At the NBA 2K16 Road to the Finals championship final earlier this week, we caught up with professional wrestler, YouTuber, and avid eSports fan, Xavier Woods. During the interview, he discussed his love for eSports and his career in WWE, including his motivations and how he made it into the ring.
When asked how he felt about the event, Woods spoke about his passion for gaming and eSports, saying “I’m huge into video games, I’m very big into eSports, I’m trying to get to the point where I understand everything a lot more than I do right now.” As you probably already know if you follow eSports, they typically require the audience to know a bit about the games and their language. Woods says that he’d also love to become a commentator for eSports, noting that he has already commentated a Smash Bros tournament.
“I commentated a Smash Bros tournament that we had last year, for Up Up, Down Down, my YouTube channel, … so coming here, I’m horrible at [NBA 2K16], but sitting at the booth, and being able to commentate a little bit.. it feels good, because I can talk about it, I’m just not great on the sticks.”
Woods then goes on to discuss Street Fighter, speaking similarly about the game. If you didn’t already know, he’s a big fan of fighting games, with Street Fighter and Tekken being his top two. Unfortunately, though, he didn’t get the chance to catch Combo Breaker this year thanks to poor service where he was at during the event.
“I’m so upset, I’ve been so good and been able to watch everything … but where we were, there was no service in the buildings, no service while we were driving, and I was [so mad] reading updates on Twitter.”
When asked if Woods had any interest in delving into any other areas of eSports outside of fighting games, like League of Legends, he says he’s already started.
“I am playing League, not as much as I wish I was able to. I just got a new gaming laptop, and this laptop is like 25 pounds. It’s got everything in it, because I need something for VR while I travel. So I was like, ‘you know what? Just max it out, I want everything.’ But I have some friends that are very good at League, they’re like Diamond [rank] and they’re teaching me how to play it. I want to get more into it so I can understand it and speak the lingo.”
Of course, being known for his work in the WWE, there had to be some WWE questions. When asked how it feels to be doing well in video games and the WWE, Woods talks about his career path leading into the WWE. As it turns out, he used to have stage fright, but you would never know that by looking at him now.
“It feels good, because honestly every decision that I’ve made throughout my life was to get me to the point where I could be in the WWE. I had really bad stage fright, so I forced myself into show choir. If you can sing and dance in front of people, you can do whatever in front of people.
I wrestled so that I could become a better athlete and play football and run track. I was a cheerleader so I could learn to do flips. Everything that I did was to get skill so that I could do this, because I knew I wasn’t going to be 7 feet tall and I knew I wasn’t going to be 300 pounds. So my dad told me when I was getting into this, he said, ‘okay, you pay your way through wrestling school if you want to do it. We’ll support you, but it’s your thing.’
So once I went to my first show and started getting some steam, he [says], ‘if you try to go to the place that you want to go, you’re not gonna be the biggest guy, but you’re my son so you will be the smartest guy. Use what you have to out-think everyone in the building and get to where you want to go.’ That just told me, there’s nothing that says you can’t do something unless you say you can’t do something. You use the skills you have, and you make it work.”
It’s a rather inspirational tale of his entry into WWE, and I’d recommend giving the full video interview a watch up top. It just goes to show that anything is possible if you put your mind to it. Do you agree? Let us know in the comments below.