A WWE star has looked back on their main roster call-up from NXT and how Vince McMahon may have had a unique motivation in making the call.
One of Vince McMahon’s more infamous booking tropes was how he handled wrestlers who had made a name for themselves in NXT. Often unnecessarily repacking the stars of the developmental brand, McMahon stunted many stars’ momentum on arrival with new gimmicks, confusing creative and sometimes name changes.
After a year on NXT, Hanson and Rowe made their way to the main roster in 2019. However, while the War Raiders became one of the more popular and dominant tag teams on NXT, the same could not be said for The Viking Experience, who were also renamed individually as Erik and Ivar.
Regarded as one of the more infamous re-namings in WWE history, no one thought the name was a good idea, including the former Tag Team Champions. Speaking with Chris Van Vliet, Erik first recounted how he found out about The Viking Experience and the meeting with Vince McMahon that followed:
“Our first day on the main roster. We had never actually physically met Vince McMahon, but we went and stood outside his office to go and plead our case. Because I was ringside, this is fun, I was ringside, and I see our music starts playing, and it’s ‘The War Raiders’ up on the screen, and then the logo changes, and ‘Berserkerz’ comes up. Now I’m looking like, oh man. Then that goes away, and ‘The Viking Experience’ comes up. I look and I’m like, Oh no!
So I walk up and Hunter was actually ringside, he’s texting. I walk up to him and I was like, ‘Hey, dude, is this a rib?’ He just shakes his head and goes, ‘I wish.’ I’m like, ‘What do we do?’ He’s like, ‘Well, you gotta go talk to Vince.’ All right, cool. So Ivar’s plane was late, he gets to the building, I tell him we got to go talk to Vince. This is bad, right? So we go get in line, stand, we make our case. Said, Viking Experience sounds like a Disney ride, it sounds something like a small world, the tea cups and all that stuff. ‘The Viking Experience, bring your kids,’ right?”
“Vince McMahon Loves Vikings”: WWE Star Erik
Continuing, Erik noted that it was likely that he and Ivar were called up as McMahon is a big fan of Vikings and found out that there was a Viking team in NXT, adding that at that point the name Viking Experience couldn’t be changed:
“So, we pitched that case, and Vince was like, ‘Well, that makes sense, but we don’t have time to get that through legal.’ Because we asked to be Viking Raiders because we heard through a little birdie told us, when we changed from War Machine to War Raiders, it was they were really stuck on Raiders. So all of the names had Raiders in them.
This time, Vince was really stuck on us being Vikings. He loved Vikings. Little known fact, Vince was a big fan of the history show Vikings, which is probably why we got called up in the first place, because he was like, ‘Hey, we got Vikings on TV? Bring them up!’ So he wanted us to be ‘The Viking something’, right? And the problem is, Vikings are a very popular thing in culture right now. So nothing could get past legal, nothing could get trademarked, nothing could get whatever. Viking Experience was shockingly free, because no one wanted to be that, including us.
So we asked to be Viking Raiders. By this point, it’s like, 7:30 right? The show’s going on at eight. He was like, ‘Well, we can’t get this cleared through legal at this point. So what we’ll do is, you’ll be The Viking Experience today, and if we really don’t like it, then we’ll be Viking Raiders next week. No press is bad press. So worst case scenario, people will talk. They’ll be talking about you.’ So we’re like, okay.”
Concluding, Erik recalled how he and Ivar were told to also change their individual names, which also happened to be very common Viking names:
“As we’re leaving the office, kind of in an afterthought, he goes, ‘Oh and by the way, one of you is Ivar, and one of you is Erik, I don’t care who.’ We just walked out. I looked and we were maybe two steps outside of his office, and Ivar grabs my arm for real, and he’s like, ‘Please don’t make me be Erik. My brother’s name is Erik.’ The bully in my brain for like, three seconds, I was like, Man, I really should be mean. No, okay, fine, you can be Ivar. But it was close to us being the other way.
I was like, Man, I don’t know how they came up with these names. Someone in creative might have just Googled famous Viking names or something. Because I did that afterwards, trying to figure out where they come up with these names? The first one was Erik the Red. Then it was Ivar the Boneless. I was like, Oh, cool. So it’s literally just Erik, Ivar. You guys are Vikings? Yep. Erik and Ivar.”
Also in the interview, Erik looked back on the motorcycle accident that he miraculously survived.
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