Chris Sabin on AJ Styles, his influences, and his World Heavyweight Championship run

Chris Sabin, who recently returned to Impact Wrestling as part of the Motor City Machine Guns, sat down with Chris Van Vliet. He was asked if he had learned anything from AJ Styles.

"I'm not sure. He didn't really like me at first. I don't know if I wanted to learn from a guy who didn't really like me, you know what I mean. I guess you can ask him why he didn't like me,"

"...we respect each other and I would say he's one of my friends. I've known him for a long time, but I haven't talked to him in a long time, but yeah."

He did elaborate on some of his influences.

"As far as my style goes, I liked studying Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, Eddie Guerrero, Jushin Thunder Liger, and Shinjiro Otani. I would really like watching the WCW Cruiserweights because I'm like, 'Okay, these guys are my size.'

Growing up, I would watch all these crazy Japanese guys that I didn't even know existed. I really studied a lot of cruiserweight wrestling when I was younger you know, because I'm a cruiserweight."

The conversation segued into when he won the TNA World Heavyweight Championship for the only time in his career.

"I wasn't ready because I was a tag team wrestler basically from 2007 until 2011. After returning from injury, I had only a few matches with the Machine Guns before Alex Shelley left, and I was on my own. I had only like 10 or 11 singles matches and tore my other ACL, and was out for another year. So, I was basically out for almost two years straight, and then several years before that, I was only a tag team wrestler,

They wanted to put the title on me like really quickly. This was barely two or three months after I came back and I just didn't feel like I was ready as a singles wrestler. Do I feel like I could have done better if they would have built me up over a year as a singles guy? Yes, absolutely, but it is what it is.

I would be a lot more prepared now. I would feel more comfortable and I don't think that they would throw it on me right away or anything. I think that the company's just different now and hopefully, I have time to prepare and build something up as opposed to a shotgun in a story like that real quick."