NXT Champion Tommaso Ciampa and Johnny Gargano once had a lengthy feud on what had been the black-and gold brand. They initially thrived as a duo, and they held the NXT Tag Team Championship together before Ciampa turned on Gargano to kick off a remarkably heated rivalry. Injuries and other creative issues derailed the storyline before NXT eventually revisited it in 2020; the two foes clashed in the memorable “One Final Beat” match on April 8, 2020, Since then, they’ve largely gone their separate ways.
In a recent interview with RN Pro Wrestling, Ciampa looked back on this stretch of his career. Specifically, “The Blackheart” noted that he wished his hug with Gargano, following the latter’s crowning moment at NXT TakeOver: New York, was the end of the story. He explained that its actual finish felt “weird,” and in hindsight, this emotional embrace would have been a more satisfying conclusion.
“It was so on-the-fly, like I didn’t think I was gonna make it to that New York show,” said Ciampa. “That was days after my surgery. So just being there, honestly, I was exhausted. I just was, by the time they went out. And then I remember watching it in gorilla with Candice [LeRae], and that crowd was not in favor of Johnny to start. And I just remember having this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach like, damn it, this is supposed to be the moment, right. And then to just watch two artists, like those are two of the best pro wrestlers alive. By the end of fall two, like going into that third fall, it was out of this world. It was insane, like hard to duplicate that.
“So it was just cool to experience that with Candice, and then there was a very on-the-fly [decision], and I would guess it was Hunter, I think, who said, ‘If you want to go, go.’ It wasn’t like a plan, it’s not like I rehearsed and I know Johnny didn’t, if you watch it, you can tell Johnny didn’t know. So yeah it was a cool moment. I’ll be honest, I wish it was the end of it. I wish it had ended there. I felt like that was like a weird closure, not a storyline. It just felt that way.”
Ciampa then noted that he enjoyed the DIY reunion against Mustache Mountain at WWE Words Collife 2020, and he’d “love” to do more one-offs like this. Along the same vein, he acknowledged that it’s “exciting” to see NXT originals interact now because the 2.0 revamp has prioritized new faces. Fans recently started buzzing about a brief tease of another clash between Ciampa and Gargano, and the NXT Champion simply stated that everyone will have to wait and see what happens next.
“I liked when we did DIY vs. Mustache Mountain as like to me as a one-off,” said Ciampa. “I love the idea of doing DIY stuff as one-offs here and there….I think any time you put two NXT originals out there, there’s not many of us left, I think that’s exciting. I think between him and I and Kyle [O’Reilly] and Roddy [Strong], yeah, we’ll see where it goes, though.
The full interview is available here:
