Former WWE Superstar Mojo Rawley wasn’t known for a whole lot during his career with the company but was a 7-time 24/7 Champion.
Rawley talked about the fact that he had to take it down a notch with his character which he thinks ultimately led to its downfall. He said “I think I wasn’t allowed to say the word ‘hype’ at any point. They wanted me to get completely away from that. If that’s what they want, of course, we’ll do it, but for me, I was like, ‘my hype is the one thing people know me for.’ Still, to do this day, I stopped doing the ‘hype’ thing four or five years ago and that’s still the only thing people remember from me. I was like, ‘we shouldn’t get away from that. If you want me to be tough and serious, we can still do that under the hype umbrella and pivot,’ but they wanted me to segue out of it.”
When Rawley started his reigns as the 24/7 champion, he wanted to take a more serious approach with the title where he would stand up to any challenger instead of run away. He said, “R-Truth killed it and it was so funny and entertaining, but you can’t have Truth doing the same thing every week with the same antics and the same script and the same 30 guys chasing him for no reason. I was like, ‘let’s take the fun away and let’s make it more like the hardcore title and we’ll get serious with it. I’ll be the first one to not run away and I’ll try and defend it. We can get nasty with it.’ The hardcore title is what the fans thought we were bringing back in the first place. I told that to Vince and he loved it. He said, ‘We’ll start it next week.’ I tried to not pitch Vince too much so I wasn’t one of those guys always in there complaining and pitching stuff that might not work.”
However, things did not go according to Mojo’s plan mostly because they brought Riddick Moss in to watch his back. Rawley said “I won the title and a week later, after this whole campaign to not need help or run away, they bring in Riddick Moss to watch my back. I was like, ‘what the hell? This is the opposite of everything we set up and what fans were excited about.’ I wasn’t mad because I love him. He works so hard and was finally getting a shot at the main roster. He’s a guy that isn’t built for NXT. Those athletes that didn’t work the Indies, they have a harder time in NXT. They put us together and we were going to make it work.”
Mojo finally would talk about the actual plans for WrestleMania 36 which featured his friend Rob Gronkowski, an NFL star who decided to come out of retirement and win another super bowl with Tampa Bay last year. Mojo said, “We were going to do some matches before the world shutdown and he went back to football. We started with Moss and had to cut that programing. I think the plan was for me, Moss, and Truth to do a triple threat at Mania or some 24/7 Behind the Scenes match. Something that was different. We had to scrap all that on the fly. Part of me was like, ‘I should’ve pitched this Gronk stuff until after Mania,’ but we knew we wanted to bring him in before Mania. Part of it is on me pitching stuff, but you know how the machine is; every week, you show up and you don’t know what you are. At one point, I was flip-flopping between face and heel every week. I do what I’m told.”
Thanks to Fightful for transcribing the podcast done with Straight Shootin’s Matt Rewholdt.
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