When Johnny Gargano departed WWE NXT last year, he made up his mind that he was leaving almost a year prior.
WWE RAW Superstar Johnny Gargano was the latest guest on WWE After The Bell with Corey Graves to discuss a wide variety of subjects. When asked about his decision to depart WWE last December, Gargano said his decision to let his NXT contract expire came almost a year before it was up.
“Yeah, so I feel like I kind of made a decision that I was gonna let my contract expire maybe a year before that, honestly,” Johnny Gargano revealed. “So it had nothing to do with anything going on currently at the time. It just felt like to me; I was fulfilled with everything I did in NXT. And I’m very much so a person that wants to enjoy the place he’s working, and I love NXT. That’s why I was there for so long. Like, make no mistake about it. You can ask anyone you want. Like it was my choice to be in NXT for that long, just because I genuinely loved everyone I was working with. I love the writers. I love the locker room. I love the office. I had great relationships with everybody.
“But there was also another side of it to where what more can I accomplish there? I’ve always had this chip on my shoulder underdog mentality, where I’m always trying to search and find out what can I do next. I’m always trying to do the things that people tell me I can’t do. And that was my whole NXT run and I did everything there was to do in NXT. So I’m always someone who’s looking for that next mountain to climb. And for me, after I did everything I did in NXT, it was kind of one of those things where like, okay, do I go to RAW or SmackDown? I don’t know if I want to do that in that current climate of my life.
“I was like, I don’t know if I want to go there yet. So I was okay letting my contract expire and kind of seeing what else is out there for lack of a better term, but also when the time came. I think everything happens for a reason, obviously. Candace got pregnant. And when Candace got pregnant, that kind of solidified my decision to where I was 50/50 going into my contract being expired when Candace got pregnant, and we found out the timetable everything how the baby was going to be born in February. My contract was going to expire in December. I kind of decided like, Okay, I have a rare opportunity now to let my contract expire and also be able to just sit at home and enjoy the first couple of months of fatherhood that I wouldn’t have gotten a chance to any other way. So, I said I think everything happens for a reason. And there was no one thing that made my decision, but it was just an amount of different things. And also, the baby, which is a big thing that made me decide.”
READ MORE: Johnny Gargano Explains How ‘Stranger Things’ Convinced Him To Return To WWE
What do you make of Johnny Gargano’s comments? Are you surprised by how far out he decided to let his NXT contract expire last year? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
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