Samoa Joe’s been wrestling for a great many years, and a lot of fans have long considered him one of the best in the business. But his work in Raw’s main event over the past couple months has turned him into one of the hottest acts in sports entertainment.
A lot of that has to do with the fact Joe looks like he belongs with WWE’s special attraction, Brock Lesnar. Not many guys get the opportunity to work with Brock, and Joe is one of a handful of full-time roster members to work a recent program with him. The Samoan Submission machine can verbally can hold his own with Lesnar’s advocate, Paul Heyman, and physically matches up with the Beast Incarnate, which has helped him stand out while working with the Universal champion rather than just play a supporting role.
During a talk with Drew Garabo on his radio show for Tampa Bay’s 102.5 The Bone, Joe revealed two things that may explain his success working with Brock.
One, Lesnar’s preferred method of working a match doesn’t intimidate him:
“When you're going in there and you're going to get into it with Brock. Brock isn't going to work on a lot of stuff; he's going to want to go out there and he's going to want to get down, so like Brock's not a preplanned dude at all, man, so you've just got to go out there and do it. For some people it trips them out, but for me, I'm like, 'if we're going to scrap, we're going to scrap.'“
Two, Joe spent a lot of time working with another freak athlete with an impressive amateur wrestling background while with TNA:
“Like, honestly, a lot of getting ready for Brock was realizing he's basically a bigger Kurt Angle. But Kurt is… he's crazy, man. We just had the documentary about him and everything I said is true. If Kurt Angle's leg fell off, he'd hop twice as fast to make up for the loss of mobility, man. There's no quit in him. It was kind of a nice primer to get ready for Brock.”
The first reason is the hot sound bite, especially as some fans are critical of Lesnar as a part-timer who works similar, and short, matches each time he wrestles for WWE. There’s validity to those criticisms, but not laying out matches in advance isn’t necessarily proof Brock is lazy or something. A lot of guys prefer to work without “touching” ahead of time - for instance, Sami Zayn vs. Shinsuke Nakamura, a bout on a lot of people 2016 “Match of the Year” lists, went down at TakeOver: Dallas with no pre-planning by the performers.
As a non-wrestler, I can’t really tell you if Lesnar’s approach is good or bad. All I know is, Joe doesn’t seem to mind. And with the roll he’s on, if it works for The Destroyer, it works for me.
H/T: Wrestling Inc.