Former WWE star Mojo Rawley was interviewed on Steve Fall’s Ten Count. Here are the highlights:
Mojo has founded Paragon Talent Group, which represents wrestlers:
“We’ve worked with well over 100 brands now, like different companies for our talent in less than a year. Our initial goal was to do primarily marketing deals for our talent, brand deals for social media deals, maybe appearances, things of that sort of stuff that would allow them to continue to do everything that they wanted to do, wrestle full time for whoever they wanted to wrestle with, and be able to, you know, not leave the house and still make more money than they were to leave the house kind of situation. Then that morphed into negotiating contracts. So we’ve negotiated contracts for our talent with WWE, AEW, I mean, I think we’ve negotiated contracts for everybody with all the world’s biggest companies. Now it’s just at the point where it’s anything we can get our hands on to help out our guys. It doesn’t matter if it’s within our initial realm. We seek to do everything because from our side, me and Steve (his business partner), we just started this thing ourselves and we’re just kind of rolling with the punches as it goes, so you know, wherever this crazy path takes us, we’re ready to rock with it and it’s been fun and exciting just to see where it’s all gonna shake out. We’ve had a lot of talent that have done deals with some pretty big brands and we feel like it’s only the beginning. So it’s been a great relationship.”
On whether he and Rob Gronkowski would be a tag team at SummerSlam 2020:
“Rob was hanging it up from football. The plan was to do a tag match with me and him at SummerSlam because it was in Boston that year. I think we were going to work with Miz and John Morrison. They were throwing around some names. There was, you know, potentially The Revival we were talking about. Obviously, it’s their call so they were going to do what they think. Any one of those guys would have made that match an incredible match and Rob was ready to come in and work.”
“But yeah, he came in, he signed the contract. From Boston, I think I was going to turn on him and then we were going to have the one on one, no DQ match in Saudi Arabia where my dad’s whole side of the family lives, was kind of like the storyline. After I turn on him, you beat the crap out of me in my hometown in front of my family. I’m gonna do the same to you in Saudi at one of these big matches, and I thought that was gonna be dope.”
“He would have had enough time to come in and train like, you know, Bad Bunny and Logan Paul, guys that train every single day in the ring for three, four or five weeks, you know, and they’re training for one match. They’re not training for a different match every night. So when you’re training for one match, you can get anybody there to go in and kill it with enough training if they have a good athletic pedigree, which of course Gronk has.”
“That was the plan, but then I was sitting with him in his trailer before a SmackDown when Brady and Drew Rosenhaus called him and told him that (Tom) Brady was, you know, gonna go to the Bucs. Rob had, I believe 10 million or more on the table to go back for one season left on his contract and it was just like, it was a no brainer to come back. He was feeling good. He’s feeling fresh. Go back for one last run. Of course, they won a Super Bowl, so he made the right decision. I can’t knock him for that.”
When Gronkowski decided to return to the NFL, the following was the plan for Rawley:
“I believe they were talking about maybe me, Cesaro, and Shinsuke (Nakamura) doing a new League of Nations kind of thing with me playing on the Arab background and I believe that ran right into when I got COVID really bad and had to stop wrestling.”
You can watch the complete interview below:
(h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription)
