Leon Slater Recalls Finding Out He Would Be Wrestling On John Cena’s Retirement Show

Leon Slater reflects on finding out he would be wrestling on John Cena’s retirement show in Washington, DC, late last year.

Slater has had an explosive two years in the world of pro wrestling, capturing the TNA X-Division and World Championships, as well as competing on John Cena’s retirement show late last year.

While speaking to the Extreme Channel in a new interview, Leon Slater spoke about competing on the show, including how he found out he would be participating.

“I try my best not to have those moments until after the matches, because I feel like if I have these things where I make the event and I make the match this super big life- monumental changing thing, then I get nervous. When I’m nervous, I feel like I can’t perform to the level that I need to. So when I found out, I remember like I kind of had inklings because when I was doing that little NXT run, I never really knew where I was coming and going. Obviously, I’m still living home here in the UK, so it’d be a case of going out for a TNA loop and then getting the call from Orlando and being like, ‘oh, hey, we need you down here for two or three weeks,’ and then the two or three weeks would run up and like, ‘oh, no, like you’re gonna be with us another two/three weeks so it was one of these times where I think I had a RevPro show or something like that booked on the same day or the day before and there was a gap in my schedule between TNA and NXT. So, I was asking him like, ‘oh, cool, like, I’ll go home here then yeah’ and Melissa, the travel lady at NXT, she goes to me ‘no no you’ll you’ll be in DC that weekend, and I go, like, ‘all right, cool,’ and I didn’t really think of it, and as I walked off, I was like, ‘what’s going on in DC this weekend?’ Then I realized, I was like, ‘oh, my god’ and then as the talks carried on and it got made official, it started to set into reality, and then, you know, the weekend itself was just incredible. I got to have a lot of my friends there. I got to meet a lot of my childhood heroes, and like I’ve said before, it really was a dream that day. It was incredible.”

For more on Slater’s thoughts on competing on Cena’s final show, you can read more about that here.

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