Samoa Joe Revealed That His Main Roster Debut Was Unlikely
May 10, 2017 at 5:49 PM
The former two-time NXT champion Samoa Joe recently spoke to Chris Jericho on his podcast ‘Talk is Jericho’. He revealed that the main goal of bringing him into the WWE was to use him at NXT only;
Source – WrestlingINC
“I think the initial idea was, ‘let’s just bring him in for NXT’ and we got such a good response with everything that it kind of really blew up even beyond that and here I am on the main roster.” Joe said, “and really to the company’s credit, it wasn’t something that was set in stone. Like, the scenario that was laid out before me was like, ‘listen, we can use you here in NXT, but we don’t really think that it’ll go much beyond that.'”
Joe suggested that he was happy to treat the opportunity to go to work for NXT as a “foot-in-the-door”.
“I really wasn’t worried. It was kind of a foot-in-the-door deal and I had a lot of good people rooting for me at the time.”
“I think it was a cultural thing here in WWE. I think that for a long time, past TNA projects that they had brought in hadn’t done well. And I think there was a major push within the company that says, ‘we’re going to build guys from scratch on our own.’ They had put a tremendous amount of money into the PC and the Performance Center, which is producing great talent. So it was kind of like, ‘hey, this is a guy who can help us build NXT into a brand.'”
“Road Dogg and a bunch of other guys and I think enough people got in Hunter’s ear where he was just like, ‘well, let’s have a meeting and talk about it.’ We set up a meeting and we sat down and talked about it, and it went from there.”
“In a way, it was kind of like new ground for the company and for me and nobody really, who was in my position, had made overtures to the company and really they kind of wrote a lot of us off. And I don’t think it was out of malice or spite. I just think they had an edict that they had to follow and I get that, but it wasn’t something that they thought was a possibility. I think Hunter kind of saw the possibility that a lot of people didn’t and it kind of started from there.” Joe continued, “They didn’t want to sit there and rely on people that had done things in other places. They wanted people to be built and made in the realm of WWE. Like I said, I can understand it. I may not have necessarily agreed with it, but I could get where they were coming from.”