The New Day Reminisce About The Prime Time Players & Origins Of ‘Francesca’
Photo by Steve Granitz/WireImage
The latest episode of Feel The Power podcast features some initial talk of New Day’s first rise to making it and one team they wanted to give credit to was Titus O’Neil and Darren Young of The Prime Time Players. Xavier Woods, Kofi Kingston and Big E talk about exactly how that happened for them:
“So when we were wrestling The Prime Time Players, we got beat up a lot. Feel like I almost lost my life a couple times,” said Xavier
BIG E: “Titus can be a very scary man in the ring.”
WOODS: “Titus is real big. I’m not as big as Titus”
WOODS: “Yes. I kind of miss The Prime Time Players. They were fun together. I feel like they made sense. As a team.”
KOFI: “And people like do what they were supposed to do like, they always got people hyped, you know what I’m saying. So it always makes it easier from a wrestling perspective when you have an opponent that people care about and they definitely cared about them and I think, not to toot our own horns, but we got people to care about them even more, so you know.”
Kofi goes on how intimidating it is to work with a big strong dude like Titus before Xavier mentions how their program with the men with “Millions of dollars” led to them being part of the first tag team Elimination Chamber.
“Getting to work with him and Darren, it was fun. It was a good little run that we had with which eventually led to us being the first trio inside of an Elimination Chamber as part of the very first tag team Elimination Chamber which was absurd they let us all get in there at once and we got to come out last. Which was absurd!”
One of the true highlights for The New Day’s career so far has been them winning the WWE Tag Team titles at SummerSlam 2015 in Brooklyn, but Xavier Woods makes note that the next night led to the birth of “Francesca,” his trombone, which Woods amazingly learned to play by ear.
“So the next night, we were in Brooklyn is when we introduced “Francesca” because I remember we had the match, we were feeling good and so ‘Oh, maybe tomorrow night on RAW you guys do something with the song ‘New York, New York” and this is when we were starting to get like, ‘Okay, they’re kind of trusting us to do whatever, we’re asking for stuff and they’re kind just like letting it slide, but let’s see how far we can go.’ At this point in our career we were trying to see if we can get into trouble. And so I remember texting back, I was like, ‘Oh, instead of like singing it, can you get me trombone because I could like play it, just by ear?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah, sure well I’ll ask.’ And we were kind of joking about it like in the hotel or like wherever we were and then a few minutes later gets a text back., ‘Yeah, yeah. We can get a trombone.’ And all three of us were (gasp) ‘What?’ So we were like, ‘How do we use this trombone?’ And so I learned how to play ‘Da da da dada duh.'”
“We did our whole shtick and I was supposed to hand it off to our props guy Nick at the bottom of the ramp and I saw him and I was like, in my brain I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m ever gonna get a trombone on live TV again so I’m gonna keep it for the match.’ And then during the match I just randomly play it and then during the commercial Stu, the camera man, came up, he said, ”He who shall not be named’ is laughing his ass off! Keep playing that trombone!’ Kept playing, then we got in the back, I just remember he was cackling and he’s like, ‘Always! Always! You guys will always have this trombone now. She’s part of the group!’ And that’s when she got the name and she became a thing and now we created inanimate object psychology.'”
(Transcription credit should go to @DominicDeAngelo of WrestleZone)
A great deal more comes from this episode which you can listen to in its entirety below: