Brock Anderson Recalls AEW Tryout

Brock Anderson was recently a guest on AEW Unrestricted, where he spoke about his AEW tryout match.

“I knew since I was twelve years old that this is what I wanted to do. Once I graduated high school, I looked at our parents and I [told them] that there was no point in me going to college. If I gotta go to another company, if I gotta go to Japan… that immediately got [shut down]. Don’t ever bring that up again. [They were like] ‘Go get your education and we’ll double back to this when you have that piece of paper in your hand.’ So I went and did that. I graduated in December 2019 from East Carolina [University]. Then in January 2020, I wanted to start rolling. I started training, I was training here in Charlotte with Lodi from WCW, he’s got a school about fifteen minutes up the road. Went in there about 2-3 times a week for about a year. I think somehow Cody, just between conversations between him and my dad, had figured out what I was doing and that I was training, keeping track of my progress. I guess he called and was like ‘Anytime he wants to come up, he can have a try out.’ So, I think maybe in February 2021, he [thought I was ready]. This was COVID Jacksonville, so it was different. I walked in, it was a different feeling that Daily’s was doing TV. It was pretty surreal. I had a tryout match with John Skyler, who y’all know. It was pretty nerve wrecking because everybody was out there. This is when Cody was still doing the classes in the afternoon. But everybody’s out there. I remember Cash [Wheeler] was out there. I remember Hobbs was out there. There were roster guys out there. So there was probably 50 people out there watching me when I usually had 5 people watching. I don’t know if I just exceeded their expectations because their expectations were so low, but I got pretty good feedback from everybody. Cody came up to me and said ‘We can have that match on Dark tonight, if you want.’ I signed that day. It all happened so fast, I can’t really remember any details other than that. It was just boom boom boom boom.”