Lio Rush Recalls Triple H Rejecting His Ring Gear Idea In WWE NXT

Lio Rush appeared on Talk Is Jericho this week where he reflected on his relationship with Triple H. He recalled the first time they communicated about him going back to NXT from the WWE main roster, where Rush was only concerned about contract talks that had stalled for nine months.

"When I was in LA, I got a call from Hunter saying he wanted me to be on NXT because they just got this deal with the USA Network. I was on USA for RAW already, so I think he wanted people that were already on USA to push some more eyes onto NXT now being on USA," he said. "The first thing that I said to him was, 'When are we going to talk about this contract? It's been nine months, you can't just call me and say, 'How've you been?' It's been nine months, how do you think I've been, man?'

"I just can't. I just want to get down to the business right away and I think that initial conversation with Hunter automatically made things weird for me," he stated. "I thought that was going to be a turning point where we got on the same page but unfortunately we never did."

Rush then spoke about how WWE decided to take his nickname at the time and push it with a moth being on his video screen. The AEW star spoke about how he then tried to make it a thing by creating an outfit.

"When I was in NXT, my second go around being in NXT, I remember getting to the tapings one day and they were playing my new video screen on the titantron. I saw a moth and I was asking them what was the idea behind the moth because I was just using moth for 'Man Of The Hour' and my logo was a clock," Lio Rush said. "So for them to have inserted that moth and them being so stuck on the moth thing, I was like, 'Okay, I'm going to go with it.' So I got some gear made, which is the outfit that you're talking about. There's an orange vest with wings and there's a mask for the entrance."

That outfit was never seen in WWE, with Rush eventually using it once after his time with the company was done. But the reason it didn't appear is that Triple H didn't like it.

"I remember bringing it to tapings one day, showing Hunter. I even rehearsed an entire entrance, and Hunter comes out and he's like, 'What is this?' I think I had a big match for the NXT Cruiserweight Title that night and I wasn't being featured on like the Takeovers," Rush admitted. So I was like, 'Oh, maybe I should do something cool for my entrance. This is a big match, a title match for TV so let me just do something cool for my entrance.' He said he didn't understand it, he said it had nothing to do with my character and I was trying too hard. I was like, 'You guys made this moth a thing, I'm trying to make sense of it.'"

Rush then joked about how Triple H used to dress up like the Terminator, so that didn't make sense to him.

"I thought it was pretty funny because he would dress up as the f*cking Terminator at WrestleMania," Lio Rush joked. "So I was like, 'What do you mean, it doesn't have anything to do with the character and I was doing too much?' I thought that was pretty wild."

If you use any quotes from this article, please credit Talk Is Jericho, with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcriptions.