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When Chris Hero signed with WWE in 2011, he was ready to take the next step in his professional wrestling journey.
After spending over a decade honing his craft on the indies, working matches alongside future television stalwarts like Claudio Castagnoli, Orange Cassidy, Drew Gulak, and Eddie Kingston for promotions like Chikara and CZW, finally the man fans would eventually know as Kassius Ohno would be getting his shot at the big time; a shot the 6-foot-4 “Wrestling Genius” felt perfectly suited for.
And yet, as Hero explained in an appearance on POST Wrestling, WWE didn't make it easy to bring him down to then-developmental territory CZW. If anything, Hero had to do some serious legwork to even make sure WWE honored his contract, as after moving to Tampa, he was almost left with two apartments and no place to wrestle.
“I had met Jeff Katz years earlier, and he had talked about doing something, but those set of tapings were really important for me because I had signed with WWE, and because of my testosterone situation with the medical, they rescinded my contract. So I moved down to Tampa to start with FCW, and I wasn't able to start with FCW, and I wasn't able to start with FCW,” Chris Hero said via Fightful.
“So I was in this weird limbo of, I finished up with everybody that I'm working for, and now I have no money coming in. So if you look at it, it took me five months, from the moment I moved to Tampa to actually starting with FCW. So that was five months of limbo where I was able to get on a handful of shows. I did a PWG, I did a Final Battle appearance, and a follow-up for ROH. But these tapings, four days, went to Hollywood, shot it, and I got four, five days of good pay, and I really, really needed it. I got to see so many people from different areas of my career, people that I had met for the first time, people that I'd worked with for a very long time. We got to be a part of this special thing.”
Whoa, pretty crazy story, right? Well wait, it gets even better, as Hero was far from finished with his incredible tale.
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Chris Hero put in the work to join WWE.
Continuing his conversation with POST Wrestling, Chris Hero explained the lengths he had to go through to join FCW, which included multiple doctors visits and even more failed drug tests.
“I was told to not even come to the shows. I was like, ‘D*mn, I'd like to see people and say hi, and they were like, Yeah, you probably shouldn't.' I was like, ‘Oh, cool. That gets depressing.' Like, oh my god, I just moved. I was still paying rent in my place in Pennsylvania, I hadn't completely gotten rid of it yet. So it was just a lot. I was basically told, like, paraphrasing, ‘Hey, it's your issue, deal with it. We don't know why you failed the physical. These are the numbers that we got.' So I took it upon myself, and I went to doctors, I messaged a ton of people, and it just was really hard. People either didn't know what to, because it's this whole T/E ratio thing, like your testosterone over your epitestosterone. Basically, if it's in a certain window, it throws up flags. But if it's in that window, you have to find out what your baseline is first,” Hero said.
“I found a doctor, actually an incredible doctor from the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dr. Don Catlin, who did not know me, who responded to my email, pointed me in the right direction. He actually helped me figure this out. I had to figure out what the frick a carbon isotope ratio is, and then figure out all these things that I don't know anything about. I got that test, and then gave it to WWE and said, ‘Hey, look, this is coming from my body. It's not coming from outside of my body.' They were like okay, cool, and they set me up with another physical. Went back to Pittsburgh, did the physical again, and they said, ‘You failed the physical.' I'm like, no s**t. That's the whole point. So after working my way through that a little bit, they set up a different set of parameters for me, then I was able to start. But I didn't know what the problem was, I didn't know if something was wrong with my body. It made me nervous to take any kind of pre-workout or protein. I didn't know what the h*ll was going on. So that's why I had five months of purgatory. Claudio and I are coming in together, and then he gets a five-start head start on me, and he just passes with flying colors. Then I get there, and Dr. Tom's on his way out.”
Fortunately for Hero, his initial run in FCW/NXT was largely worth the wait, as he turned in some fantastic work that set him up to become an even bigger return to the indies from 2013-17. While Hero would have likely survived if he was unable to appear in NXT during his two runs with the company, in the end, both sides were better off by making things work, as Hero was one of the true highlights of WWE developmental over two separate runs.
