IMPACT star and former world champion Eric Young was a recent guest on the Wrestling Perspective podcast to discuss a number of different topics, most notably how a spiral of odd circumstances led to his former WWE faction Sanity having a lackluster debut on the main roster. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
Says he was excited to move to the main roster and work with the New Day:
“Yeah, I mean, obviously excited to go up to the main roster and it’s all I’ve wanted to do since I was three years old, was work for WWE. NXT, for me, was the WWE. The checks that came in the mail are from WWE and the contract I signed was with WWE. It was the NXT brand where I worked, but I worked for WWE for the five, six or whatever [number of] years that I was there. We were all excited to go up for sure, and I think they had a real plan and victim of circumstance, we were supposed to debut on SmackDown. We were supposed to go into a feud with The New Day and we’re popped. This is three of the most over guys, babyface act, on the show. Three amazing human beings, I still talk to them, love them dearly. Three of my very good friends in wrestling, I was talking to Big E a couple of days ago, actually.”
How plans for their debut kept changing:
“The next week we jumped The Usos and plans changed and we beat them up, we were supposed to beat them in a tag match the following week and the circumstances that led to that all kind of spiraling out of control was we were at a house show in Ontario, California and Shinsuke Nakamura gets attacked by a bomb-sniffing dog in the back. He was supposed to work [with] Jeff Hardy, who was the US Champion. [Nakamura] can’t work because he had to be taken to the hospital and he has these bites all over his leg, and in the meeting it comes up that they need a heel to work with Jeff.”
Says he knew Sanity was dead because they were going to take a loss in their first main roster match:
“Brian James, a very good friend of mine and I know he’s in the hospital and I hope everything’s OK [James has since been released from the hospital since the interview was recorded], he stood up and said ‘Eric Young is ridiculously talented, he could work with Jeff’ and they’re like, ‘OK, let’s do that.’ Then it was like, ‘Well, he can’t beat Jeff because he’s new and Jeff’s the US Champ, so how do we get out of that?’ ‘OK, so let’s have The Usos run out and we’ll make it a six-man tag.’ [Then it was] ‘Well… we can’t have The Usos lose because they’re the tag champs, and Jeff is the US Champ, so our first match on SmackDown, we got beat. I remember looking at the other guys in the group and said, ‘Guys, start thinking about other things to do because Sanity’s dead.’ They broke our legs before we could walk. The first time wrestling, we got beat cleanly in a six-man match, we’re done. I don’t think it was ever by design…it was just this weird spiral of odd circumstances that led us to that. That’s how it went, that’s how it works sometimes in wrestling. It’s a wild business.”
(H/T and transcribed by WrestleZone)