Bobby Lashley Says He Almost Wound up With a Mr. T Gimmick

Since coming back from injury in September, Bobby Lashley has been locked in an outrageous love [...]

By Connor Casey

Since coming back from injury in September, Bobby Lashley has been locked in an outrageous love triangle storyline on Monday Night Raw with Lana and Rusev. The angle has been widely panned by critics, but it manages to put up great numbers on WWE's YouTube page almost every week and gets an energetic reaction from fans, so WWE's creative team has kept it rolling up through the new year. The latest segment saw Lashley and Lana try to get married, only to be interrupted by a handful of people and get destroyed by Rusev and a returning Liv Morgan (who claims to have been in a lesbian relationship with Lana).

Standing at 6-foot-3 and 273 pounds with an insanely muscular figure, Lashley has always been somewhat of a soft-spoken bruiser during both of his runs with the WWE. But the former Intercontinental Champion revealed in a recent interview with Sports Illustrated that back when he first arrived in WWE's developmental, the creative team had very different plans for him.

"I didn't know this at the time, but Paul [Heyman] saw me — this big, jacked up dude — and didn't know me," Lashley said. "And none of the other writers knew who I was. They were just writing on what they thought they knew of me — that I should be like Mr. T and run around like, 'I pity the fool!' But that's not me. And that's why Paul wanted to sit down and talk. He knew he needed to write for this guy, but he didn't know who I was, and he wasn't going to just guess. So we just sat and talked forever, and he said, 'I get this guy.' And he got me over in a short amount of time.

"I'm a very subtle person. I come from a background where you shut up, you train, and you compete," he continued. "That's what Paul saw, and everything he did from then on was highlighting who I was, not trying to put me in a box that didn't fit. That's why I was so excited when he [took the job as Raw's Executive Director] because I knew he gets me, could write for me, and put me in the right position and place on the show."

Lashley made his WWE television debut back in September 2005 and worked his way up the card until leaving the company in 2008. He returned after a lengthy stint in Impact Wrestling and mixed martial arts, and has since captured the Intercontinental Championship twice.

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