Unlike many celebrities who participate in wrestling matches, Jelly Roll actively pushed to lose his debut tag team match at WWE SummerSlam, where he and Randy Orton lost to Logan Paul and Drew McIntyre. On Insight With Chris Van Vliet, he explained his reasoning and how he pitched the idea to management, including Triple H, on the day of the show.
Jelly Roll stated he was against the initial plan for his team to win. “I fought that immediately. It’s one of the first things I fought was like, Yo, man, I don’t want to go out [on top],” he revealed. “It was originally, babyfaces up.”
He first brought his wanting to lose to producer Shane Helms before taking it to Triple H directly. “So the day of, I’d been dropping it in on Shane [Helms] the whole time. Shane, I want to lose this match… So I came down and me and Triple H talked about it right there at the ring that day. I said, ‘You know what I’m coming to talk about?’ He said, ‘I want to hear it.’ And I gave it to him. And he was like, All right, all right.”
Jelly Roll laid out several reasons for wanting the loss. “It was an easy pitch. I was just like, it took three things. One, it’s the right thing to do, let’s just start at core values here. No celebrity has any business coming in and pinning a wrestler on their first run without some extreme circumstance,” he argued.
He also saw it as a way to potentially continue a storyline. “But two, I can always come back, I don’t think any other celebrity ever really cared enough to think full angle through. If I lose this… every time [Logan Paul is] in that ring, now he’s got to wonder if at some point he’s going to hear, ‘You know I got it, so come and get it’… Drew too. If I really owe one of them, it’s Drew. So that was part two of it. I was also smart enough to be like, Yo, I want to angle in.”
Jelly Roll mentioned Triple H shared a relevant anecdote during their conversation. “And then Triple H stopped me… He said, ‘I will tell you this though.’ He said Floyd wanted to lose to The Big Show. I don’t know if I should be sharing that, but he told me that, and I thought that was cool.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Insight With Chris Van Vliet with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
