Former WWE star Maven recently took to an episode of his Ask Me Anything show on his YouTube channel, where he talked about a number of topics including turning down an offer from WWE to return to the company in 2008.
Maven said, “2005, WWE fires me, releasing me and ending a dream. 2008, they call back, they call back. Johnny Ace gives me a call, says, ‘Might have another opportunity for you to come back.’ This time, I wasn’t ready. After that, I went into other avenues of entertainment. BET, HSN, and I hope you saw the worst day of my life and watched my arrest video from 2012. So where was I at after that? What happened after that? So I took a lot of time off after the arrest. I basically just had to get myself together. I find myself in New York and working jobs that I wasn’t proud to admit I was working, coming from where I came from. By 2017, I had pulled myself out of a hole pretty well, and I was working with the Brooklyn Nets. I was with the Nets up until they signed Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving Once they signed those two, a lot of us were shown the door.”
How he was in talks with WWE in 2020 to return to the company as a commentator:
“In 2019, I reached out to D-Von, and knowing D-Von still had a great relationship with the WWE, I reached out and I said, ‘D-Von, I see a path forward. I see an opportunity, and I know I could work with the company, the company that I love, the company that brought me into this business. I see my opportunity, not as a wrestler, age wins, but I see my opportunity with maybe announcing, maybe backstage interview segments.’ D-Von agreed, and D-Von said, ‘Give me some time. Let me make a few calls.’ Week or two goes by, and D-Von calls me back and says, ‘I have a gentleman that I want you to talk with. His name is Tom Phillips.’ Tom helps find talent, along with Michael Cole running the whole thing. That kind of caught me off-guard because I remember Michael Cole’s role when I was in WWE, and to see that he had risen to where he was running that entire department, I was ecstatic. So I speak with Tom, and I think that our very first conversation was at last about an hour, and it was just an opportunity for the two of us to get to know each other. So Tom told me that there was an opportunity to perhaps get into the commentating side of the business. To do that, I would have to come down to the training facility. Now, it was going to be all expenses paid. They were going to fly me down, they were gonna take care of my hotel. I was gonna spend an entire day pretty much in Orlando, where NXT is located. To be honest with you, I was excited to go down, and I had heard just how amazing the facility was, but I had never seen it. So I knew it was going to be, if nothing else, just a good day,Tom called Michael Cole, and Michael Cole asked him, immediately said, ‘How is he?’ Tom was honest with him, he said, ‘There’s something here.’ But is he TV-ready today? No, of course not. He would need to be here for several months, working on his craft.’ They come back to me, they said, ‘Maven, if you were given the opportunity to accept a job but we told you you had to move here and it would take you six-to-twelve months, coming to this facility and just working by the monitors and learning different matches, is that something that you’re willing to do at this level and at this age?’ I said, ‘Absolutely, I’ll start packing tonight. Tell me when, I’ll move here as soon as possible.”
How the COVID-19 pandemic ruined his plans to return to the WWE:
“I leave, go back, get to the hotel, and then I see it. Flashing up on the TV screen. Every hope that I had was dashed in a second. What I see flashed up on on the TV screen was, ‘NBA to cancel their regular season.’ What I didn’t tell you was the date. The date of my interview was March 11, 2020, the day that the entire world shut down.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
