Joe Hendry is not pretending the reaction did not happen.
The July 27 Raw concert with Danhausen, cut short by Ryan Garcia and a guitar shot, drew the heaviest criticism of Hendry’s WWE run. Fans hammered it on social media and Cagematch, where it dragged the episode to one of the lowest-rated shows in recent memory. Bully Ray and Jonathan Coachman both took it apart publicly. JD McDonagh, who was in it, mocked the crowd response on X.
Speaking on Cheap Heat, Hendry started with what he has put in.
We are all extremely passionate about what we do, and just to give you an idea here, when I signed with WWE, I made the decision that I was going to move to Orlando. I was going to not only commit 100 percent to NXT but I was gonna move to Orlando, I was gonna go to the classes, I was gonna absorb as much knowledge as I could. I said, ‘Put me on all the local shows.'
The point he was building to is about the work, not the reaction.
The goal is and always has been, for me, to give the audience value. There’s been times when I’ve been on the indies and I’ve made a music video making fun of my opponent. I remember there’s one in Germany and there was like 300 people and I’m like, ‘Man, I hope this joke lands’ and I’m behind the curtain like, ‘Come on!’ You want it to land and it’s the best feeling in the world when you give the audience that moment, that laugh.
He did not argue the segment worked.
We give absolutely everything that we’ve got. I give my absolute best efforts and we’re gonna try a lot of things, and some things are gonna land and some things won’t but we will always give our best efforts.
Then he turned it back on the people criticising him, in the opposite direction to how that usually goes.
I feel the fans have put me in this position. We talked about WrestleMania; that was because of the fan reaction, and WrestleMania probably happened because of the reaction that I got at the Royal Rumble, and the Royal Rumble probably happened because reactions that I was getting with everything I was doing up to that point so the fans have been there for me and they’ve put me in this position. So, I want to give them my absolute best.
