Waller addresses the situation.
In early 2024, WWE talents were making the media rounds to promote the Elimination Chamber Premium Live Event that emanated from Perth, Australia.
The likes of Grayson Waller and Rhea Ripley traveled to their home country to promote in-person. While Waller and L.A. Knight were on a talk show titled ‘Sunrise,’ the floor manager approached Waller and did a bit of shadowboxing at him. Waller stated that if he got up, he was not going to deliver a fake punch.
During a sit-down chat with Chris Van Vliet, Waller explained himself and added that he was not actually going to put his hands on the man.
I hate when people disrespect what we do and treat it as a joke, and sometimes, you know wrestling enough that we can sit here and have a conversation. You understand what I’ve gone through, you understand what you’ve gone through, it’s a good conversation. But sometimes when you do these morning TVs, they’re doing 16 interviews a day, they don’t know who anyone is. I understand why it happened, but it was when the sound guy or whatever came up and like, ‘I’ll take a punch’ and did his little thing, and it’s like, you don’t realize what we do and I was like, okay, and part of it was me being like, I’m gonna have some fun with this and it terrified them. When they turned off the cameras, they were terrified about, like, ‘Is everything okay?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m good. I was having fun.’ They didn’t know that. But I think it’s something that we need to protect what we do, and it’s just like if someone’s so disrespectful to your face, I’m not gonna sit there and take it. I’m not gonna hit him. This isn’t the 1980s where you prove a point that way. I wish we could, because then I think a lot of people would change their opinion on what we do when you feel what it is because when I’m in there and I’m wrestling Kevin Owens and he’s giving me a Swanton, man, that sucks. That’s not a fun move, so I just wanted him to respect what I did a little bit more. They had John Cena’s music playing… They don’t know what wrestling is, they’re not fans. So they’re just doing what they think wrestling is so I get it. But, I think we’ve come far enough and I think it was also because I was in Australia. I’ve flown home for two days. This is like 30 hours of travel to come here and basically do this show and I’m coming here to do this for you. You’re not doing anything for me. I’m doing way bigger things over in the States so, I think it was just like a whole multitude of being tired from the flight and just getting off that flight and going, sitting there and L.A. Knight sitting there just laughing to himself. He got out of it scot-free.
No (I was not going to escalate it to physicality). I’m a professional. That’s one thing. I can sit here and act all tough, like, oh yeah, I would have choked him out. No, I wouldn’t. That’s not what we do. We’re trained to be good at what we do and we’re not going to do that on members of the public. But I would have got in his face and told him what I thought of him, and I think that’s as far as it goes, because you just can’t react the same way as people have in the past because we’ve seen how that went. Didn’t go great for (Hulk) Hogan, didn’t go great for David Schultz so, I don’t want myself on that list.
Yeah, I did (flip a switch)… And I guess that’s some of the Grayson Waller coming into me. Who are you to come and say that to me? And I’m like, okay. Well, I’m gonna give you the same energy back and I think he backed down pretty quick once that happened.
On WWE programming, Waller and Austin Theory are a tag team. The duo were most recently in action on the 11/8 Friday Night SmackDown against current WWE Tag Team Champions, Motor City Machine Guns (Alex Shelley & Chris Sabin).
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Insight with Chris Van Vliet with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.