WWE Champion Explains Why Working For Vince McMahon Was Strange

Gunther is set for his first WrestleMania marquee match next weekend, as he prepares to defend the WWE World Heavyweight Championship against Jey Uso on Saturday.

The 37-year-old is renowned for his in-ring skill set, and has become one of the most dominating WWE champions of the modern era. But there's no guarantee that would have happened under Vince McMahon's ever-changing creative direction.

Ariel Helwani hosted Gunther on his show earlier this week, where the champion discussed his brief period of time working for McMahon.

"I was under Vince for four months and it was a strange work experience," Gunther said. "The direction was very confusing. It was hard to figure out what was expected of me. Usually, there is not an issue with that. At the end of the day, everything came around for me. It was lucky in my career in terms of timing. Right place at the right time. [I've always been] a Hunter guy. That's been my whole career in WWE. My directions came from Hunter."

McMahon was notorious for changing creative on a whim, and de-emphasizing in-ring work. The latter is naturally one of Gunther's strengths. He indicated the erratic nature of McMahon's direction would not have suit him well.

"As a person, I struggle to go along with things if I can't logically get them. If there's no objective reason for things then I struggle. I give up quickly. 'Okay, I don't want to bother with this.' Overall, I don't think it had gotten that far yet. It was just a little bit of a confusing time," he said.

He noted there was a significant culture difference between what he was accustomed to.

"I had two conversations with Vince, very brief. It was very hard to get to anything with him. It was a strange work experience. It also might be a background thing, culturally because NXT is run differently with instructions," Gunther said. "All the jobs I had, the regular jobs in Germany, it's as straight forward as it gets. You get told to do all the time and if it's not done to the highest grade then you get told right away. It's very different work culture."

Even though Uso won the Royal Rumble, the match wasn't initially his desired bout for the show.

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