The New Day Discussed Their Formation And Their Mortified Reaction To Their Babyface Gimmick

Watching Kofi Kingston, Big E and Xavier Woods come into their own as The New Day has been a long, frustrating, but ultimately rewarding ride. The New Day are one of the most entertaining acts in WWE today, but there were a few speed bumps along the way. They first appeared together in mid-2014 as an unnamed group dissatisfied with their position in WWE. While they never specifically addressed their race, many fans assumed this was an attempt to do another black power group like the Nation of Domination, and WWE blinked, pulling the faction from TV after only a couple weeks. Months later, they would reemerge as The New Day, a clapping babyface team that would proclaim their positivity in stereotypical preacher voices. Needless to say, this didn’t go over terribly well either.

Well, The New Day recently appeared on Chris Jericho’s podcast to discuss their tumultuous formative period. Xavier Woods talked about how frustration over being squashed by Rusev every week led to the formation of a faction

“I debuted and wasn’t really doing anything. So I kind of had an idea because Rusev was beating the hell out of all of us. At NXT like six TVs straight he was beating the hell out of me, I came up to the main roster, then Rusev came up chasing me and beating me up here. But I had an idea. A character that I’ve wanted to do for a while is just this snarky, intelligent, running his mouth, just the total like punk kind of character. So I’m working on that character trying to get something going and then I’m kind of realizing like ‘Oh, E’s not doing anything, he’s coming off his Intercontinental title reign and kind of starting to float.’ So I was like, you know what, let’s see if we can merge him into this. Literally like weeks at a time we were going into pre-tapes filming things, pitching ideas. Then we were thinking like there’s something that’s missing from this, we need one more thing. That’s when we kind of thought ‘maybe Kofi.’ ”

Xavier and Kofi Kingston also discussed not wanting the group to be a typical “angry black guys” stable.

Xavier Woods: After talking about it for a while we kind of approached them with what we wanted to do and rather than being this group that everyone thought it was going to be, just three angry black guys, it’s like, no, it’s three guys who have come up from the same background who just want more from life, more from their jobs, more from their friends, more from everything around them. So we tried to take that mentality and get it across on TV as best we could.

Kofi Kingston: And we did! For about two weeks, we did. [Then] we got taken off. We got on and everyone thought we were going to be like the second coming of the Nation. ‘You guys are the New Nation of Domination.’ “

After having their original group shot down, Xavier, Kofi and Big E spent months pitching new ideas to WWE management. According to Kofi, they even proposed a funny APA-like team called The Problem Solvers, which people liked, but it ultimately didn’t go ahead. Then, one fateful day, Vince McMahon called the trio into his office and informed them he had a new vision for them – he wanted them to be preachers. The rest of the meeting went about as awkwardly as you’d expect.

Woods: He was, ‘How do you guys see this?’ We were like ‘Well, we don’t want to sing and dance because we feel like for African-American athletes you’re either singing and dancing, or you’re the big strong black guy, or you’re the foreign black guy.’ Those are the three archetypes. We were like, ‘We want to push some sort of message for all kids but more specifically young black kids watching wrestling that you can be whatever kind of character you want. You come with a blank slate and you can be anything, not just these three things. So then when we got to this part about being preachers…”

Kingston: We can’t describe to you the tension. Because you can’t sell it, you know what I’m saying? None of us were going to get up and go ‘This is bull!’ and be all pissed about it. We all were just smiling and nodding and all of us were all thinking the same thing like ‘Oh my god, this man is crazy.’ We walked out of that room and we had no idea. It was the complete opposite of what we wanted to do. You know, he wanted us to be like clapping. When I do go back to church it’s like the white Catholic church, it’s not like Baptist style, so this was like completely out of my comfort zone. But you’re given a task and you do the best with it and I think that we did do pretty well with it.”

So there you are, The New Day were as weirded out by the clapping, dancing original incarnation of the group as we all were. Thankfully, the group managed to strike gold by turning a bad idea on its head. They also credit The New Day’s long, twisted origin story with making the final product better. Xavier, Kofi and Big E were friends before they formed a team, but fighting to make The New Day the team they really wanted it to be for nearly a year brought them closer and created the chemistry you see on screen today. Now that’s a story you can feel positive about.

(Via Talk Is Jericho and SB Nation)

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