Hello everyone. This is the first part of a long interview that my friend Marco Piva made to Drew Galloway, for our italian website, wethewrestling.altervista.org
After a series of botched attempts at this interview, after a number of miscommunications worth of a Mel Brooks movie (only the last one being a man giving me the wrong directions), after an impressive number of Facebook messages and emails, I'm finally in Ayr, sitting in front of the hottest commodity in pro wrestling today, the one and only, the (formerly?) chosen one, the current holder of no less than six titles, THEE… DREW GALLOWAY . Who, as a teenager, used to work in this very bar to pay for his wrestling lessons. Thanks to that bar too, then.
It won't be easy to hammer our very long chat into the shape of an interview, even split in four parts, but I'll be doing my best. And I promise, I won't cut anything important.
Let's go.
WtW: Just to warm up: where did you train?
DG: When I first started there was no wrestling school here in Ayr – actually, there was no wrestling school in Scotland. I needed to travel twelve hours by train to go to Portsmouth, in southern England, right at the bottom of the country, for three-day or week-long training camps with the FWA guys. I went on every possible holiday I had. And this was when I had just turned 15, fourteen years ago. There were some good trainers there, Doug Williams, Mark Sloan, James Tighe… of course everything was focused on the British style of wrestling, that's how I was trained. Every match was mostly chain wrestling (actually, Robbie Brookside calls it simply "wrestling"), a little bit of heat, a small comeback and that was it.
WtW: In the first part of your career, you had a fantastic feud with Sheamus O'Shaunessy and Stu Sanders, two wrestlers we now know as Sheamus and Bad News Barrett – and then the three of you went together to the WWE; can you tell us how it happened, and how did you help each other to excellence?
DG: The first time I met Sheamus I was working for Irish Whip Wrestling (IWW), who had a TV show on The Wrestling Channel; it was the first season. I went over for a show with my then-manager Charles Boddington. Sheamus was a bouncer at the time. We went for a night out after the show, I was 18 or 19 at the time; I met a girl, disappeared and missed my flight. The next day I finally showed up, Graham [Charles Boddington's real name is Graham McKay] was desperately looking for me. But to get a new flight would have been really expensive, to change flights without a fee I'd have to wait two days. So Sheamus said I could stay with him, we got to know each other, we realised we had similar goals, we wanted to go to America, we both loved the same wrestlers (Bret Hart was our favourite), we had the same philosophy in wrestling, so we became very good friends in those couple of days and we started talking about what we could do together in wrestling. And he's still one of my best friends in the world today.
Then the promoter in IWW wanted to set up a feud between Sheamus and I in the second season of the show; I didn't have Charles with me any longer, so I wanted a faction. He let me know about a big guy he saw in Wales (Stu lived there at the time), there also was a French guy Sheamus liked, Pierre Marceau, who is now in NXT with the name of Marcus Louis: we were The Foreign Legion. Sheamus and I were wrestling all over Ireland, we started trying lots of different stuff, the promoter gave us a 2-out-of-3 Falls Match, we recorded it with Sheamus's own video camera and watched it back to try to get better; then we asked for a Submission Match, and we did that… we watched Bret Hart vs Mr. Perfect and we tried to emulate that match… we were constantly testing each other trying to get better. Then, on the TV show, there was The Foreign Legion against Sheamus. At that point he had been undefeated for, like, two years, he had the belt. Finally I defeated him for the belt, which was a big thing.
Then some stuff happened, they kinda forced Sheamus out of the company. Then, when they eventually asked me to drop the belt at a show I said no, because I was unhappy at the way they had treated him, he was and is my friend. So I just gave them back the belt, telling them I didn't think I'd be going back because they f**ked over my friend. They asked me to go over and do a match and I refused to work with them again and I haven't worked for them since. They thought I'd go back because I wanted to wrestle… but Sheamus and I had big goals, we wanted to go to America, no matter what; we were going to help each other get there, and if anybody f**ked us over we'd tell them to go f**k themselves, and that's what I did, even though I was the champion at the time.
Then Sheamus got some information about a tryout for the WWE and gave me all the details, he gave me their email and told me what to do, I emailed the person in charge at the time and got everything set up, we went in at the same time. The first time it was in Manchester, but John Laurinaitis wasn't there. We still wrestled each other, but we were told to go back the next time when Johnny Ace would be present. So the following tour, six months later, we went to London. I was 21 at the time. Arn Anderson put two big guys in the ring, two giants. One was Rob Terry, I can't remember who was the other. They had never wrestled in their lives, so… I mean, this other guy couldn't even do a forward roll. Then he said "You and you", pointing at me and Sheamus. So we looked at each other and said "Sweet, he picked us together, thank God". We had what we fell was a really good match, the agents were really complimentary afterwards, they told Johnny Ace he had to sign us. Johnny grabbed me first, I walked with him towards catering and said to me "I think I'll bring you to America" [here Drew does a pretty good impression of Laurinaitis] , so I looked at him and I said "I'm thinking of letting you". I had just turned 21 at the time, that was amazing. I got signed right there and then. Then I spoke to Stu, he was there as well, and he said he got signed too. So we looked for Sheamus, and Johnny had not spoken to him yet. I told him to go find him, so he did. And he got signed too. All three of us got signed together, which was amazing. We had gone through the whole journey together, especially Sheamus and I.
So we went to the concession stand and got a beer. And then the real journey begun.
WtW: Wow. That was a story. Anyway: when you finally went to America, did you have to change your wrestling style?
DG: Yes, slightly. It was all a matter of listening and learning.
WtW: Anything specific you had to change?
DG: I became more strike-based. Again, that was just me listening to the others. Nobody actually changed me: like with anything, if you are smart you take what you like and disregard what you don't. I was getting taught by so many good people. I mean, in England I had some good trainers, but there everyone was great, and they gave me their different views and told me how to stand out, how to think outside the box. I took what I liked from it to make it a believable style, as I didn't think that the style of wrestling I had at the time was very believable. I wanted people to think "I know wrestling is not real, but when I watch that Drew Galloway I'm having some doubts".
WtW: There you became Drew McIntyre. Why did you choose that name?
DG: On my first week in OVW the WWE writers were there. At the time they only visited every six months, although I thought they'd be there all the time. Just luck. They needed an opponent for somebody, and they decided to take a look at the new guy. So they just threw me in, let me do a promo and a match, clearly they liked me: the following week I was on television, on Smackdown . I had just turned 22. It was insane. Three weeks after getting to America, I was already on television. I was in Gorilla [the Gorilla position is the area just behind the scenes where wrestlers wait to be called for their matches] just before my match, and Stephanie McMahon asked me: "Is Galloway your real name?". When I said it was, she insisted that I changed it, at the time they were making sure they could retain the rights to the wrestlers' names. So Michael Hayes and I ran to Talent Relations and asked somebody to Google for Scottish surnames. I wanted a name with three syllables, it seemed easier to chant. Like GAL-LO-WAY, you see? So we started scrolling down the list.
For a second I nearly was Drew McDonald, but… no, there was already one, you know, and the stories they told about him… well, I really didn't want to be confused with him. Mind, he is… he was a good friend of mine, I miss him a lot, but I really didn't want Vince to think that the stories they told about him were about me, you see.
Then Michael Hayes saw "McIntyre", I looked at him and we both said "That's it", and we ran back to Gorilla for my match. Seconds before I walked out they buzzed the ring announcer to tell him about the change. When I walked out to the ring for my first match, it was against one of the Major Brothers [it was Brett Major, now known as Zack Ryder] , the Titantron was flashing the name "Galloway". You couldn't see it on television, they cut it to make sure you couldn't, but it was.
WtW: Anything else you want to tell us about that match?
DG: I remember the time getting cut. I was not used to that. We were supposed to have six minutes, but when we already were on the ring the referee casually said that we had three. I had never been in a situation in which I had to stick exactly to a time … but I called the match and we did. I had to figure out how to do it, on television, as I went along. Nobody had taught me how to work a hard camera either. I was figuring everything out as I went along.
We conclude here the first part of our long interview with Drew. In the next, he'll tell us about Wrestlemania, 3MB and the end of his working relationship with the WWE. Don't miss it!
To read our others interviews you can check В http://wethewrestling.altervista.org/ .
Bye!