It has been years since Baron Corbin was the pro wrestler on the rise in WWE, having started out as “The Lone Wolf” in NXT. His characters have since lost momentum after joining the main roster in 2016, with his most recent one being “Happy Corbin,” which resulted in a loss to Pat McAfee and having John Bradshaw Layfield as his manager.
WWE broke up Corbin and JBL’s pairing after the Royal Rumble earlier this year, as it never led to anything grand with the WWE Hall of Famer.
Corbin has since returned to NXT to rehabilitate his character on the yellow brand. It’s not lost on him what he did beforehand, however, as he tells the After the Bell podcast that he was “drowning” in his partnership with JBL (h/t Cageside Seats for transcription).
“There was a sense of panic there for me, because everything I had done up until then had worked. I’d made things work. But I had one promo in my career, where I was in the ring, in the middle of it going, ‘There is nothing that is going to make this good. We’re not saving this.’ It was a segment with multiple people, and I felt the crowd just going, ‘Dude.’ Like, this is not good. And you feel it in your gut.
“Then, when we got to the end of the JBL stuff — we were trying to make it work. I just think there were a few things that went against us: opportunity, timing, a few other things. And you could feel it. I felt like I was in a movie, where they’re stuck out in the ocean just waiting to get eaten by sharks. I was drowning, in a sense. And that’s when we had the conversation, and it was like, ‘Okay, what do we do?’”
Corbin expressed his excitement about returning to NXT and praised working with NXT champion Carmelo Hayes when the chance arose.
“That’s when this NXT opportunity came up and I was like ‘Hell yes! Let’s go, let’s go down there, and let’s do this.’ And it’s been a lot of fun because I got to come in the door and run with [NXT champion] Carmelo [Hayes] for a little bit. And we had that ‘Lone Wolf’ entrance, and that was special, man. You could feel the energy in the building when that music hit, and had the jean vest on, and it was a little nostalgia. Social media numbers were off the charts on that — it was just an entrance.
Sometimes people take vacations to “find themselves.” That seems exactly the plan for Corbin in NXT. What he finds remains to be seen, but it’s a risk he’s taking before a potential return to Monday or Friday nights.