Samoa Joe Speaks On Getting Hired By WWE And Keeping His Ring Name

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.

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