Former WWE Superstar Umaga passed away back in 2009 at the age of 36.
On the most recent episode of Grilling JR, with Jim Ross and Conrad Thompson, the two discuss the career and life of former WWE Superstar Umaga.
During the podcast, JR talks about having to release Umaga from his WWE contract back in 2003.
“Me. I would deliver the news. Try to do it in person when you can. It’s not a letter. I’ll call, talk. You had a conversation about it. But Vince [McMahon] would earmark it and sometimes it was brought up by others in the company how, ‘Well, this guy’s putting our company in jeopardy, he’s out of control and he can’t control his habits,’ etcetera, etcetera and then you get all these little indications like I said earlier, the small things start accumulating, and cumulatively, it’s bad business and so he would say, ‘We gotta fix this problem and unless you can tell me differently JR, the only way I know how to fix it is to let him go and let him mature and because we’d sure as hell like to bring him back.’
We knew he was gonna be great, but you still can’t make exceptions with somebody you perceive to be out of control and dangerous, especially that big, that strong, and so we had to — look, Eckie [Umaga] understood that. He knew he f*cked up and he took the bat out of our hands. What are we gonna do now? So, that’s kinda what that was. He knew he had f*cked up. You gotta pay the piper sometimes and that’s the only recourse that we had.”
You can check out the entire episode of Grilling JR where they take a look at the life and career of Umaga below.
(h/t to POST Wrestling for the transcription.)
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