Ali shares a Randy Orton story.
When Mustafa Ali was starting on WWE's main roster, he mixed it up in the ring with the likes of Bryan Danielson, Randy Orton, Samoa Joe, and others.
He had two singles matches with Randy Orton, and one of those bouts was at the 2019 Hell in a Cell Premium Live Event. The backend of the bout saw Ali go into a handstand to counter Orton's RKO finisher.
While speaking to Justin Dhillon of The Wrestling Classic, Ali revealed that Orton was not initially keen on the reversal idea because if Ali messed it up, the crowd would turn on him. Ali said he got in his own head, but quickly reassured himself and Orton that things would go smoothly.
After the match, while they were backstage, Orton jokingly mentioned that things went great and they should have just had Ali win the match.
“So, Randy Orton’s the GOAT obviously. He’s the man. I pitched doing this reversal to him and at first, he wasn’t too keen on it, and I thought he was just trying to protect the RKO but then he pulled me aside and explained. He goes, ‘Hey, listen, I know you wanna do this handstand block thing.’ But he’s like, ‘If you f*ck that up, if you botch that,’ he’s like, ‘This crowd’s gonna boo you.’ He’s like, ‘They’re just gonna think that you took a really bad RKO,’ and he’s like, ‘You’re in this position where you don’t want --’ so I kind of got in my head for a second but, for some reason, something told me, I go, ‘Randy, I promise you, I won’t mess this up.’ So he was like, ‘Alright, we can try it’ so, we did it, hit it perfectly. Rolled him up, crowd came alive in there. Two seconds later, I get the RKO, and then Randy wins the match obviously but in the back, he kind of jokingly came up and put his arm around, he’s like, ‘Sh*t, we should have just put the kid over. That was great.’ He walks away, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that would have been great.’ But yeah, Randy’s a consummate professional, he’s a great guy, he’s been a bit of a mentor to me. So, I’ll always have that moment with him and yeah, he’s the man.”
Ali and Orton first met in February 2019. That was the bout Ali suffered an injury in and it led to him being pulled from the men's Elimination Chamber and Kofi Kingston taking his place.
If the quote in this article is used, please credit The Wrestling Classic with an H/T to Fightful for the transcription.
