Karrion Kross says Jon Moxley believed he would do well in WWE.
Karrion Kross’ brief time in WWE from 2020-2021 can best be described as a roller coaster. He did very well for himself on NXT. Capturing the top championship on the brand two times around and then, things started to fall apart as he went to the main roster and spent only a few months on the Monday Night Raw brand before being released in November 2021.
Before he joined WWE, Karrion Kross was one of the top competitors on the independent circuit and he says, it was a run-in with former WWE champion Jon Moxley that first made him believe that he could be successful in WWE.
Talking about the angle he participated in with Jon Moxley and the subsequent conversation with Moxley that got him the contact Triple H, Karrion Kross tells Renee Paquette on the most recent Oral Sessions podcast that he really enjoyed the chemistry he shared with Jon Moxley.
“Jon [Moxley] leaves WWE. I think to myself, 'I'm starving on the Indies. I just want to work with people that are better than me. I want to be in the ring with people that have done this at the highest level and now he's independent.' I'm looking on the Internet and I was like, 'No one is attempting to create some sort of feud or reach out to him to see if he's willing to work. No one is trying to sell tickets with him. Are you guys insane?' I put this promo together, a short vignette, trying to test the waters to see if people would be interested in seeing us work, not knowing him, but having mutual friends. I didn't want to call and ask for his number, I'm not that guy. I was like, 'I'm just going to put something out there and see if people want to see this.' Sure enough, there was an interest. Jon randomly texted me and was like, 'What's going on?' We start talking and I was running a show in Las Vegas, Natural Born Killers, it was a mix between UWFi Japan...a little like Bloodsport, I was trying to create an environment in Vegas to prepare people for Josh Barnett's Bloodsport. I was like, 'This is what I'm doing.' He goes, 'Don't tell anybody. I'm showing up.' I did not tell anybody. Not even the promoter knew until the day of that he was showing up. He comes down, we work, we barely talk about anything, natural rhythmic chemistry was awesome.”
After their time together in the ring Jon Moxley told the future NXT Champion that he believed that one day he could wind up in the ring opposite Roman Reigns and that he should give Triple H a call, for Karrion Kross, that's exactly the reassurance he needed.
I'm talking to him after the match and he goes, 'Where do you want to go, what do you want to do?' I'm rattling off ideas and he's like, 'Do whatever you want, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but one day, Roman [Reigns] is going to need someone to work with after working with Drew [McIntyre]. I think you would do very well there, but go wherever you want and do what you want to do.' In my mind, I'm thinking, 'Holy shit, this is a person who has been at the highest level, recently too, very humbled by that. If he's saying this to me, whatever level of assurance do I need? I need to stop fucking around.' He was like, 'Just call Hunter.' He said it like it was nothing. 'Call him and tell him you want to show.' 'Really?' 'Yeah. I'm gonna give him your number. You're gonna call him right now.' That was a lot for me. I just wrestled in front of 130 people in a warehouse and he's like, 'Call Hunter.' When the time was right, I called Hunter and it was funny. I sent him a text so he wasn't getting a random number and I told him, 'Sir, I'd love to be part of the company, if you think I have any sort of value to contribute, I have a lot of ‘interesting ideas’ and I talked to him about monetizing certain types of characters and symbols. I tried to appeal to the businessman. That company can hire wrestlers. Finding wrestlers isn't a big problem. it's finding that total package. That's how Hunter and I started talking.”
Kross, who is currently taking a foray into Hollywood, also commented on his time in Monday Night Raw, calling it “bizarre.” Learn more here.
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