Randy Orton continues to make the media rounds to promote his Undisputed WWE Championship match against John Cena in the main event of Saturday’s WWE Backlash: St. Louis premium live event in his hometown.
During a recent interview with Billboard, “The Viper” spoke about how he’s not sure what type of reaction he will get from fans this weekend against John Cena, as well as how he kept pushing for Joe Hendry to be his opponent at WrestleMania 41.
Featured below are some of the highlights from the interview where he touches on these topics with his thoughts.
On how he’s not sure what kind of reaction he will get against John Cena this weekend at WWE Backlash: St. Louis: “It’s different, because I’m the good guy, and that’s never been the case before — so I don’t know what to expect. I wouldn’t say I’m nervous, but I’m very excited to see, because usually I know the type of reaction I’m going to get, or at least I know the type of reaction I want. Usually, it’s close to that. But with this, I don’t know. They might love John. They might s–t on me and be booing me. I know it’s my hometown and I’m from St. Louis and I grew up here — but as far as being the hometown guy, I’m not at all the Cardinals games, or wearing the Blues jersey, and doing all that s–t. I’m a homebody. I’m not out. I have my kids and wife, and we stay to ourselves when I’m in town. It’s not that I don’t rep the city, but I’m not out there repping the city. So it’s not like everyone is going to love me necessarily. I’m very curious to see how Saturday goes.”
On how he kept pushing for Joe Hendry to be his opponent at WrestleMania 41 and how cool it was to have a ‘holy sh*t’ moment with him on “The Grandest Stage of Them All”: “There was a lot up in the air just a couple of things prior to Mania. Owens had the neck thing and it was starting to bug him. So once they took a closer look at that, the doctors said he was a no-go. This one was important to me because it was my 20th, and I’m closer to the end of my career than the beginning. Getting these Manias in, and leaving as much of a legacy behind [as possible], is important. It kind of came down to, “OK. We need to get Orton an opponent. Who’s it gonna be?” And there was a very short list of guys on our own roster, but we had some new guys coming in — and it was one of those things where I needed to win, but considering we knew where I was going to be going thinking about Backlash, we needed me to look good coming out of Mania. It couldn’t be one of our new guys, because when we debut a new talent into the show [we couldn’t] have him start with a loss.So we put our heads together and it was actually my idea [for it to be] Joe Hendry. I kept pushing for it, and a couple people we’re unsure, but I was able to talk everybody into it. I’m really glad that they went with him. It was perfect. It was different from anything else on the card. It was a legitimate surprise, and we were able to keep it a surprise for the most part. We got that really cool, “Holy s–t” moment when his music hit, and it was great. He was great. It was actually a stress-free fun Mania for me, because I didn’t have this crazy 30 minutes balls-to-the-walls match with all this high-risk s–t. I had this cool little segment with Joe, and we didn’t have to do much to have fun out there. So I was really able to enjoy the week and just soak it all up.”
