Apollo Crews is one of the stars who seemed to have huge potential when he started with WWE but his career didn’t go as planned. The former IC champion was called up to the main roster in April 2016, less than a year after his NXT debut in August 2015. A lot of people believed that he wasn’t ready for the main roster run and this was the primary reason why he got lost in the shuffle. This is why Crews took the opportunity to go back to the development territory with open arms earlier this year.

The WWE star recently appeared on Ryan Satin’s Out of Character podcast. Speaking about his NXT return in June, Apollo discussed how he had been stuck wrestling on Main Event and hadn’t made a PLE appearance in over a year. So he decided to take a chance and ask about a potential opportunity in NXT:

“It was weird that nothing was happening [in my career]. It got to the point where it was just like ‘man, I don’t want to be coming here and doing Main Event anymore. I want to be on the main shows. I want to be one of the guys here that’s a household name, right? I want to be one of those guys.

So like, it wasn’t coming. So I made an approach and asked if there was any spot down here essentially for me at NXT and the opportunity came about and it happened. There happened to be a spot available. I was like, ‘Man, I’m 100% for it.'”

Apollo Crews revealed that the officials asked what kind of run he wanted to have. But for him, it was about taking the full advantage of the opportunity:

“It was one of those things where it’s like, ‘Is it long term or it’s gonna be short term?’ and I was like ‘For me honestly. It doesn’t matter.’ I’m gonna control what I can control. You give me this opportunity. I’m gonna come out here and kill it.

If they bring me back to Raw or Smackdown two weeks later so be it. If they bring me back [in] two months, so be it. But in my head, I wanted to take full advantage of the opportunity that I was being presented with because essentially, I was presented with the opportunity to kind of change the trajectory of my career and kind of really start over which not a lot of people get to do.”

You can check out Apollo Crews’ full interview below: