Newly crowned NXT Champion Samoa Joe recently appeared on Sam Roberts’ Wrestling Podcast. Here are the highlights.
On his conversations with WWE about getting hired by the company:
“I didn’t plan on it, but it was funny, man. It’s a lot of confluence of a lot of good guys kind of going to bat for me and making the connection with me and Triple H. And the next thing you know, I find myself here.”
“I mean, [conversations with WWE] started out real informal. I’ve been wrestling as long as I have. I’ve made several inroads and friends with a lot of people. It was a real weird process because it was kind of the first time WWE in a long time ever brought in somebody, third party, under their own guise and didn’t try to create them unto themselves. Me, I was an experimental idea, so it’s like, ‘hey, we’ve got these ideas’ and they didn’t want to say who and all of a sudden it was, ‘hey, can we set up a meeting? Come down to Orlando [Florida] and lets talk about things. We’ve got some ideas we want to throw at you [and] see what you think.’ I think, for the most part, WWE was concerned that I’d be insulted initially by some of the inroads they made to me because [of] not understanding what they’re trying to build in NXT and what was going on here.”
On keeping his ring name:
“My lawyer is dope. Yeah, but I’m really super over and awesome, so that helps. I think the biggest thing really is when they looked at the situation, which was very unique that I was coming into, and AJ [Styles]’s much the same way. It’s very unique where we have decade-plus careers and decade-plus name recognition behind us that it’s more of a benefit to keep us as we are, so I think that’s the biggest thing. And for branding purposes and all that, I understand their business acumen behind trying to change somebody’s name. But, at the same time, do we want to start moving stuff a couple of months down the line or start moving stuff on night one? And that was a motivating factor too. I mean, it was financially smart and it was creatively smart, so I think that was the biggest thing that went into it.”
You can listen to the podcast here.