Eli Drake Quotes

But the general audience, if you want to grow your audience you need to tell stories, you need to have characters, and that’s how you bring them in. That’s my favorite part of the business.

So my favorite part of the industry was always the drama, the trash-talk, all that kind of stuff. And if you can throw in hard-hitting action on the back end of that, that’s amazing.

I like the idea of not being stuck in a warehouse five days a week. That’s not a shot at anybody, that’s a fact of life, if you will.

I wish Impact Wrestling nothing but continued success and growth going forward.

When I was at the Performance Center, I was super hated for probably two or three months because I’m a quiet guy. I’m very much an introvert and it shocks people when they see what I do on TV because I’m verbose and I talk a lot.

Comedy and silliness has a place in wrestling, but there’s still gotta be some level of believability.

If you look at WWE 1998-99, was it over the top? Sure it was, but they were still doing well. If you get into 2004-05, you’ve got HLA, Katie Vick and things like that – that’s where it just gets dumb.

I don’t even like wrestling really small guys a lot of the time. It just feels phony.

I’m loving life, making money doing what I love to do, making good money and living comfortably. I drive a corvette and live in L.A., baby!

You’re running a business, and at the end of the day, if you’re running a business, you’ve got to make money.

For so long, it felt like I was doing great things that nobody was seeing. Now to be featured on television, doing the things I was doing and being able to be seen on a worldwide scale, it was huge.

The casual audience was never really turned on by crazy moves, they were turned on by crazy characters.

You know, Billy Corgan has a big vision. He has a great idea for what he wants to do and how he wants to distribute it and I have always liked Billy and Dave Lagana’s platform as far as being more character-driven and just kind of let us do our own thing and let the talent be talented.

As far as backstage, the morale has always been good. It’s very relaxed backstage. No one’s walking on eggshells and there’s no one stabbing another in the back. It’s always been really good.

There’s a big etiquette thing with wrestling, but every day you come in, you shake everybody’s hand, you introduce yourself, you say hello.

I think I won the Feast or Fired briefcase every time I was in the match.

In all honesty, I’m super happy to be where I am, doing what I’m doing and making a living doing what I love to do.

I wasn’t around in the old days, but if you look at guys from the 70s, 80s and 90s, back then these guys were the kind of guys that if you walked up to them in a bar you would not go up to them and talk trash to.

I don’t make good connections with people and I don’t know if that’s an emotional block on my part. I don’t know.

I’ll be 100 percent honest, any time I’ve been given a promo, I’ve used three to five percent of it, which is usually what are the bullet points, what’s the direction I’m going in, what points do I need to get across, what am I putting over, and that’s it.

It’s been phenomenal to finally be recognized for my talents and to be on a worldwide stage where people can see me, see what I do and see what I say. It’s really been incredible.

I have amazing respect for Tessa Blanchard; I’ve told many people that she is easily the best female wrestler in the world. She is so intense with everything she does, and her facials, and moves.

One of my biggest gripes with wrestling in the last decade is it has seen a lot of silly, goofy characters. I feel like every other match is a comedy spot, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think if there is a comedy spot, it should be special.

I think that there is eventually going to transition in to a way where – I think cable is eventually going to go the same way as just regular radio. Where people still listen to it, it still exists, but for the most part, they’ve got MP3, they’ve got satellite radio, they’ve got Pandora.

The deathmatch thing is overdone.

I enjoy that competition. All that does is light a fire under me, and once that happens I start to get hot whether it’s verbally or physically, but it’s actually good fuel.

After 4 years with Impact Wrestling, some ups, some downs, I would like to thank them for the overall great experience.

I was one of the top paid guys at Impact, thankfully. With that money, I invested a bunch of it and I’ve been taking classes on learning day trading with stocks.

I don’t think most guys can handle a mic even close to what I do if I’m honest and I say that with no ego, that’s the honest truth. I know what I do and I’m self aware.

I am interested in anyone who has something interesting for me to do and who is going to pay me well.

When I was on the indies back in 2008, I had an opportunity with WWE when I went in and did a dark match and they liked me and wanted me to come back the next week.

I have this personality, where I’m a natural introvert in my personal life, but when you give me a camera and microphone, I have a so much to say.

The business is always evolving and you’ve gotta evolve with the business in a reasonable way.

Half the time Dave Lagana will come up to me and tell me to just go out there and do my thing.

But I’ve been day trading stocks and I’ve been doing it pretty successfully.

A lot of people try to evolve in unreasonable ways and I don’t agree with them. But you must evolve and be better than the same guy next to you, at the same time being able to work with the guy next to you.

I just like my lifestyle living in L.A. I didn’t want to move to any other state, I didn’t want to go anywhere else.

The business that I fell in love with was big, strong, masculine men who looked like they were fighting. They all had characters and they all could. even the worst promo guys were good.

I’ve always enjoyed my wrestling being geared more so towards adults.

The biggest advertising dollars are coming from television – not to mention there’s just a certain ‘aura’, there’s a certain feeling about being on TV where it still is special to a lot of people.

Yeah and that’s the thing, you can have a 100 different chat shows, they can all look the same and do the same thing, but if you can get in there and set something apart, you win.

As far as my goals are concerned, Eli Drake needs to be a household name any and everywhere it can be. Aside from that I want to rack up championships.

The weird thing about me is that I’m naturally an introvert, so I don’t talk to people.

Growing up when I was watching wrestling, if a guy couldn’t talk, I didn’t care about him. You could have the fanciest moves and be the greatest wrestler if all time, but if you didn’t have a compelling character and you couldn’t talk, I didn’t care.