Damian Priest recently looked back on his match with Bad Bunny at WWE Backlash 2023 and the match where things ‘clicked’ for him. Priest touched on the topics during his appearance on Insight With Chris Van Vliet, and you can see highlights below (courtesy of Wrestling Inc):
On his match with Bad Bunny at Backlash: “It almost didn’t happen in Puerto Rico. Plain and simple, I don’t think we would have done the match if it wasn’t in Puerto Rico. For me, it was always, of course, I’m a very proud Puerto Rican, but it was just [about] representing the Latin community, all Hispanics, that, to me, was opening the doors for a lot of stuff.”
On his nerves heading into the match: “Yes, there’s confidence in me, but at the same time, they have to have been like, ‘Ah, we made the wrong decision here.’ There was talk of changing it to a tag match, but at the same time, Bad Bunny and I were very adamant, we were like, ‘We don’t want to do a tag match,’ and I was proud of that one. Hands down, my favorite match, just because of what it represented, it was bigger than any win or loss.”
On the NXT match where everything clicked for him: “I think the first big jump was after my match with Finn Balor at In Your House at the Performance Center, just during the COVID era. I don’t know, I can’t even explain what happened that day, it was just something clicked and I just let loose, and I remember getting to the back and Shawn and Hunter were waiting for me and he was like, ‘That’s the guy I need to see from now on. There’s no going back, that guy that was out there, that guy’s money, like, you have to be that guy always.’ He said, ‘Stop pretending.’ The match with Finn Balor, he just brought something else out of me, and then Finn and I became ‘boys.'”
