During his recent interview on the AEW Unrestricted podcast Adam Cole spoke about his rise in the wrestling industry, where the former NXT champion credits the Young Bucks and Kevin Owens for advancing his career, which included the formation of the Mount Rushmore faction in PWG. Highlights are below.
Says that he came up with “Adam Cole Bay Bay” back in 2009:
“I actually started doing, ‘Adam Cole Bay Bay’, in 2009. It didn’t really catch on until about 2014. Where the idea came from is I was about a year into my wrestling career. I was working for Maryland Championship Wrestling, MCW. I remember it was the Shane Shamrock Memorial Cup. That is one of the biggest shows they do every single year. Joey Matthews was in the finals, or Joey Mercury when he worked at WWE. I remember he was beating somebody up, he would turn to the audience, throw his fist up, and say, ‘Joey Matthews’. He would beat him up again and go, ‘Joey Matthews’, over and over again. I remember as a 19-year old kid going, ‘That is really smart. If half these people had never seen a wrestling show before, and they remember one name, they’re going to remember his.’ He screamed his name a dozen times over and over again. I had just turned heel in Combat Zone Wrestling, CZW, and I felt like I needed something. I thought I could yell my name, but I wanted to make it different. I didn’t want to straight up steal the thing that he was doing. I remember, again I’m a massive fan of Chris Jericho, he would stand on someone’s chest and say, ‘C’mon, baby’. I was like, ‘What if I say my name and then ‘bay bay’ at the end?’ Originally it started as baby. It was ‘Adam Cole baby.’ It became ‘bay bay’ and got more and more obnoxious as time went on. Funny enough, it really didn’t catch on until, again there was a phase that even in Ring of Honor when I was doing it, people would not do it with me. They would just boo because it was used as a tool to get heat in that sense. When I first started doing it, the intention was never that I was going to turn this into a catchphrase that people would yell with me. It was just some arrogant thing to say during my matches. That was the only intention. I remember I had gotten shoulder, tricep, and elbow surgery and I was gone for like four months. When I came back, fortunately, the audience missed me. When I did the Adam Cole ‘bay bay’ thing, they did it with me. It kind of grew from there. It was almost a giant mistake in a lot of ways. That is how it started.”
How his friendship with The Young Bucks and Kevin Owens came to be:
“Originally, me and The Bucks were teaming together. I think at that point, Kevin Steen, now Kevin Owens in WWE, was trying to figure out something he wanted to do in PWG. I think it was actually Kevin who approached us with the idea of, ‘Hey. We should be a group. We should be a faction.’ Kevin had been a babyface at PWG for a long time and he just wanted to do something different so he turned heel. I don’t remember exactly how he did it, but I remember he turned heel, and we all joined forces together. I think we were all just talking backstage, and I think it was The Bucks who mentioned something like, ‘Yea, we’re like the Mount Rushmore of PWG.’ Then Kevin and I were like, ‘That should be our name. We should be the Mount Rushmore of wrestling. We are Mount Rushmore.’ We had cut the promo backstage after the show. Kevin had mentioned it as well because we still weren’t sure if that’s the name we were going to go with. Kevin said, ‘We’re the Mount Rushmore of pro wrestling’, and the comments were ‘Mount Rushmore, Mount Rushmore, Mount Rushmore’, so we were like, ok, that’s our name. Here we go. We already had the shirt idea with Mount Rushmore with our faces on it. That shirt sold really well. That was how that stuck and how that started which was really, really cool. Between The Bucks and Kevin, those two helped me advance in my career more than they take credit for or more than they realize. I won the PWG World title because of Kevin. I got booked in Pro Wrestling Guerrilla because of The Bucks. So, those three have always had my back 100%. So, the Mount Rushmore thing felt so natural because we were all so close.”
(H/T and transcribed by WrestlingNews.Co)