New Japan Pro Wrestling (NJPW) star and IWGP United States Champion Juice Robinson was recently a guest on Sean Waltman’s podcast, X-Pac 12360, to talk about several professional wrestling topics. He first talked about WWE Hall Of Fame commentator Jim Ross getting injured during his match at the G1 Special in San Francisco on Saturday:
“I thought it was squashed after the show. Obviously, it wasn’t our intention to hurt JR. I think he knew that, because why would we want to take the attention off the match? Nobody wants to hurt anybody, especially a 70-year-old guy.
“We apologized because it’s just a bummer that it happened. We’re in the wrong at the end of the day. I thought the guardrails were gonna be locked, I went out there earlier in the day because I knew we were gonna be hitting the fences pretty hard so I wanted to make sure they were interlocked. The guys on the floor at 4pm told me they were going to be so I thought it would be okay.”
He then offered his thoughts on the injury that Hiromu Takahashi’s sustained at the G1 Special as well:
“When you hear broken neck people, you think [paralyzed], but that’s not with every broken neck. Hopefully his broken neck is just time off. Even though, that still sucks but that beats the alternative. After seeing it, this is probably the best case scenario because that looked like it could’ve been the last bump he ever took.”
Robinson then compared the differences between training in the WWE Performance Center and the NJPW dojo:
“The Dojo was more bumping – you have to remember that there were a lot of guys that are really just starting out to even take like backdrops and hip tosses. When I was at the Performance Center, I was in one of the higher classes where obviously we already knew that stuff. In the Dojo, for me, I was just going through the drills, just the basic drills, stuff you can do in your sleep but you get a workout out of it.
“The Performance Center, it turned more into a mental thing… you know a lot tape study, a lot of studying psychology, applying the finer things of the business. The Dojo just kinda got back to the basics.”
You can listen to Juice Robinson’s interview on the X-Pac 12360 podcast by clicking this link here.
