Drew McIntyre reflects on the advice given to him by The Undertaker early on in his career when Undertaker was his mentor.
Nowadays, Drew McIntyre is a bona fide main eventer in WWE, but back in 2009, he was a young man full of bravado and potential. In an effort to try to capitalize on this potential, Vince McMahon told Drew McIntyre that The Undertaker would be his mentor with the hope that Drew would be able to pick the brain of “The Phenom” as his own career grew.
Appearing on the Broken Skull Sessions with “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Drew opened up about the kind of advice Undertaker would bestow upon him with one major theme of the lessons being “less is more.”
“I harassed him all the time. He's The Undertaker, he's my mentor, so I would just ask him questions all the time,” Drew began. “The big one that took me a while to understand it, he'd look at me and say, 'stop playing the wrestler and be the wrestler.' I'd think, 'what is he talking about? I'm out there, I'm in wrestling gear, I'm wrestling around, I'm being a wrestler. I don't understand what it means.' It took a while before the light bulb turned on and I understood what he was talking about. As I'm out there, I'm stressed. I'm thinking about the next move. You can see in my eyes that I'm not in the moment and the crowd can see, 'this guy is just not with us right now, so we're not going to be with him.' I wasn't relaxed, as simple as that.
“Just relax when you're out there, feel the moment, be in the moment. When you start feeling it, they'll start feeling it. I wasn't feeling it at all. I was so tense and stressed out there, you know, never allowing the crowd in, just so focused on the next move, deer in the headlights, deer in the headlights in the eyes. It took a long time until that finally clicked in, what he was trying to tell me all this time. It's little lessons like that. At the time, I felt like he was talking and riddles, man, he's not trying to help me. He's just talking in riddles.”
He would later add, “One of the many lessons he taught me is to stand there, give it a second, and let what you just did breathe. You don't have to rush to the next thing every two seconds. In my head, I'm like, 'Moves, more is more,' and [Undertaker] was trying to explain to me, 'No. Less is more,' and I've heard it a million times. Took so long before I finally started applying it and seeing the difference and seeing how the crowd reacted to everything. ”
Drew McIntyre revealed in past interviews that he might have been on a collision course with the Undertaker for WrestleMania 26 in 2010. In this interview, he admits that had that match come to be, he doesn't feel like he would have been able to live up to the hype at the time.
“That's what I heard after the fact. I wasn't told directly. It was supposed to build to a match between 'Taker and I was all I was told. But I heard [it] basically from Shawn and afterward, I got to spend some time with Shawn, worked with Shawn, but that was the plan. Obviously, he had the great Shawn and 'Taker match, the retirement match. But if I had that match f the time, it wouldn't have been what it should have been.”
Drew McIntyre would also say that he was, at one point, penciled in to win the Money in the Bank briefcase at WrestleMania 26 but was later told that it was “too obvious.” That match was won by Jack Swagger (Jake Hager).
The cream always rises to the top and ten years later, Drew McIntyre would finally capture the WWE Championship by defeating Brock Lesnar at WrestleMania 36, helping carry WWE through one of its most uncertain times in history.
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