Nathan Jones was with WWE for barely over a year before he quit the company in December 2003, walking out on the promotion during a tour in Perth, Australia.
On a recent edition of his “Grilling JR” podcast, WWE Hall of Famer Jim Ross discussed Jones’ shocking WWE exit and Vince McMahon’s reaction to the news.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On if he was surprised to hear Jones had walked out: “Well yeah. Nathan didn’t travel well. And Nathan sometimes had — his downfall was his people skills. His look, his facials, his body? Par excellence. Perfect big heel body that would eventually turn babyface, and he would been he would got over. He just didn’t like the travel. He didn’t understand the business as well as we would like for him to. I don’t know how much he invested in you know, learning customs. What’s accepted, what isn’t. But I was not totally shocked that he that he left. It just never — he never seemed comfortable, let’s put that way.
“But man, oh man. What a physical package he was. Golly! He was pretty amazing. So you never know, that’s one of the things I always wonder about. Could be another chapter for a book is, guys that you wonder, ‘How would this have worked out if things have been different?’ ”
On if WWE could have done anything different with Jones: “I don’t know what we could do to make Nathan comfortable in his surroundings. You got to be a good traveler, because you’re going to travel a lot. And for a seven foot guy, sometimes that’s really daunting.”
On Vince McMahon’s reaction to Jones leaving: “I don’t think he blew a gasket. I think he was disappointed that it didn’t work out. Because we had high expectations and high hopes for Nathan. It just was not meant to be. And sometimes, no matter how good a manager you want to be or you try to be, sometimes there’s just nothing that you can do about it. You can’t change a guy’s basic personality. If you don’t like to travel, and you don’t want to be on the road, this is not the business for you. So I think that’s kind of where we we we left it, you know. Just, it was was not meant to be. But again, I often wondered how great Nathan could have been if things had been different. But we’ll never know.”