Samoa Joe, who had won the NXT Championship from Karrion Cross at NXT Takeover: 36 was forced to relinquish his championship due to an undisclosed injury. However, the timing of this, with the WWE NXT brand going through a metamorphose starting tonight ushered in several conspiracy theories from the WWE universe that ‘The Samoan Submission Machine’ wasn’t actually injured. Are WWE going to be firing more names after Samoa Joe’s injury?
Now, it appears that theory could potentially not be such a conspiracy after all as according to Bryan Alvarez proclaimed on Wrestling Observer Live that he talked to a source who believes that, indeed, Samoa Joe is not actually injured. Credit to Ringside News for the following quote.
“WWE is saying he’s injured, but I have heard from someone else who strongly believes that he is not inured, but he is not available, so you can make of that what you will. I have heard from a third person who does strongly believe this whole thing is a work to get the title off of him to do a championship tonight.”
In other news regarding Samoa Joe, during a recent interview with So Catch by Hal 2, the now former NXT Champion discussed what advice he would give to his younger self back when he was starting wrestling. Credit to Wrestling Inc for the below.
“I think not to put a timetable on things,” Joe said. “I think early in my career I’d always kind of put this…you know if you had asked 19 year old me where I would be right now, at this point I would’ve wrapped it up ten years ago. ‘I gave it this and this and I’m working on this.’ I never really envisioned it would be the lifelong pursuit that it’s become. It’s not that I didn’t want it to be, it was just young me always kind of thought in very blocked off time blocks. I wanted to be at certain places at a certain time in my life. And I think a lot of young me are very much the same. But yeah, it never occurred to me some twenty odd years later that I’d be here doing this.”
