James Ellsworth made his first WWE appearance on the July 25th, 2016 episode of Monday Night RAW. Ellsworth was squashed by Braun Strowman but became an instant hit with the fans. He went on to spend over a year with the company and appeared frequently on weekly Television.
Ellsworth was recently a guest on Chris Jericho’s podcast: ‘Talk is Jericho’. During the interview, he revealed the original plans WWE had for him that were scrapped.
After the squash match against Strowman, WWE said they had an idea for him at Summerslam (2016). Here is what he said:
“I get an email that says, ‘Hey, there’s an idea for you for SummerSlam. It’s Barclays Center; you could drive there from Baltimore.’ I’m thinking I’m gonna be a part of SummerSlam for two weeks. The Friday before SummerSlam, they’re like, ‘Hey, creative changed, we don’t have anything for you, hopefully, we’ll have something soon”
Ellsworth found out later that the idea was for him to defeat Heath Slater in a match to earn a WWE contract. Here is the backstory:
“I found out months after that what the SummerSlam thing was supposed to be. When Heath Slater didn’t get drafted by Raw or Smackdown, and he was a free agent. He was trying to get a contract out of them both, he was supposed to come out at SummerSlam, demanding, ‘Daniel Bryan, I want a contract!’ Daniel Bryan’s trying to make it easy for him. ‘All right, I’ll give you a Smackdown contract, all you have to do is beat this guy,’ and it was me! The idea was I was supposed to go over and I was supposed to win the contract. But what happened was Slater winded up getting babyface reactions before then, he was getting over as a babyface doing that angle. If they ever did anything with me, at first, they wanted me to be a babyface. But I was like, ‘Man, I almost had a SummerSlam match with Heath Slater!’ That would’ve been fun.”
Things ended up working out pretty well for Ellsworth anyways.
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[h/t to Uproxx]