Samoa Joe has opened up about his return to WWE in the summer of 2021.
On April 15, 2021, Samoa Joe was released by the WWE after six years with the company and having held multiple titles. He returned exactly two months later, initially serving as William Regal's enforcer and then eventually capturing the NXT Championship for the third time. He was ultimately released again on January 6, 2022.
At ROH Supercard of Honor, Joe made his return to ROH, taking out Jay Lethal and Sonjay Dutt and standing tall alongside ROH Champion Jonathan Gresham to end the show.
During the post-show media scrum, Tony Khan said he was interested in signing Joe following his first release, but, as he sees it, it all worked out great in the end.
"No, but I was interested and it just never happened. It would have been great. It worked out great, right?" Khan said.
Joe jumped in and added, "To be honest, he didn’t really have much of a chance."
As for what influenced his decision to return to the company that had just released his a couple of months prior, Joe cited the strong relationships that he had built, specifically those with Triple H and William Regal.
"At this point, in my career, what I have done, the second release...my going back to WWE was majorly because of the people I had worked with and the relationship I had built in the company, namely Triple H and William Regal. As Triple H, dealing with his situation, which I knew about and was way more concerned about than my employment, and Regal and his departure, I knew the writing was on the wall for me, which is fine. We were a big collective team and a big collective think tank within the company and they went a different way. As far as the release, it’s an up and down process for a lot of people. For me, it just freed me up to pursue a lot of projects that I really want to work on and freed me up to talk with Tony and talk about the future of what he wanted to do and I was very surprised a lot of that matched up," he said.
On March 2, Tony Khan announced on Dynamite that he was the new owner of ROH. Joe admits that this did play a role in his decision to now sign with AEW, calling the ability to be part of and influence ROH's future an 'unmissable opportunity.'
"It played a role, the initial discussion, obviously Tony was playing his cards close to his chest and not revealing things, heavily alluded to it, but never quite revealing. It did play a role. Obviously, I have a lot of my legacy tied with [ROH] and a lot of work that many fans have enjoyed over the years has been affiliated with the promotion. To see it and to be a part of it and help influence the future of it was kind of an unmissible opportunity," Joe said.
Elsewhere during the scrum, Joe said that he is healthy and ready to smack people in the mouth. Click here to read more.
He also shared that he had been trying to help WWE purchase the ROH tape library before Tony Khan acquired the company. Click here to learn more.
If you missed anything from Supercard of Honor, you can catch up by checking out Fightful's live coverage.
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