Former WWE Superstar Viktor of The Ascension revealed during a recent edition of the “Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling” podcast that WWE wouldn’t let him reference the Hart Family Dungeon on television despite being trained there. You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On his training at the Hart Dungeon not being mentioned on WWE TV: “We used to kind of always pitch it. Like, this is one of my things, basically. Because that’s a thing in wrestling. You know what I mean? That’s what I came up watching. Like, everybody else that came from The Dungeon, that it was just kind of a given. You hear somebody is from Calgary and you say, ‘That guy can work. That guy is gonna be a good wrestler.’
“When I got to FCW they were just like, ‘Nope. We’re not letting you say that anymore.’ And I was like, ‘Hmm. Well, thanks.’ And I think even [William] Regal said it one time on NXT and they told him to quit saying it. So I really never got a definitive answer as to why. They just told me to drop it. And so I said, ‘Fine’. I don’t need to keep trying to jam it down your throat if you don’t want to accept what I am.”
On being one of the last graduates of the Hart Dungeon: “It gave me a lot of credit when I would go somewhere. Even when I went over to England for the first time back in 2005-06, somewhere around there. They didn’t like a lot of foreigners always coming over and taking work – is kind of how I was told even before I got there. Then once I started meeting the guys and talking to them and even a lot of the veterans that were there, I never had any issues. They were all pretty cool with me. I felt like it always went a long way until I got to FCW and then it was like, ‘Nah. What you are doesn’t matter anymore.’”
