Karl Anderson says signing with WWE while still holding championship gold in New Japan Pro Wrestling brought a much nastier reaction than people might realize. According to Anderson, things got bad enough that he actually received death threats over the situation.
While speaking with LNG Productions, Anderson was talking about the upcoming Diary of a G1 Finalist series and some of the different periods of his career they plan to revisit. One of those will be November 2022, which was a pretty strange time in Anderson’s career.
At the time, Anderson was still the NEVER Openweight Champion in NJPW. That didn’t stop him from signing with WWE and immediately returning to the company alongside Luke Gallows. When the interviewer brought up Anderson working for WWE in Saudi Arabia while still holding the NJPW title, Anderson remembered just how intense the reaction became.
“As a NEVER Openweight Champion, I signed with WWE, and everybody just—I mean, I got death threats.”
Anderson returned to WWE in October 2022 alongside Gallows, reuniting with AJ Styles. The unusual part was that he still had unfinished business in Japan and remained NJPW’s NEVER Openweight Champion throughout the entire situation.
That created an especially messy moment when Anderson was originally scheduled to defend the title against Hikuleo at NJPW’s Battle Autumn event on November 5. WWE had Anderson booked for Crown Jewel in Saudi Arabia on the same day, where The O.C. accompanied Styles for his match against The Judgment Day.
Anderson ultimately remained NEVER Openweight Champion despite returning to WWE. He later went back to NJPW and eventually dropped the championship to Tama Tonga at Wrestle Kingdom 17 in January 2023.
More than three years later, Anderson apparently hasn’t forgotten just how seriously some people took the whole situation. Signing with WWE while carrying NJPW gold was strange enough, but receiving death threats over it took the reaction somewhere else entirely.
Were you surprised by how much controversy Karl Anderson’s WWE return caused while he was still NEVER Openweight Champion? Let us know in the comments.
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