Jacob Fatu spent nineteen days in 2024 not knowing whether he still had a WWE contract, unable to explain to his children why the move to Florida had stopped, after a phone call from Bruce Prichard told him it was not looking good.
Fatu told the story on What’s Your Story? with Stephanie McMahon, and prefaced it by saying he had not intended to.
WWE had offered him a deal in February. Two weeks later, he got off a plane drunk, and the call came the following morning.
“They gave me a call like two weeks later. I was just getting off a plane. I was drunk, like on one. When they gave me the contract, I went home. I told the kids, they’re excited. We’re ready to move. My in-laws, everybody knew.”
“I woke up the next morning. Called Bruce. He said, well, I’m gonna tell you right now, the way I felt last week, it’s not looking too good. I wish the best for you. Hung up. That was the hardest s***.”
He took the call sitting in a towel in his bathroom, with his wife doing her makeup in the mirror.
“My kids asking me, dad, when we move? I couldn’t even tell them. Couldn’t even tell them why. Because your dad wants to go get drunk. Because your dad wants to go have beers. For what? What are you doing, Jay? That’s when everything switched.”
“I hang up, and she’s like, what happened? I was like, you heard what happened. I’m about to lose my job. I was so stressed, but my wife said, Jacob, you’ll be all right. You’ve made it this far. If it comes, it comes. If it don’t, we gotta figure it out.”
Nineteen days followed with no answer either way.
“Nineteen days, I didn’t know if I had a job. My kids were asking me, dad, when we moving to Florida, when we moving to Florida? I couldn’t even answer them for 19 days because I thought it was done. It was done.”
Jimmy Uso rang him every day through it.
“Jimmy Uso says this divine movement. Jacob, you gotta move. Me and Jimmy became closer because of this. My brother guided me the whole way. Called me every day, talking about Bible scriptures, just talking about what my name even meant in the Bible.”
It was Jimmy who told him the decision had gone his way.
“That day Jim called and he told me, hey, bro, they gonna give you a second chance.”
Fatu says the call was Paul Levesque’s, and repeated the terms he was given.
“He said, we’ll give him a second chance. Everybody deserves a second chance, but when he gets here, all that’s gotta stop.”
He stopped that day, and turned up to WrestleMania in Philadelphia noticeably lighter.
“I stopped everything so much to where I showed up at WrestleMania in Philly. When they see me, they was like, dude, are you okay? You got too skinny. What’s going on? And I remember Roman told me, hey man, let’s get a little bit more weight. Let me be the lean one.”
He debuted that May, interfering to help Solo Sikoa, and has since spent time in the main event scene. The story he was building to is what happened at WrestleMania 42 this April, in the same week Fatu had spent years telling his cousins he would hug Levesque before he was ever offered a job.
“Your husband came and found me after. I jumped in the crowd and then I came the other way. Hunter wants to see you. As soon as I’m walking up, your husband’s coming down, and just gave me a hug. I just remember telling him, crying, just telling him thank you, thank you, man. You’re the one that gave me that second chance.”
“He grabbed my face, like, man, you did it. Don’t thank me. You did it. The only person that could mess this up is you, Jacob.”
Fatu also had a number in his head for that show. He says 42 means five two in his family’s culture, and he had posted WM 42 on social media during WrestleMania 40, when he had no idea how he was going to get there.
“It ain’t how you start, it’s how you finish.”
