WWE star and former two-time NXT champion Karrion Kross recently spoke with The Ringer Wrestling show to discuss the work of Undisputed Universal champion Roman Reigns, and how he believes the Tribal Chief is a modern day Bruno Sammartino. Highlights from the interview are below.
How Roman Reigns is a modern-day Bruno Sammartino, and wants to work with him next:
Roman Reigns [is who I wanna work with next]. I feel like everyone should wanna be in the ring with Roman Reigns. For me, I hope nobody minds that I’m comparing him but, to me he’s our modern-day Bruno [Sammartino]. What he’s doing right now in my opinion is historic for our company’s history, this art of storytelling. It’s an amazing thing and it’s going very, very well. People are having fun, they’re enjoying what they’re watching, it’s something different every week but it’s — I could go on and on. That’s the guy that I’d wanna be in the ring with. Aside from that, I mean, I’m a people pleaser so whoever people really wanna see me in the ring with, me personally, that’s the direction I’m gonna lean in. I like big fight feel, I like those freak show fights, those Superman versus Batman, this shouldn’t happen, we wish it would happen but there’s no way it does happen and then it happens and it happens at WWE and that’s why people come to see the show, to cultivate the energy in a building. I wake up every day for that, I train for that, I’m aiming for that, you know?
How his current main roster run is different from his previous one under the McMahon era:
Well, 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 and I always remember getting into this business and thinking to myself, when this is all said and done, I wanna leave this place a better place than it was before I came in. You wanna make it better. You wanna make people around you better, you wanna make the product better, you want your performances to get better. For me, I’m always chasing the perfect match. That’s like my wrestling philosophy, I’m chasing the perfect story and I’ve just always wanted to contribute my best foot forward artistically and be work-driven. When I came out and I heard people laughing, I was like, you know, what I’m doing right now, to me at the time presently, it felt like I was betraying everything that I wanted to contribute to what I was doing [for] 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 them what they’re gonna like,’ that’s never gonna work. So the difference between then and now, tonight 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 is the major difference between last time and tonight.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling
)