During an interview with Corey Graves on the “After The Bell” podcast, Kevin Owens talked about his surprise appearance at Saturday’s NXT TakeOver: WarGames III event from the Allstate Arena in Chicago, Illinois where he worked the main event.
It turns out that once changes to the card were made due to Johnny Gargano being pulled from the show with an injury, Triple H made the call for Owens to wrestle the show.
“It’s been a constant throughout the last few years that any time I hear anybody at NXT getting injured or for some reason not being able to make a show, whether it’s a storyline or not, I always send Triple H a text like, ‘Hey, if you need somebody, I’m here. Hahahahaha.’ We always have that little insider joke, and so the same thing happened when I heard that Gargano was off of TakeOver,” Owens recalled. “I immediately texted him saying, ‘I hear Johnny’s out. I’m available.’ And then this time the answer was, ‘Well actually, that’s a possibility. I’m looking into it.’ I was like, ‘Oh s–t, alright.’ And then he called me in the middle of my European tour a couple of weeks ago and let me know that it was going to happen.”
“I guess I was sitting on it for a week and a half; we didn’t tell anybody. I’m astonished it didn’t get out because especially that day, we didn’t take any precautions to try to keep it secret,” Owens said. “I was just walking around with the guys and I was just there, like, I was just another NXT guy. So that fact that it didn’t somehow leak that I was going to be in the match was a nice surprise because I don’t know what it is about our industry and where we work that makes everybody want to tell everybody everything.”
