Lio Rush On How He Caught WWE’s Attention, Talks Teaming With Velveteen Dream

Lio Rush was a recent guest on the Cheap Heat podcast where he discussed how he originally caught the attention of WWE with his in-ring work. Below are some highlights with a H/T to WrestlingInc.com for the transcriptions.

On catching WWE’s attention:

“I was coming up on my contract with Ring of Honor and I knew I didn’t want to be there anymore and I wanted to go overseas, so I didn’t resign with Ring of Honor. I spent a year there and I always feel like I am the kind of person that if I do something, even if it’s a short amount of time, that’s on my resume for the rest of my life,” said Rush. “I kept building my resume so I felt that I had a pretty impactful run with Ring of Honor to kind of get my name out there more and be able to learn and wrestle from some of the best wrestlers in the world. I knew that I wanted to wrestle overseas and I knew that Ring of Honor would help me build that name to potentially get booked overseas, which ended up happening.

“I spent about three months in Europe and then I spent a little under a month in Mexico and about a month in Canada, so I was all over the place so WWE took notice of that. I had a couple of matches that had gone viral, a couple of clips that grabbed people’s attention and then I got the call from WWE that they were going to be bringing me up with a few familiar faces that I knew from Ring of Honor so it was pretty cool.”

Teaming with Velveteen Dream before WWE:

“I started out in a tag-team, which is how me and Patrick became so close. We were in a tag team called Sudden Impact, and we were just two young athletes who had just graduated from the training school and we’re trying to make a name for ourselves. It wasn’t so much about the characters; we came out in tracksuits, looking like a unit. It was crazy how fast we got noticed by a lot of people,” stated Rush.

“We didn’t stay in Maryland for too long; we wanted to venture out. We did some independent shows in the New York area. We went to Pennsylvania working for Samu, which built our confidence a little bit. Got some eyes and attention on us and once we started rocking and rolling Patrick gets a call from WWE saying that he was going to be on Tough Enough and that was the end of that. We were a team for not even a year, so it wasn’t that long, but at that time we were a team we definitely made an impact.”