The Miz recently appeared on the Off The Beat program, where the former two-time WWE champion discussed his early days with the company, how they originally wanted to bring him in as an announcer following Tough Enough, and how he eventually decided to sign a developmental deal with WWE to prove everyone that he could be a superstar. Highlights from the interview can be found below.
How WWE originally saw him as an announcer coming out of Tough Enough:
I’ll never forget, they were like, ‘You impressed us so much that maybe there is something for you here.’ They brought me up to Connecticut to commentate. Joey Styles brought me up with Todd Grisham and Michael Cole, they brought me up and I had to do a take of commentating. They told me, ‘we might bring you in as a commentator or interviewer.’ It was the first time I said, ‘but I want to be a WWE Superstar.’ They didn’t look at me like a WWE Superstar, they looked at me as a personality. I saw something different, ‘I love what you guys do and you do a great job, but I want to be bigger than The Rock and bigger than (Hulk) Hogan. I want to be a Superstar.’ ‘Alright, okay.
On deciding to sign a developmental contract with WWE:
They gave me a developmental deal to go down and they didn’t think I was going to be much of anything, to be honest, you could kind of tell, ‘let’s see what we got here.’ They gave me this developmental contract and I was like, ‘I’m making more than this doing Real World and The Challenge. I’m not taking a paycut to do this.’ I had to think about that. Are we looking at this as a career move? Sometimes, you have to take less because you see the big picture. That’s what I did. I took less money to go there, train, and prove everyone wrong.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)
