AJ Francis Reveals Why Some Stars Were “Salty” With Hit Row In NXT

Former WWE Superstar AJ Francis was a recent guest on the Public Enemies Podcast where he discussed wanting to keep his indie gimmick. This saw him doing something similar to Hit Row, and originally, he had hoped to get Lio Rush involved. However, he then explained how the group originally began.

"When I got to WWE, I was like, 'yo, I want to do the same thing.' At the time, I wanted to do it with Swerve and Lio Rush, right? But Lio got released, and then Swerve was doing his own thing," he said. "So I was like, you know what, let me focus on myself, and I was just doing my own thing. And then Ryan Katz who worked at creative at the PC was like, 'what do you think about your Briana, and Tehuti all getting together?' At the time, it wasn't to do a rap thing. It was just us being a group together and finding out what we are going to do.

"I was like, 'that's a cool idea,' because Briana is bad, and it never hurts to have a bad on your shoulder, right? Tehuti can go with anybody in the ring on the planet Earth currently breathing air. Let's call that a fact. I was like, 'yeah, that sounds great,' and I talked to them. I was like, 'look, Briana, I already know you rap, I already did the rap faction before I got here, let's do it again. We can pretend that Tehuti is the producer, even though I am really the producer. We can pretend Tehuti is the producer, you rap, I rap, and we are a crew.' So we did that, and we were called The Hit Makers."

AJ Francis also gave some credit to Triple H for not scripting them. He revealed that The Game told a member of the creative team to let Hit Row do their own thing when it came to promos.

"That's the thing, and I always give Triple H credit for this.  The fact that like the first time we did a promo, somebody, I don't even remember what producer it was. But they wrote up like a rough outline of what they thought we should say," Francis revealed. "And they were like, 'you can change parts of it if you want to,' like they do with everybody.

"Triple H got in their ass. Triple H was like, 'don't write anything for them. Let them do what they want to do, let them say what they want to say. We can't tell them how to be them, we can't tell them how to do this, let them do their thing."

While that situation worked well for them as a group, AJ Francis admits it rubbed others the wrong way. He overheard certain talent complaining about the fact they got to have that freedom.

"There were some people, because I would see the looks and I would hear the conversations when they didn't think I could hear them. Or didn't realize I was in the other room of the locker room," he said. "People would be salty because they didn't get that kind of freedom. And they've been on the show for a lot longer time."

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