No Way Jose was one WWE release among many last week, and not a particularly surprising one. After all, he’d barely done anything since he got called up from NXT to Raw in 2018. He was pretty much limited to comedy spots with his conga line and the occasional meaningless match, and never even won the 24/7 Championship.
In a new interview with Wrestletalk, Levis Valenzuela Jr., the man who was No Way Jose, says that he never wanted to have such a silly name in WWE, but was given it in NXT all the same:
The name itself, ha. I don’t know how the hell it happened, they were like “What do you think of No Way Jose?” and I was like “No.” I thought it was a catchphrase, and I was like “Oh cool”… They saw something in film and somehow it came up… [Matt] Bloom was like “What if you want it as a name?” and I was like “No way.” Then a writer came up to me and was like “Why?” and I was like “It will pigeon hole me, there is a ceiling”, all the real stuff in terms of business. Nobody goes in there and says they want to be a No Way Jose probably, they want to be, for me it was The Rock. When I saw The Rock I wanted to be The Rock… We went into Full Sail and I’m walking in and you shake everyone’s hand and Triple H is right there talking to Eva Marie or someone, I’m like “Hey, sir, how you doing?” And he’s like “No Way, what’s going on?” In my head I’m like “shit, is that a thing?” And he goes “Got it approved today, what do you think?” And I said “I love it, let’s go.”
It’s understandable that being a new NXT guy he wouldn’t want to disagree with Triple H about his name in that moment, even if he had previously objected to the name. And then of course he got called up to Raw and became inseparable from his conga line.
They wanted the conga line with me. In NXT, I only did the conga line for big events. I was like “Alright, whatever. I’ll do the conga line,” and then it stuck. I feel a certain way about the conga line. I love the conga line, I absolutely do, but I think that’s the line that maybe held me back a little bit.
At every step of the way, WWE seems to have insisted on making No Way Jose as silly as possible, even though he’s a big muscular, handsome guy. Then, they
immediately seemed to hold it against him that his character was so silly, and never did anything with him. Hopefully Valenzuela can find opportunities elsewhere.