Hours before WWE Raw is set to feature the New Day’s tenth-anniversary celebration, Big E. penned a lengthy piece at The Players’ Tribune.
Ettore “Big E.” Ewen detailed his struggles with depression from a young age, which spiraled further in university while battling constant injuries that prevented him from pursuing a football career.
Ewen received a scholarship to play at the University of Iowa but was cut short due to tears of both ACLs and later, tearing his pectoral muscle and suffering a broken patella. These latest injuries ended his football aspirations but he still graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree.
It was a coach who observed problems Ewen was displaying and provided information for the player to seek help through therapy which led to a diagnosis of major depression with psychotic features.
He noted how it was hardly an immediate fix but began his road to understanding his problems:
My life over those next few years…… it was like a perpetual trial and error. It was exhausting. Frankly, it was excruciating. But it wasn’t a spiral anymore — or if it was, it was a spiral slowly turning around.
After a chance meeting with Jim Ross on a flight after the NCAA championships in 2009, a fellow athlete from the University placed Ewen in touch with the former Vice President of Talent Relations which led to Ewen’s next act, moving home to Tampa and beginning at Florida Championship Wrestling as Big E. Langston.
It was in FCW where he met Austin Creed a.k.a. Xavier Woods and began a friendship that would grow after Woods’ arrival on the main roster several years after Ewen’s call-up.
Ewen gave his insight regarding the presentation of professional wrestling and relying on stereotypes and minimalized people’s backgrounds:
I mentioned how this big part of wrestling’s appeal is its universality. Good vs. evil, classic storytelling. A universal language. And that’s very true. But the downside of universality can be over-simplicity. Characters that are based on stereotypes, or painted with a broad brush, or put into a limited number of boxes. And you can see that downside in how the industry has treated Black wrestlers over the years. They’ve often been cast as brutish thugs, or as smiley, unthreatening types. They’ve often been presented as angry or unintelligent or both. And they’ve often been “underpushed,” i.e. not gotten the opportunities they’ve deserved. When The New Day debuted, The Rock was the only Black man ever to have been WWE champion.
In 2014, New Day was formed at the urging of Woods, who initially pitched a reboot of the Nation of Domination for the three of them with Kofi Kingston’s involvement, which Ewen felt did not embody the three of them:
The Nation was a faction of Black militants. And while it had a lot of cool moments (and those guys are all legends) … Woods, Kofi and I are not militants. But I think that just tells you what it’s been like at times to be a young Black wrestler trying to make it. You pitch based on what you feel will get you on TV. And what you feel will get you on TV is probably what’s gotten on TV before. And what’s gotten on TV before is a very narrow definition of Blackness.
He only spent a bit of time addressing his potentially career-ending neck injury sustained in March 2022 stating he is “at peace”.
I’m excited to explore the paths that are opening up for me in its wake. Whether it’s working for WWE outside of the ring, or it’s hosting, or acting, or voice work, or filmmaking, or so many other things. I feel like there are still so many parts of myself for me to discover. I feel like I’ve spent the last 10 years with Woods and Kofi on this amazing, life-changing project: trying to perform a version of wrestling that’s in the image of all the things we love. And now I want to find out how far I can stretch that project past wrestling. I want to see if I can actually create some of those things we love.
He is engaged to his girlfriend Kristen (the sister of WWE performer Mia Yim) and just purchased a home together in Oakland.
Tonight’s show from Everett, Washington, will feature the group’s tenth-anniversary celebration after months of friction between Kofi Kingston and Xavier Woods.