James Storm recently spoke with Busted Open Radio about his match at Lockdown with Robert Roode and more. Check out the highlights:
On his Lockdown Match: “It’s one of those—I don’t wanna say ‘make-or-break’ matches—but it’s definitely the biggest match of my career so far. There’s a lot of pressure. To me, I think a wrestler’s dream is to headline a huge pay-per-view, be in the World Championship match in his hometown, and ultimately win it. And that’s what I have the opportunity to do in front of my friends and family and all the fans that came to see me when I used to wrestle in Tennessee and Georgia and Kentucky. I know a lot of them are going to come out for me. There’s a lot of pressure on me, but I’m going to handle it just like I do anything else. It’s time for me to step up or shut up, so come Lockdown this Sunday, I’m definitely going to be stepping up. Bobby does his job well. He’s arrogant, he’s playing the heel role to a T. And my job as the babyface is to get the crowd behind me, to get them to want me to kick his ass. And both of us do our jobs.”
On his relationship with Roode: “There’s going to be some eyes swollen shut, that’s for sure in this match. The whole deal with him saying all that stuff about my two step-brothers and my dad on the TV…that actually kind of caught me off-guard. I didn’t know that he was going to say that stuff. He can call my family red-necks all he wants, he knows that really doesn’t bother me; I’m proud of who I am. But you go talking about my dad and my two step-brothers that were killed by a drunk driver, that are not here to defend themselves, that’s a different story and I’m going beat somebody’s ass for it. And I told him, I said ‘I don’t appreciate it, and when we get inside that cage, I’m going to show you.'”
On Storm and Roode’s TNA Legacy: “Me and Bobby, we’ve had the opportunity to go somewhere else, but we didn’t. We stayed with TNA because we believed in it. I’ve built a pretty good career here and a good legacy. This Sunday when I win the World Championship, I’m just going to add to it and make it that much better.”
On how it feels to be in the main event when the big names like Hogan still get pushed: “It definitely makes us proud—me, him AJ [Styles], even Kazarian, Christopher Daniels. I don’t want to say we look at them and say ‘we told you so.’ They bring in these other guys and they put them ahead of us just because they think they’ve got the name recognition and all this, but now I guess they’re learning that the fans don’t want to see them. They want to see guys like us who go out there and give it 110 percent who are not there just to collect a paycheck. It’s politics. That’s basically what it all comes down to. It’s good to have guys who still love the sport of wrestling, who are not there just to collect a paycheck, who want to go out and wrestle their next match like it’s their last match. And I think that’s what TNA needs to get to is the guys that are passionate about this, and they’ll start seeing ratings go up. To me, wrestling fans are not stupid. The company and the higher-ups can say what they want to say, but at the end of the day, wrestling fans know that they want to see wrestling. They don’t care about all these older guys going out and talking all this. It’s a wrestling show—let the guys go out and do what you hired them to do and that’s perform.”
On Kurt Angle: “Every time he’s on Lockdown, he pulls out a hell of a performance. That hamstring, you hurt it, it’s OK. But you try to push and it tears, you’re done for a long time. He knows his body, he knows when he’s able to go and what he’s able to do. Hopefully he’s cautious when he gets inside that ring, and doesn’t do something too stupid.”
On whether it’s a necessity to have blood in a cage match: “No. I know me and Bobby’s match is bound to have blood cause there’s such intense feud and we’re not going to hold nothing back. I mean, if we get busted open the hard way, so be it. But I don’t think there’s a necessity to have blood in every cage match. You just got to go in there and you have to work smart.”
On how his relationship with Montgomery Gentry started: “Alcohol. We were hanging out at a bar, and someone was telling me, ‘Hey, that’s Montgomery Gentry over there.’ I listen to some of their music, so I went over there and they were more shocked than I was, like ‘Man, you’re Cowboy James Storm!’ We just stood there and drank beer and had a good time, down at Tootsies in Nashville.”
On Garrett Bischoff: “I don’t think it’s really Garrett’s fault. I travel with him on the road sometimes. I’ll get in the ring with him before a house show and we’ll wrestle around and me and him work on some different things he need to work on. I mean, he’s doing his best to get better because he knows that he was just kind of thrown in to the wolves.”
On AJ Styles: “Somebody brought something up to me that I thought would’ve been pretty interesting that said if I win the World Title this Sunday that it would be cool to have a match, me against AJ Styles, at Slammiversary because we’re the only two guys that have been here since Day One that are left on the roster. You give us twenty minutes out there to tell a story and wrestle, we’ll definitely tear it down. Especially AJ. He’s one of the best of the best; there’s no doubt about it. For the last ten, fifteen years, he delivers every time. There’s nobody in my mind that tells a story better in the ring than A. J. Styles. So for people trying to nit-pick him saying he can’t cut great promos, to me, he cut pretty good promos and that’s good enough. His wrestling abilities make up for the rest of it.”
