Nic Nemeth: Somebody Very High Up In WWE Asked Me To Stop Being So Good At Selling And Putting People Over

For nearly his entire career, Nic Nemeth has been praised for his ability to sell moves in the ring.

As it turns out, Nemeth was more “over the top” with things when he first started training. A couple of months later, he had to tone it down.

“All my over the top shit was the first couple of years. It’s really weird. When I started training, it was Rip
Rogers going and Jim Cornette going, ‘All four corners, when someone gives you an arm wringer, you go
to all four corners of the arena and let everyone know you’re in pain,’ and three months into my training,
I’m busting my ass.” Nemeth told Fightful’s Sean Ross Sapp in a new interview. “We had four days a week and I would come back at night and redo class because I was trying to catch up to everybody because I had never done independents. I was coming from college wrestling, so I’m trying to get good because everyone else here has some experience. I had zero. So I’m trying to get everything I can. I’m like, ‘Okay, big, always big.’ Three months into that, Vince goes Reality Era. Everything’s serious. Nobody’s selling. I had just locked in three months, seven days a week, several hours a day. So I had to train myself to tone it down a notch. Then when it came down to it, I used to watch, obviously, Mr. Perfect or Curt Hennig, AWA stuff. He’s so good and he could be cartoony, but it was okay. He was like 89, 90, 92. It’s okay to be a little cartoony, but we became the Reality Era. So I tried to go, ‘Okay, I’ll have a big bump here and there. I’ll put my entire body into a turnbuckle or somebody’s knee for a finish, whatever it is.’ I’ll make sure that I still want the last false finish or the last finish of the match to have everyone go, ‘That’s an MMA knockout. This dude’s out.'”

Even after toning it down, Nemeth’s selling still drew frequent concern from Vince McMahon. One name from the company even directly asked Nemeth to stop being so good at selling and putting people over.

“20 or 30 times I came to the back with Vince going, ‘Oh, my God, are you okay?’ And I go, ‘This is what
you pay me for, brother. Like this is why I’m doing this.’ So I loved that I got the boys and the office
sometimes because I would put so much into it. But one time I was pulled aside by somebody very, very
high up and said, ‘Could you not be so good at selling and putting people over?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’
Because every couple years I would tone it down a little bit more and I’d make some serious stuff, but
when it’s a knockout, it’s a knockout, I want it to be good. I tried, I had a live event where I tried to like
not have a snap back crazy bump on a tackle. I was like, ‘Nah, this doesn’t work. I can’t do it.’ I just have
too much pride in my work that even if it’s hurting me and nobody can reciprocate the sells that I do back
to me, because sadly Curt Hennig is not around. So nobody’s gonna reciprocate that for me. So I’m on my own here. It’s genuinely hurting my career, but I can’t not do it. He goes, ‘Don’t take those Brogue Kicks so great because the boss is gonna have you do them every week,’ and then cut to every week, it was twice a week, Mondays and Fridays. I was taking a Brogue Kick for about six months and I loved it because—I mean, it hurt—but it also looked like I got murdered in a video game, but it’s real life. They just wanted to see that and that slowly, but surely, you can’t be World champ if they want to see you taking finishes every week. So I tried to get out of that, but also still wanting my matches to have the ones where some kid could jump up and go, ‘He just lost a tooth,’ or ‘That knocked him out,’ or ‘Those guys don’t like each other, I know it,’ and that’s the magic of pro wrestling in 2025 and 2026.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Nic Nemeth spoke about Leon Slater ahead of their match at Slammiversary. Check out his full comments by clicking here.

Fans can check out Fightful’s full interview with Nic Nemeth in the video linked at the top of this article. Also, head over to our YouTube channel to check out more of our recent interviews.