ve fallen off, so to speak, or whatever it may be, but to me, it’s just a matter of working harder than everybody else.”

“To me the biggest threat, and the biggest enemy, as far as injuries are concerned, is the schedule — the wear and tear; the wrestling every single night; the bumping every night,” he said. “Nine times out of 10, the stuff that really hurts the guys, or we get injured on, isn’t the big stuff…. I mean, we’re year-round. We don’t have breaks, we don’t have an off-season, we don’t have time to recover from our injuries the way a lot of professional athletes do. We are a one-of-a-kind business in that sense.

“Live events are just a lot of fun,” he said. “I enjoy the interactions with the people. They play a much bigger role in the shows than they (do with) TV.”
Asked how a fan might grab his attention, Rollins said: “If I see a good sign or something like that, I’ll give it a nod, or a little wink or something like that, but mostly I just like to get all the people on the same page and then I’ll fight with them a little bit. If it works, it works. If not, then we’ll try something new. Live events are the best, man. They’re a hell of a good time.”

Credit: Jan Murphy
For Full Interview: Seth Rollins Interview on chinlock.com