William Regal on What He Looks for at WWE Tryouts, Developmental and the Main Roster, More

As noted earlier this week, WWE has announced 40-person tryouts for Dubai later this month. The tryouts will be ran by William Regal, who recently spoke with ESPN about the process at this link. Below are highlights:

What WWE officials are looking for at tryouts:

“I’ve been doing this long enough that once I spend a day with somebody, I can say, ‘Well, this person will be good at this as long as, obviously, no injuries and everything goes right, but it may take two years. This person could be getting good at this after six months.’ But if you were to ask me to actually describe what that is, it’s more of an eye for looking at things or looking at people than actually being able to write down the formula of it.

“There’s no easy answer. But you want the physical attributes to be able to do it. Over a few days you learn a lot about people and whether they’ve got the kind of temperament that you need to do what we do in this day and age. You find a lot out about people when they’re blowing up, as we say, gasping for air, and if they can still hold conversations and be polite. Also, they’ve got to have some kind of charisma, because you can have 10 gold medals hanging ’round your neck, [but] if you’ve got no charisma at all, you’re just absolutely worthless to what we do.”

The success they had in China last year:

“We were hoping if we could just find one person, and if we didn’t find any that would be OK, because it was a completely fresh market for us with no expectations of finding anybody that would fit the bill. We came back with [eight] people, so now we’re going to Dubai, and I believe there’s 17 countries represented.”

WWE having success with their developmental program, how far WWE NXT Tag Team Champion Rezar has come:

“This will be my 34th year in this industry. The last five years or so that I’ve been a part of talent development have been the most rewarding for me, to watch people thrive in the environment of the Performance Center. [For example], the Authors of Pain that are with us now [are] the tag team champions at NXT. Gzim [Selmani], I met when he was 19 at the last Dubai tryout three years ago. To watch him go from that, at 19, to being part of the tag team champions [as Rezar] now at NXT, it’s a really rewarding experience. Just to deal with everybody on a daily basis and see the progression. Sometimes you see people, they struggle a little bit, but then there’s always somebody who knows how to help them.”

“It’s a testament to the scouting and recruiting team that goes out to these tryouts and a variety of other events throughout the year. But it also speaks to the amount of time and resources that the WWE has sunk into its facilities in Orlando. The Performance Center features seven training rings, a state-of-the-art gym and nearly every piece of equipment a future WWE superstar could need to sharpen their body and their mind. It’s paid off in a big way over the last four years. Nine out of the 13 matches on the WrestleMania 33 card earlier this month featured at least one superstar who had spent a significant amount of time in NXT and at the Performance Center. Every active main roster title has had at least one NXT alumni as its reigning champion at some point over the last two years.”

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