Finn Balor became a WWE Triple Crown Champion on this week’s Monday Night Raw, defeating Damian Priest to win the United States Championship for the first time in his career. Balor reversed Priest’s attempt at The Reckoning late in the bout, then hit the Shotgun Dropkick and a Coup de Gras for the win. Priest then grabbed a microphone and turned heel, saying the fans cheered Balor on to victory while never showing him that kind of respect during his reign. Priest then nailed Balor with a cheap shot and tossed him onto a commentary table with a Razor’s Edge.
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This marked Balor’s first championship reign since returning to WWE’s main roster last year. His previous attempts saw him come up short multiple times against Roman Reigns for the Universal Championship and lose in the finals of the 2021 King of the Ring tournament against Xavier Woods.
Balor was recently on My Love Letter to Wrestling, where he explained what drove him to head back to the NXT roster in late 2019 for a second NXT run.
“I feel like I got a little bit stale. I was tired. I was exhausted. I was worn out by dealing with the politics, the office, the writers, and everything that goes with it. I just had enough,” Balor explained. “When I returned to NXT, I really felt like that rejuvenated me in the ring. One thing I felt that helped with all the negative effects of the pandemic was taking the fans out of the equation in wrestling makes you change the cadence and the tempo of the match because you’re not trying to perform for a large audience. You’re literally performing in a one-on-one environment, and you can really work on the details of the match. You’re not so reliant on hearing the audible response from the crowd.
“I would produce a match to get a yea or a boo or a holy s— but then when you take that element out of it, you can get back down to the nuts and bolts of what I actually learned in Japan which is just gritty wrestling,” he continued. “I really feel that despite all the negative things that the pandemic brought us, it brought me that one positive thing that I can really get back to wrestling for me and the way I like to wrestle. I’m now finding that balance of how can I keep that art form of the way I like to wrestle in front of big crowds when you’re on a limited time frame with TV wrestling? I feel that finding that balance is going to be the most difficult thing.”
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