“The match that changed my life was my first match. As the outreach of NXT grows and grows, WWE developmental is changing. A lot of times, NXT Superstars are already recognized by the time they get to WWE. In the days of yore, developmental was just that. You were like a Minor League Baseball player. People might have known of you, but they knew very little about you. Once you made it on TV and had an official debut it was like, ‘ OK,I'm on TV now.The legwork of getting to television is over. The story is now truly beginning.’
“It wasn’t the match itself, or the body of the match, it was the fact that it happened. It’s not that I was more or less accepted backstage. I didn’t have a sense of entitlement, achievement or acceptance. I knew I had a start. And if you look back, it was an improper start, but a start nonetheless. It just didn’t work. The situation I was put in wasn’t the right time. I would soon evolve into something extremely different and go from there. But the most important thing about it was it was a beginning. You can’t have a good story without a beginning.” — JOHN CENA