The Elite’s Kenny Omega, who is set to become one of the hottest free agents in professional wrestling over the next few months, recently appeared on Chris Jericho’s ‘Talk is Jericho’ podcast and talked about how he almost quit wrestling.
Then, Omega stepped into the ring with A.J. Styles.
“I found that my in-ring performance was suffering because you know there’s an aesthetic look you have to maintain in professional wrestling” Omega stated when describing his mindset back in 2006. “If I’m cutting 20 pounds for a tournament or a fight and then I have to go to the ring I’m going to look like I came out of a dryer and it just didn’t jive. So if I was going to concentrate on one, the other was going to suffer.”
Omega then described how he approached an upcoming match with Styles, the current WWE World Heavyweight Champion.
“[It was] after that AJ match when I thought, ‘Oh my goodness there’s this guy who’s so much better than me but we have this chemistry together.’ It kind of showed me my true potential and maybe something that I could grasp and something I could achieve that I hadn’t seen yet.”
“It really made me look in the mirror and say to myself: ‘Jeez, even when I do these all-time jiu-jitsu tournaments I’m always going for a finish, I’m always trying to have that exciting match when really you should just be concentrating on getting that gold medal or whatever. So I found that I was actually and entertainer, I was a performer. So I was going to give this wrestling thing one more shot.”
