Karrion Kross was released from WWE nearly a year ago and has since returned to the company sporting his previous NXT gimmick that many find to be successful.
That was not the case during his first main roster run when Vince McMahon was controlling creative. Speaking with The Ringer Wrestling Show immediately after his victory at Extreme Rules, Kross reflected on people making fun of him and his mask during his first main roster run.
Kross said, “I don’t know if I’ve ever said this publicly, but the first time I came out with the mask, there were people laughing in the audience. They were laughing.” This made Kross feel like he was betraying the wrestling business as he would go on to say, “When I came out with that, and I heard people laughing, I was like, You know ‘What I’m doing right now,’ to me at the time, it felt like I was betraying everything that I wanted to contribute to what I was doing and [betraying the] fans, because the fan in me is still alive. That’s how I know how to read an audience. If you become too high up on your horse, and you disconnect from them, ‘I’ll tell them what they’re gonna like.’ That’s never gonna work.”
There was a much different atmosphere in Philadelphia for Kross over the weekend and it did not go unnoticed by Kross. He said “I walked out and they were singing our theme music. The entire audience was singing our theme music. That was a moment we wanted to get to before the pandemic and I got that tonight in a packed house in Philadelphia. So that was incredible. So I would say that that is the major difference between last time and tonight.”
Karrion Kross got into the wrestling business to chase the perfect match. He said, “I always remembered getting into this business and thinking to myself, ‘When this is all said and done, I want to leave this place a better place than it was before I came in.’ You want to make it better. You want to make people around you better. You want to make the product better, you want your performances to get better. For me, I’m always chasing the perfect match. That’s my wrestling philosophy. I’m chasing the perfect story and I just always wanted to contribute my best foot forward, artistically, and be work-driven.”
Kross admitted that he did not hate the mask he was given during his first run, he just did not think it made any sense given what he was doing in NXT. He was jokingly asked if he would sell the mask but Kross revealed that he does not have it and he left it in the prop truck. Kross said, “If you’re watching Game of Thrones, and suddenly, one of the characters was played by somebody else with no explanation, or he’s just dressed differently or has a new accent or something, it takes you out of the narrative of the story. I feel like that’s what happened. I didn’t think that the character presentation was a bad idea, but just the way it was introduced. It just didn’t make any sense. So people were going, ‘This is not what we wanted.”
Thanks to Fightful for transcribing the interview which you can listen to below.
