Killer Kross Recalls How Top AEW Star Connected Him To WWE

Appearing on Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette, former WWE star Killer Kross talked about an independent wrestling match he had with Paquette's husband, AEW star Jon Moxley, back in 2019. Kross detailed how the match came together, starting with him taking the initiative to try and get Moxley to notice him.

"Jon leaves WWE," Kross said. "I think to myself, 'I'm starving on the indies. And I just want to work with people that are better than me. I want to be in the ring with people who have done this at the highest level.' And all of sudden, he's independent. I'm looking on the internet and I'm like, 'no one's attempting to create some sort of feud or reach out to him to see if he's willing to work. No one's trying to sell tickets with him.' I'm like, 'are you guys insane?' So I basically put this promo together, it was like a short vignette trying to test the waters to see if he'd be interested and to see if it would work. Not knowing him but having mutual friends, I didn't want to call and ask him for his number. I'm not that guy. I was like, 'I'm just going to put something out there and see if people want to see this.' Sure enough, there was an interest.

"Jon randomly texts me and he's like, 'hey, what's going on?' We start talking. I'm like, 'I'm running a show in Las Vegas, Natural Born Killers.' It was like a mix between UWFI Japan, a little bit like Bloodsport. I was trying to create an environment in Vegas to prepare people to go to Josh Barnett's Bloodsport. So I was like, 'this is what I'm doing.' He was like, 'don't tell anybody I'm showing up.' And I didn't tell anybody. Not even the promoter knew until the day of. I was like, 'we're doing this old school, we're not telling anybody. I'm going to wrestle Dan Severn and then afterward, somebody's going to show up.'"

The match would ultimately end with Moxley and Killer Kross wrestling to a draw, with both wrestlers coming out very happy with it. Killer Kross would go on to reveal that Moxley gave him advice after the match, as well as Triple H's phone number so Kross could contact him about potentially joining WWE.

"So he comes down, we work, we barely talk about anything," Kross said. "The natural, rhythmic chemistry was awesome. I'm talking to him after the match and he says, 'hey, where do you want to go? What do you want to do?' And I'm just rattling off these ideas and stuff like that. He's like, 'hey, do whatever you want. I'm not going to tell you what to do. But one day, Roman (Reigns) is going to need somebody else to work with after he's done working with Drew (McIntyre). And I'm just saying, I think you would do very well there. But go wherever you want, do whatever you want to do.' In my mind, I'm like, 'holy sh*t. This is a person who's been at the highest level, recently too. It's not like it was a few years ago.' I was very humbled by that and I thought to myself, 'if he's fu**ing saying that to me, what other sort of level of assurance do I need? I need to stop fu**ing around here.'

"So he was basically like, 'just call Hunter.' I was like, 'what do you mean?' He said, 'just call Hunter.' He said it like it was nothing. 'Call him and tell him you just want to show up.' I was like, 'really?' 'Yeah. I'm going to give him your number. Give me your phone right now.' I was just like, 'holy sh*t.' That was a lot for me. We just wrestled in front of 130 people in a warehouse and then he's like, 'yeah, just call Hunter.' When the time was right, I basically called Hunter. It was so funny. I had sent him a text, just so he wasn't getting a number randomly out of anywhere. And I basically told him in the first conversation, I said, 'look sir, I'd love to be a part of the company. If you think I have any sort of value to contribute to the show, I have a lot of really interesting ideas.' I talked to him about monetizing certain types of characters and symbols like that. I tried to appeal to the business sense. That company can hire wrestlers from anywhere, finding wrestlers isn't really a problem. It's finding that sort of total package thing, that's kind of how Hunter and I began talking."

Killer Kross would of course join WWE in 2020, though he would later be released in November of 2021. If he had to do it all over again, Kross would still go to WWE, though he admitted he would attempt to establish more continuity between his NXT and main roster runs.

"This may shock a lot of people, but like I said, I like to look at the glass half-full," Kross said. "If someone had presented a crystal ball and said, 'this is how your career's going to go in WWE and by the end of it, this is what's going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it. Would you like to go, or would you like to skip this, period?' I would honestly have gone because I learned so much. And I grew as a person, especially with what was going on in the world at that time. It's served it's main purposes in a greater aspect to be there, mentally, physically, spiritually.

"If I could've done something differently, very simply put, I would've attempted to maintain continuity of what we were doing in NXT and taking that to the main roster. Fans were already fantasy booking us to be walking down the aisle of WrestleMania. Drew was like a big supporter of us and stuff like that. Everyone was so cool. The fans were telling the company what they wanted to see. So the matches were there, the tickets could've been sold. If we had just listened to what people were telling them what they wanted, this would've been super easy in my opinion. If we could've done things differently, that's what we would've done."

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Oral Sessions with Renee Paquette and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription