Karrion Kross reflects on his original main roster run and the mask he was made to wear.
Karrion Kross first main roster run left a lot to be desired. Debuting on Monday Night Raw while still holding the NXT Championship, Kross lost in quick fashion to Jeff Hardy before being released shortly thereafter with only a few matches on Monday Night Raw under his belt.
Later in the run, Kross had a lot of the elements of his NXT presentation stripped away, including Scarlett Bordeaux and his original theme song. Instead, Karrion Kross came to the ring wearing a unique mask, leather straps, and something more akin to Demolition from decades ago.
-------- --------. @WWEKarrionKross goes one-on-one with @KingRicochet NEXT on #WWERaw! pic.twitter.com/o2Qx3sZeBn
— WWE (@WWE) August 24, 2021
He is here to make @KingRicochet fall and pray.#WWERaw @WWEKarrionKross pic.twitter.com/4ARAEQ2J8O
— WWE (@WWE) August 24, 2021
Now, Karrion Kross is back and his presentation is more in sync with his initial NXT run.
Speaking with The Ringer Wrestling Show after his win at WWE Extreme Rules 2022, Karrion Kross reflected on the reaction to that mask, saying he could actively hear audience members laughing at him as he walked to the ring.
"Well, I don't know if I've ever said this publicly, but the first time I came out with the mask, there were people laughing in the audience. They were laughing. I always remembered getting into this business and thinking to myself, 'When this is all said and done, I want to leave this place a better place than it was before I came in.' You want to make it better. You want to make people around you better. You want to make the product better, you want your performances to get better. For me, I'm always chasing the perfect match. That's my wrestling philosophy. I'm chasing the perfect story and I just always wanted to contribute my best foot forward, artistically, and be work-driven.
"When I came out with that, and I heard people laughing, I was like, You know 'What I'm doing right now,' to me at the time, it felt like I was betraying everything that I wanted to contribute to what I was doing and [betraying the] fans, because the fan in me is still alive. That's how I know how to read an audience. If you become too high up on your horse, and you disconnect from them, 'I'll tell them what they're gonna like.' That's not that's never gonna work. So the difference between then and now is tonight, I walked out and they were singing our theme music. The entire audience was singing our theme music. That was a moment we wanted to get to before the pandemic and I got that tonight in a packed house in Philadelphia. So that was incredible. So I would say that that is the major difference between last time and tonight," said Kross.
Asked if he would ever sell the mask on eBay, Kross says he just left it in the props truck. He also says he never hated the mask.
"I just left it in the props truck. I didn't hate it, honestly. I just thought that for continuity purposes, it didn't make any sense, and that's why people couldn't get into it," he said. "We carved out a very specific supervillain in the first rendition of Karrion Kross in NXT. This is a guy who's completely morbidly obsessed with time and everything revolving around stopwatches and hourglasses and this metaphoric, impending doom, he's going to take time off your life, and now he's coming out with no context, without his partner in crime, and a new outfit, and an amputated presentation. So it just pulled people out.
"If you're watching Game of Thrones, and suddenly, one of the characters was played by somebody else with no explanation, or he's just dressed differently or has a new accent or something, it takes you out of the narrative of the story. I feel like that's what happened. I didn't think that the character presentation was a bad idea, but just the way it was introduced. It just didn't make any sense. So people were going, 'This is not what we wanted.'"
At WWE Extreme Rules, Karrion Kross defeated Drew McIntyre in a Strap Match. Fans can check out the full results for the event here and our review podcast here.
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