Killer Kross: AEW Was A Possibility Before I Signed With WWE

After leaving IMPACT in 2019, Killer Kross was one of the hottest free agents on the market, before WWE signed him and sent him to NXT.

Repackaged as 'Karrion Kross', Kross had a great run in NXT, before bad creative and booking on WWE’s main roster all but deleted the good will from his NXT run, with WWE soon releasing him from his contract.

Before signing with WWE though, Kross also contemplated AEW, asking his fans on Twitter whether he should sign with them or WWE. When asked by Chris Van Vliet if a move to AEW was possible, Kross said the following:

"Yes. Around that time, I was trying to swerve people as to where I was going to go. At the time when I put the post out on Twitter, I already knew and I was trying my absolute best to protect that as much as I could. I said, 'Hey, where would you like to see me next?' It was an overwhelming amount of people who wanted to see me go to AEW. I had that Peter Griffin moment like ‘Ahhh.'"

Kross continued:

"I know there are a lot of different ways to look at that, but one way I looked at it was, it kind of p***** me off. It is my own doing, I understand it's not meant to be this way. I thought to myself at the time when I saw an overwhelming amount of people wanted me to go to AEW over WWE or New Japan, 'Why are people so convinced that I would find much more success in AEW vs. WWE? Do they think that I can't become successful in WWE? I'm going to show them that I can and I will.' It was a done deal, pretty much, at that time. I understand, as time went on, they weren't saying it in a resentful way, they were saying it because they thought I could probably find the best version of myself there.”

When asked how he would have fared in AEW, Kross was blunt:

"I'd probably still be wrestling [laughs]. I'm sure I would have been happy and creatively fulfilled. All of my friends work for AEW. I had only a couple of friends work in WWE. I would have been in good company, not that I wasn't in NXT, the locker room is awesome there. I think I would have loved it.”

For Kross though, signing with WWE was a no-brainer:

"I knew, since I was a little kid watching it on TV, that I could be there and I could do this and perform at the highest level. I knew that since I was a little kid. Little kids think they know everything, so it's hard for your parents, family, and friends to get behind statements and ideas you have as a child because they want to steer you in the right direction, they don't want to burst your bubble. As time went on, nobody in my family was doing anything like this. They live in a practical and realistic world and would go for what they knew they could essentially get, they would work hard for. This seemed like, 'these people are TV, what are you going to do, fly inside the television and be with them?' It seemed like such a foreign idea to get involved with that, but to me it wasn't. I felt something as a kid that told me that I could do it. It was the first thing I ever watched, WWF. Part of me always wanted to be there. I went to a wrestling school, initially, in order to learn how to do this at the highest level to go there. Over the years, I would meet people that would discourage me to doing that or I would feel differently about or see something and I was wondering, 'can I hang with these people? Can I do this?' You find places you're working that you really love independently. Finally, I really got committed in making the decision to take it seriously and pursue it. When I did that, it happened."

H/T: Fightful