Eli Drake on Pressure to Help Impact Wrestling Ratings

GFW World Champion Eli Drake recently spoke with Justin Barrasso of the Sports Illustrated where he discussed a variety of topics. Here are the highlights from the interview:

Eli says he doubled the amount of training he did when he came to know about the decision that he will be winning the GFW World Championship.

“Once I heard the decision was made [to win the world title], I put a lot of extra pressure on myself to not relax or be complacent. I actually started doubling up my workouts and I was in the ring two or three times a week extra just because I wanted my work in the ring, on the mic, and my conditioning to be second to none. If I’m going to be the face of the company, then I’m going to make sure I can go like nobody else.”

The GFW World Champion feels that attention to GFW should be paid even though there is tough competition out there, with NFL and Thursday Night Football adding more pressure on the champion.

“I don’t like to use that as an excuse. If we’re putting out a compelling product, then we should still have the eyeballs on our product. If you rewind about 20 years, and look at WWE in 1997, they were putting on a great product but nobody knew because WCW made such a loud noise via the NWO. It took WWE another year-and-a-half to make that big comeback, even though they were producing some great stuff with [Steve] Austin and DX.”

“We just had the regime change months ago. There is the stuff we didn’t expect with Jeff [Jarrett] and Anthem, but growing pains are to be expected. I hold a lot of that burden on myself. I am the guy at the forefront of the company, and I want to make sure eyes are on us.”

You can check out the full interview here.