The A-Lister has main evented WrestleMania once in his career, and he won’t ever stop reminding people about that fact. Despite that, The Miz had a very rocky start to his WWE career, and many believed he would be let go sooner or later. Thankfully, he persevered and became one of the highlights of the company.
While speaking to Brian Baumgartner on Off The Beat, Miz recalled WWE only seeing him as an announcer and nothing more. The Miz then revealed that he even took a pay cut in order to join WWE.
“I’ll never forget, they were like, ‘You impressed us so much that maybe there is something for you here.’ They brought me up to Connecticut to commentate. Joey Styles brought me up with Todd Grisham and Michael Cole, they brought me up and I had to do a take of commentating. They told me, ‘we might bring you in as a commentator or interviewer.’ It was the first time I said, ‘but I want to be a WWE Superstar.’ They didn’t look at me like a WWE Superstar, they looked at me as a personality. I saw something different, ‘I love what you guys do and you do a great job, but I want to be bigger than The Rock and bigger than (Hulk) Hogan. I want to be a Superstar.’ ‘Alright, okay.
They gave me a developmental deal to go down and they didn’t think I was going to be much of anything, to be honest, you could kind of tell, ‘let’s see what we got here.’ They gave me this developmental contract and I was like, ‘I’m making more than this doing Real World and The Challenge. I’m not taking a paycut to do this.’ I had to think about that. Are we looking at this as a career move? Sometimes, you have to take less because you see the big picture. That’s what I did. I took less money to go there, train, and prove everyone wrong.”
The Miz to Off The Beat
The Miz is currently feuding with Dexter Lumis and Johnny Gargano on Monday Night RAW every week. We will have to wait and see how WWE will develop their feud in the coming weeks but for now, The Miz appears to be broke.
H/T to Fightful
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