Samoa Joe continuing his role as a talent scout.
Just over a month into his time as a part of All Elite Wrestling/Ring of Honor, Samoa Joe became the ROH World Television Champion and is currently involved in an on-screen program on AEW TV with Jay Lethal, Satnam Singh and Sonjay Dutt.
During the back end of his run in WWE, Joe worked as a talent scout and as the launch of NXT 2.0 got underway, that became Joe’s primary position. He told Tony Schiavone and Aubrey Edwards on the AEW Unrestricted podcast that he’d be open to helping AEW in the same department. He’s grown to appreciate helping the next person out because of people like William Regal who did the same for him.
Yeah [I’ve been doing some talent scouting]. Before WWE was heavily involved in their scouting department and now, kind of keep those eyes open and keep those eyes out there for a different purpose. Obviously, you wanna have some of the best up and comers coming into your company and if I can help facilitate that for AEW then I’d be more than happy to.
I’ve learned to appreciate it and like it because of men like William Regal, who in the height of their career, took time to give me advice, just show me a path. It wasn’t, ‘Hey, I’ll put in a word for you. I’ll do this.’ It was like, no, here’s the path and if you choose to follow it, you can find success. It’s just kind of something that’s missing in the industry as a whole. There’s just not a lot of guys who have that experience kind of going back and having honest discussions with dudes about what the industry is like, what this business really is and breaking down the numbers and not just kind of being grandiose and bragging about how you’re awesome and this is how much you did and this and this and this. It’s like, every empire’s built with a plan and the problem is we don’t talk about the plan enough. We just talk about the empire, so I’d like to change that. Any time I can offer a word of advice to somebody young and up and coming, you know, wanna put themselves in the best possible position to succeed which I think is vitally important to anybody in our industry is putting yourself in position to be successful. Not just, you know, waiting for something to break or happen is a big asset bank of our knowledge which isn’t shared enough and I’d like to see that happen more.
Joe arrived to the company through ROH at Supercard of Honor. He and Tony Schiavone recapped the travel woes that Joe dealt with on his way to Garland, Texas for the event.
Schiavone: I know from working backstage at that Ring of Honor show, your debut, that you getting to Dallas was a challenge because of weather issues and you did make it obviously, but that was a very challenging day because of the weather issues but, hey, you’ve been in the business long enough to know that sometimes, travel can be difficult.
Joe: Oh absolutely. I know there is weather preventing jets from getting to Tampa on time and a lot of mechanical issues, flights went out and so, I had to end up driving to Cross City, Florida. Small little kind of rural town in the middle of Florida to catch a private jet to get up to the show and it was quite an escapade. The best part was as I arrived to the airport and walked into this little office, this little old man sitting behind the counter looked at me and I said, ‘Hey man, I’m here, I got a jet coming to pick me up’ and he just goes, ‘Well, what time?’ I said, ‘Well, I think 7 o’clock’ and he goes, ‘Well, we close at 6 man. I’ll see what I can do.’
Schiavone: I remember Tony [Khan] came to me and he said, ‘Where is Cross City, Florida? You ever heard of it?’ And I had to go on my phone and look it up on Wikipedia. I said, ‘Yeah, here it is.’ It’s like southeast of Tallahassee, little bit north of Tampa and I said, ‘There’s really an airport there?’ He said, ‘Yeah, there is.’
Joe: I didn’t know there was a city there to be honest with you so, I mean yeah, it was quite a surprise to everybody.
I spoke to several people here and many, many people who are how I would describe as ‘fine country folk’ and even they were like, ‘I’ve never heard of Cross City.’
You can thank Tony’s pilots. They went above and beyond in trying to get down there and find me.
Coming out of the 5/4 AEW Dynamite, the field for the men’s side of the Owen Hart Foundation tournament was set and in the first round, Joe is scheduled to take on a ‘Joker’ mystery opponent.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit AEW Unrestricted with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
