Paul Wight said he knew his time as an in-ring competitor in WWE was finished the day Vince McMahon called him by his real name.
Speaking on the Inside the Ring podcast, Wight pointed to a moment during the pandemic era.
“I’ll tell you when I knew I was done with WWE. Vince called me Paul one day during the COVID era. In all the years I knew Vince McMahon, he never called me Paul. He called me Show or Big Show; he never called me Paul. We were doing something; I think it was during the Randy Orton angle, and Vince said, ‘Paul can do an interview here,’ and in my brain, I died a little bit in my soul, because I knew my opportunities to compete in the ring were pretty much done, because Vince didn’t see me as a talent anymore.”
“Vince was going to start moving me into ambassador roles and all these other things that, at the time, I didn’t want to be a part of. So that was a lot of my decision, knowing and being around him long enough. There was nothing mean or malicious about it. I could have rolled into that nice role, but at the time, I wasn’t ready to give up competing. That’s when I went to Tony Khan.”
Wight signed with AEW in February 2021.