Xavier Woods recently spoke with Tech Times about facing The Usos at the Royal Rumble, the trombone, and his gaming YouTube channel. Here are the highlights.
The New Day is putting its tag-team titles on the line against The Usos at Royal Rumble on Sunday night. What challenge do The Usos present for The New Day?
The Usos have been gunning for our tag-team championships for a hot minute, but the thing is they don’t seem to understand that they can’t beat us. So, this is like the third, fourth, fifth, whatever number of times that we’re going to beat them. They could come with the whole dance. They’re cool guys. I could understand why people might like them, but The New Day is just better in every aspect. While they are a great tag team, it is exciting to beat them every time we’re in the ring with them, and it just shows how much better of a tag team we are.
The trombone has become one of the most significant props in WWE history. How did it originally come into play and become part of your repertoire?
Well, there was one day that we were going to sing a song and I was like, ‘I could sing this song, while you guys sing the words … oh no, wait. I know how to play the trombone. If you guys give me a trombone, then I could probably learn how to play it.’ We got one and things kind of took off from there. It became a huge part of The New Day. I’m super thankful that we got the chance to do it.
Your YouTube gaming channel UpUpDownDown has taken on a life of its own online, outside of wrestling. Obviously, you’re a big-time gamer, but what made you start it and can you believe the way it has taken off?
It’s cool because it’s like my baby, as far as people will come up and say, ‘Watched Raw, watched SmackDown, enjoyed it.’ I’m a part of that show, but I didn’t create it. So, it’s cool and it feels good to be able to have achieved the life goal or life dream to be on TV wrestling, but when people come up to me and they’re wearing theUpUpDownDown t-shirt like, ‘I love when X and X that happened,’ this is my creation, so it’s very a humbling experience when people tell me they enjoy it, that they actually watch it, that they actually are foaming at the mouth waiting for certain episodes.
Every time, we’re in a different town, I always try to find a Barcade that’s around, so I wanted to do a show where I was traveling from Barcade to Barcade, actually highlighting them and highlighting the town. ‘Hey, if you’re in Portland, go to Ground Kontrol. If you’re in Charlotte, go to Boxcar.’ Meeting up with someone else, they kind of wanted to do a YouTube channel, so I was like, ‘Oh, why don’t we combine them?’ It was like, ‘It might be weird to do the travel channel thing on YouTube, so why don’t we do a gaming channel since it’s essentially the same concept?’
I started working on it, hashing out ideas, and like a year later, we got the green light to start doing it. Since then, it has kind of taken off. It’s huge from what I imagined it to be. I thought people might enjoy it, but my fear was that only wrestling fans would watch it. While I love wrestling fans, I wanted to get the gamer crowd, too, that doesn’t necessarily watch wrestling and possibly pull them into wrestling if they’re open to it.
You can read the entire interview here.
