Chris Masters Wants WWE Return At Royal Rumble

As we come to the end of 2022, that means that WrestleMania season is just around the corner, kicked off by the Royal Rumble.

The 30 man and 30 woman matches are one of the highlights of the wrestling calendar, and usually see names from past and present compete, and in 2023 Chris Adonis - aka ‘The Masterpiece’ Chris Masters - wants a shot in the match, telling NBC Sports Boston:

“In terms of a comeback, all I can say is the desire is always there a little bit because this is what I love to do, and I still do it. Even when as far as last year, as long as I’ve been outside of WWE, I’ve never pushed to come back and it’s just because I didn’t look at it like an option after the second time,” said Adonis. “After the first time, sure. But after the second time, it’s like I gotta move on. I still wanna wrestle, but it’s just not gonna be on television with WWE and that’s okay. I can do other things in the business as time goes on. But this last year at the Royal Rumble was the first time and shoot, it’s been well over 10 years. I’ve seen MVP come back, I’ve seen Shelton [Benjamin] come back, I’ve seen Carlito come back. I kind of felt like, shoot, you know, it’s been 10 years. It feels like a good time. It’s been so long, it’s like who else can they bring back that would be a bigger surprise at this point out of at least those guys that have been gone, and I just kind of felt like it was me.”

It’s not just a Rumble spot that Adonis is after though, having petitioned WWE for a Rumble face off with Bobby Lashley:

“When you also think of the whole Bobby Lashley aspect, the idea of the Hurt Lock/Masterlock thing. So when Royal Rumble came around, I kind of started petitioning for it a little bit, and there was some talks with some of the people I knew within WWE, so it wasn’t like it was just going on deaf ears. But Bobby Lashley ended up not being in the Rumble. Everything changed, everything got flipped upside down. So that kind of took a lot of steam out of it.

“When I did petition for this, it wasn’t for the sake of, ‘Oh, I need to make a comeback to WWE’ or ‘I wanna make a comeback that should lead to something.’ I know as wrestling fans, we’re always looking for that ‘Oh s***’ moment. We’re always looking for that moment where if you’ve got your wrestling friends, you’re gonna be hitting them on the shoulder and be like, ‘Woah!’ I kind of felt like if Bobby Lashley was in the Rumble and he’s working that [Hurt Lock], and you get that countdown and you hit the OG Masterpiece theme, you’re gonna have a moment. Maybe not for the younger fans, although a lot of them do still remember it. But you get a lot of guys who are within our age or even within 10 years, you have a lot of those guys like, ‘Oh my god’, and it’d be that moment, a Hurt Lock [versus] Masterlock, like it’s finally gonna go down. What’s gonna happen? So it would be one of those moments, and that’s what we’re always looking for, you’re looking for those moments because those are what we live for," Adonis said.

Adonis continued; "This was about the moment. It was about giving a moment to the fans and to myself too, but again it’s not me trying to petition for a Chris Masters comeback in WWE full-time. It’s like hey, this would be cool. Let’s give them this moment because everyone’s always on Twitter and Instagram talking about the Masterlock and [the] Hurt Lock. Bobby and me obviously know each other real well, and I just felt like it would be a cool moment. I still hope, cross my fingers that we can make that moment happen just because obviously it would be cool for me, but I think it would be cool for the fans, everybody in general. I think we could do something really cool, even if it was very brief.”

H/T: Fightful