Daniel Garcia on 2021 NXT tryout, Anarchy in the Arena match, more

[Chris]

Source: f4wonline.com

Daniel Garcia says Triple H welcomed him to the team after his WWE tryout last year.

Garcia was a guest on Talk is Jericho recently and spoke about participating in a camp at the WWE Performance Center in early 2021.

"I had a WWE tryout in January of last year, so 2021 and I had a match on NXT right after the tryout," he said on the show.

"I did the camp and honestly, I crushed it. The promo was phenomenal, well I thought it was at the time, looking back it probably wasn't. At the time, I liked it. I had a really good practice match. It was only me, one other indie guy, and then a bunch of football players."

"I thought I did really well. They asked me to stay an extra day to have a squash match on NXT against Tyler Rust, his name was in Diamond Mine. The match went really well. I remember I went through the back and Shawn Michaels loved it, Road Dogg loved it, A-Train loved it, Triple H shook my hand and said ‘Welcome to the team.’ I think he thought I was signed but I wasn’t at the time. In my mind, I’m like, ‘I guess I’m going to NXT. Mom, I'm moving to Orlando!”

“I talked to Canyon Ceman right before I left. He said, ‘Let me know if any other place has interest because we’ll sign you sooner.’ In my mind. I’m like, that’s disrespectful to me. If you want to sign me, just sign me."

“At the time, I had interest from Ring of Honor and I knew AEW wanted to bring me back in for extra work but I was, like, I’m gonna make this seem bigger than it actually is. So I said to him, ‘Well, with that being said,, I’ll talk to you very soon.’ I think he got kind of hot at me for that, I think that shook him up a little bit. They emailed me a couple weeks later, kind of saying like, ‘We’re gonna stay in contact blah, blah, blah’, and then that kind of made me mad. Then I went on a crazy Indie run and I signed with AEW.”

Garcia also commented on the Anarchy in the Arena match from Double or Nothing receiving a five-star rating from Dave Meltzer in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter.

"I got up and I started beating my chest," Garcia said of his reaction to finding out the match's star rating. "I got real excited because that's an accomplishment that when you grow up in my era of wrestling fans, I grew up in the internet wrestling community and star ratings and Meltzer, that was all very important to my generation of people. So, once I found out I got a five-star rating, I'm like, 'man, that's a cool thing to check off my bucket list.'"

"It's cool to know that if I never get another five-star match ever again, I got one. It's cool to kind of get it out of the way a little bit."

 

[Swerve]

WWE blew this one.