Xavier Woods Talks About WWE Changing The New Day From a “Militant” Gimmick to What it Is Now

In a recent edition of the “PodNasty” podcast, WWE Tag Team Champion Xavier Woods talks about WWE changing The New Day from a “militant” gimmick to what it is now, a group of “positive” spewing, arrogant champions, set out to end negativity surrounding WWE. He also talks about wanting his PhD more than holding the WWE World Heavyweight Championship, the “E:60 Behind the Curtain” documentary, and more.

Woods discusses the rumors of WWE pairing himself, Big E, and Kofi Kingston up to form a “militant” faction of black men, similar to the Nation of Domination from WWE’s Attitude Era. He confirms that this was the original plan, and goes on to say that he’s not sure why things changed, while popular theory is that the company scrapped the idea due to the civil unrest that had begun in Ferguson, Missouri during this time.

Woods says,

“Wrestling is a never-ending storybook so sometimes you start going one direction, but the beauty of it is we could go in whatever direct we want but things just changed. For what reason, I’m not exactly sure, but it’s WWE and you kind of just go with the flow.

It ‘s one of the things you learn when you get hired is it is an ever-changing and ever-evolving living breathing workism, so the best way to stay afloat is to just go along with the things that are occurring around you.

I’m not sure why things changed, but in light of recent developments of New Day it’s great that they did because to me rather than someone just coming out and the character just being there, it’s nice to be able to see that character evolve over time.” 

He then hits on The New Day’s gimmick, and that he thought they would work as babyfaces, saying,

“We had a couple of different schools of thoughts. We thought this would occur, that people would be into it, because it’s maybe one of the only positive things on television, because you turn on the news and there’s death, murder, car crashes and everything. 

Here’s a positive thing with three guys, all college educated, all college athletes, all very eloquent so we’ll preach a positive message like ‘do well in life and go to school, make sure you work out you could be big and strong like E, make sure if you stretch a lot you can be flexible and agile like Kofi and make sure if you read your books you could be smart like Woods.’ And then we realized after a few months it turned into ‘people don’t like those who are happy.’

So it’s kind of like a play on society, essentially, people of American society. Back in the 80s, if someone’s happy, someone’s doing well, someone’s getting hardships, you cheered for that person.

But now it’s 2015, and they don’t like that. They want someone who’s grimy and who doesn’t like people and who doesn’t smile and isn’t happy and wants to punt a puppy across a football field. If that happened, people would be watching and it would get 3 million views on YouTube because it’s something that’s horrible so essentially society has created this thing where people like to see car wrecks, and they want to see a hot mess and they want to see a fall from grace.

So if you don’t have those things people are going to boo you because that’s not entertaining to them, they want to see a mess, they want to see somebody fall on the sidewalk and bust their lip on the ground. They don’t like nice things.” 

He goes on to explain why he’d rather get his PhD than a WWE Championship, saying,

“I feel like we have the opportunity as WWE Superstars to make some sort of impact on lives whether it’s one kid or whether it’s an adult.

Yes, guys have been WWE World Heavyweight champion, and it’s amazing, I take nothing from that at all. But if there’s a kid who’s out there in the world watching wrestling and they see me and they know I have my PhD while I was wrestling, that could possibly inspire them to not drop out of school, to not drop out of college, to go and obtain that type of educational status, and that to me means a lot more.”

You can listen to the entire podcast here.

Editor’s Note:

This is a good listen. Check it out.