Rob Conway says the story Randy Orton tells about their first meeting is not what happened, though he can see why Orton finds it funny.
Conway went through it with Chris Van Vliet on Insight. Orton’s version is that he was introduced to Conway at a gym as a new signing, put his hand out, and got looked up and down and walked past.
“We were at a gym, and me and him are still good friends, but he claims that the first time I met him, that I walked in the gym, they said, this is Randy Orton, he just got signed. He stuck his hand out, and I looked him up and down, and walked right by him,” Conway said. “That would have never happened. That sounds like something he would do, but I don’t know how that came up.”
He said the behaviour is not in him.
“I can’t imagine me in this lifetime not reaching out and shaking somebody’s hand,” Conway said.
What he does remember about the early days is the condition Orton turned up in.
“When I first wrestled him, he’s a natural, but he was not in the best shape. When I wrestled him, he was so tired that I was basically having to pick him up to clothesline myself,” Conway said. “The office kind of got on him, and I think the next day, I saw him on the stair climber at the gym, and then within a month he was in fantastic cardio shape.”
The match he is describing is on the record. Conway and Orton wrestled on the June 22, 2002 episode of Velocity, in one of the tryout matches Conway had across that period, and Orton won it with a crossbody off the top.
Conway started at Ohio Valley Wrestling in 1997 under Danny Davis, several years before the class that made the place famous arrived. He and Nick Dinsmore were the two senior wrestlers in the building when Orton, John Cena, Brock Lesnar and Batista came through as WWE developmental signings, and Conway has said elsewhere that his job in that period involved showing Orton how to work a headlock.
His own WWE run took a while to convert. Conway had his first WWF television match in May 2000 and spent three years in tryouts on Jakked, Velocity and Heat before being signed properly in 2003. He debuted on Raw as an American serviceman who turned on his own country to join La Resistance, the pro-French heel act built around Sylvain Grenier and Rene Dupree, and held the World Tag Team Championship three times with Grenier across 2004 and 2005. He was released in May 2007.
The years since have been the more decorated ones by some measures. Conway is a two-time NWA World Heavyweight Champion, winning it in 2013 and again in 2014, and a four-time NWA World Tag Team Champion. He is the only wrestler to have held the NWA World Heavyweight and World Tag Team Championships at the same time. He also worked New Japan and held the OVW Heavyweight Championship three times.
The two stayed in contact. Orton arranged Conway’s guest coaching spot at the WWE Performance Center in 2018, after asking him what he wanted to do in wrestling once his in-ring career wound down. Conway told WWE at the time that he had said he enjoys training people. PWInsider reported later that year that Conway had worked backstage as a producer at an NXT taping, though it was not clear whether that was a hire or a trial.
The timing of the story is what gives it something. Orton beat Cody Rhodes at Sunday Night’s Main Event in Atlanta at the weekend, in a feud built around Rhodes arguing that Orton is chasing John Cena’s record of 17 world championships. The man Conway remembers needing to be picked up to take a clothesline is now three reigns short of the record.
