Rob Gronkowski came to WWE in March 2020 and ended up serving as the host of WrestleMania 36 along with having a run with the 24/7 Title.
Gronkowski's run with WWE didn't last long due to the pandemic and his desire to return to football, but had the pandemic not changed plans for everyone, Mojo Rawley says Gronkowski was planning to work multiple matches in WWE.
"I think he did sign a contract. He never wanted to do it full-time," Mojo told Matt Rehwoldt on Straight Shooting. "To take a guy like that and expect him to make five towns a week and travel and drive and get your own rent a car, everything we go through, that's just not going to happen. He retired from football and had like over $10 million on the table his last season. He left that just to give his body a break. To bring him in to make 2% of that, which is still a good salary, more than what most of us make, it's just not going to happen."
Mojo continued by saying, "What we wanted to do was set up multiple pay-per-view matches. SummerSlam was going to be in Boston. We would have some fun at Mania, we had a few plans for that, and it was going to lead to a tag match at SummerSlam and then probably set something up for me and him after. I think the plan was to do one in Saudi Arabia. I told him, 'Dude, you're going to get the bug. You'll do one and you'll want to do another. Let's do a tag match, get your feet wet, we'll bring you in for the fireworks and I'll do the leg work. After you get your feet wet, we'll get you in for a big one-on-one.' That was the original plan. From there, who knows what it goes into. I knew he wasn't going to be full-time, but I also knew he wasn't going to come in and be like 'I'll give you one Raw before a pay-per-view and that's it.' He wanted to do more than that and he said, 'If I'm going to do this, I want to do it right. I'll fly to Orlando for a month and train every day.' That got my respect. I know his rates and how much he gets paid for an hourly rate. I've seen him turn down deals in one hour that 90% of our roster makes in a year. For him to do it, it wasn't for the money, it was because he wanted to."
Gronkowski never worked an official match in WWE, only getting involved in 24/7 Title segments. He came out of retirement to join the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the 2020-21 season, where he went on to win the Super Bowl.
Mojo recently spoke to Fightful about Gronkowski's dive at WrestleMania and Vince McMahon performing it to prove it was safe. You can find his full comments by clicking here.
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