NXT Champion Adam Cole Reveals WWE Once Accidentally Invited Him To A Tryout
Certainly he can laugh about it now...
NXT champion Adam Cole spoke with The Wrap ahead of the broadcast of his title bout with Velveteen Dream at Sunday's NXT TakeOver: In Your House. In the interview, Cole revealed that he was once mistaken for another wrestler - by someone in WWE's office.
In 2010, when Cole was still fresh in the business, WWE reached out to him to offer a week long tryout, and Cole was understandably over the moon. But it wasn't what it seemed.
"I got an email saying, ‘Hey, we’ve seen some footage of you. We’re really, really impressed. We wanna bring you down to FCW for a week to try out,’ Cole remembers. "And I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ I’m telling my brother, I’m telling my friends. And [WWE] ended up calling me and talking to me on the phone for 30 minutes — *30 minutes*, explaining, going, ‘This is who you’re going to be rooming with. This is when you’re gonna fly down. This is what you’re gonna do.’ And at the end of the conversation he goes, ‘And listen, I just want you to know, if you just show up, you work hard, it’s pretty much a done deal. Like, you just gotta not screw up. We’re that level of interested.’ I’m like, 'I’m getting hired, I can’t believe it.'
“Then I get the email with the flight itinerary. Long story short, it’s the wrong name and I’m very confused and like, wait, what? I Google the name and up pops Xavier Woods. And I sent a picture of myself, I said, ‘Hey, this is me.’ And they went, ‘Oh my God, we’re so sorry. We’re gonna book you as an extra for ‘RAW’ and ‘SmackDown.'”
As it turns out, the confusion was due to a similarity in name.
“We both share the name Austin. So my guess is they just screwed up the last names by mistake,” Cole, real name Austin Jenkins, said. “Funny enough though, the best part is myself and Xavier Woods (real name Austin Xavier Watson) become buddies at that point because a few years later, I actually did go down to FCW for a week to try out and he was there and he had known the story and I told him the story, and we laughed and kind of became buddies because of it. And now he’s one of my very good friends.”
Written by Justin Henry
In addition to writing lists and commentaries for Cultaholic, Justin is also a features writer and interviewer for Fighting Spirit Magazine, and is co-author of the WWE-related book Titan Screwed: Lost Smiles, Stunners, and Screwjobs.
