Interesting reason why Gargano didn’t want to have WWE return to his hometown

After Johnny Gargano stepped away from NXT last year to focus on becoming a new parent with wife Candice LeRae, every time a wrestling company stopped by Gargano’s beloved hometown of Cleveland, speculation started about Johnny Wrestling’s return to the ring.

When Raw was at Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse on August 8, a lot of fans circled the date. It was here, of course, that the new leader of the creative and talented Triple H would re-debut one of his black-and-gold era favorites. But that show came and went. Gargano would appear, but not until August 22nd in Toronto.

Why? To hear Gargano tell it like he did to Corey Graves and fellow Clevelander Vic Joseph at WWE’s After the clockit was almost a test of his popularity:

“A big part of me didn’t want to come back to Cleveland because I knew if I would have come back to Cleveland it would have gotten a great reaction, but people would have been like, ‘Oh, you know, he’s this little kid from NXT and he got the reaction because it’s his hometown.’

“So to come back to Toronto in an arena, I think 16,000 people could have been in that arena. It was really cool because there was a commercial break, we came back from commercial break, and then my music started playing. The reaction was such a cool reaction to experience because it was like the music hit and everyone was like, ‘Wait a minute, this is familiar, what is this?’ And then my name came up on Tron and everybody was like, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on right now? What’s going on? And then I walked out and everybody lost their minds and then the Johnny Wrestling chants started and everybody was super fun to play with.

“That, for me, will be one of the lasting memories for me is the gradual pop and the gradual reaction when people realized what was happening.”

So was the challenge of actually surprising fans in the 21st century:

“That was the most important thing for me for this secret, because this return had to make it a complete surprise. Obviously, I could have come back two weeks before in Cleveland, but everybody believed it, everybody thought it would happen. That’s probably why it didn’t happen… It was really important to me to just keep it all under wraps as much as possible. The fact that we were able to do it, the fact that I was flying into Buffalo and I was snuck across the border.

“Sneaked across the border legally. We’re not going to get into trouble here—sneak across the border to Toronto.”

The surprise was nice, and seeing how a big city crowd with no particular interest in Gargano reacted to him was probably helpful for Johnny and the decision makers backstage at WWE.

Johnny also says he signed with a different company than WWE, but the latest season of Netflix Stranger Things and the 40-year-old song it returned to the charts (Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill”) helped him decide what to do:

“It was here that I knew what I wanted. I saw Stranger Things and the song came on and the first thing that popped into my head was, ‘Wait a minute, it’s Shawn vs. The Undertaker’s song from WrestleMania.’ Placebo did a cover of it.

“I saw the hype video for Shawn and Taker from ‘Mania and I was sitting there in the kitchen, Candice was right there, she can tell you, I was sitting there in the kitchen and I saw this hype video and she’s doing baby stuff , and it just hit me when I saw this video, I was like, this is what I want to do, this is where I want to be, and this is what I want to do, that’s why I went into this, to have videos like this about me, but also to have these WrestleMania stories and matches, and I haven’t had that yet. I haven’t had that WrestleMania moment, I haven’t had that WrestleMania- match.”

We’ll see how Gargano’s first match as a member of the main roster goes in Portland, Oregon tonight (September 12)? Will that lead to him being Johnny WrestleMania for the next few years?

Let us know what you think below and check out Corey & Vic’s full conversation with Gargano here.