In pro wrestling, there are few who cut a figure as intimidating as Samoa Joe. With
two decades of experience working for nearly every major wrestling promotion, and holding
championships in virtually all of them, Samoa Joe has had one heck of a career.
On April 7th, 2019, Samoa Joe made his first appearance at WrestleMania, successfully defending
the United States Championship against luchador legend Rey Mysterio in front of a crowd of
85,000 people. For most wrestlers, that kind of crowd size would be intimidating, but for
Joe, it was just another day at the office. After all, he'd performed in front of a bigger
audience before.
That happened back in 1984 when Joe, then just a 5-year-old Joe Seanoa, was a part of
the family business. His parents, Pete and Portia, had founded a Polynesian dance company
called Tiare Productions in 1965. Back then, Pete was working as a Polynesian dancer at
Disneyland, a career that wound up lasting 28 years. By 1984, Tiare Productions was big
enough that when the Summer Olympics came to Los Angeles, they performed as part of
the opening ceremonies, dancing in Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for a crowd of over 93,000
people.
Joe's career would go in a bit of a different direction, but he certainly kept up with the
craft between bouts in the ring, and even brought the family business with him to the
world of pro wrestling. In 2005, TNA's first-ever Bound For Glory, their smaller-scale equivalent
to WrestleMania, opened with an entrance that included Joe dancing with his family's troupe
before taking on, and defeating, Japanese legend Jushin Thunder Liger.
Joe's connection to his roots fed into a common misconception among some wrestling fans about
Joe's origins: he's frequently mistaken for being a member of the Anoa'i family, a prominent
but completely different Samoan family. But to be fair, that assumption isn't baseless.
The Anoa'i family is one of the most prolific wrestling dynasties that the business has
ever seen. The extended family includes the Wild Samoans Afa and Sika, Yokozuna, Umaga,
Rikishi, multiple-time WWE Tag Team Champions Jey and Jimmy Uso, and three-time WWE Champion,
and one of the company's biggest current stars, Roman Reigns. Also Afa and Sika's father considered
"The High Chief" Peter Maivia to be a "blood brother," meaning that their extended family
also includes him, his son-in-law Rocky Johnson, and his grandson The Rock. And those are just
the Anoa'i family members you've heard of on TV.
The family does not, however, include Samoa Joe, a fact that he joked about on an episode
of the Notsam Wrestling podcast, telling host Sam Roberts,
"I'm sure if you ask any of my cousins if they're related to the Rock, they'd be like,
'Oh, the Rock? Yeah, you mean Dwayne? Oh, DJ? Oh, you're talking about DJ, we call him
DJ.'"
Still, it's a good lesson for fans about stereotypes and making assumptions.
Once you know that he didn't have a family connection to the business, you might start
wondering how Joe made his way to a career in pro wrestling. The answer? It kind of happened
by accident.
One of the reasons that Joe's style has such an edge of hard-hitting realism to it is that
he has a strong background in martial arts, winning the California State Junior Judo Championships
as a teenager and going on as an adult to train with UFC Champion Bas Rutten. In between
those two events, though, Joe was working as a mortgage broker in the early 2000s. Joe
called up a gym in California one day in order to get back to training, looking to take up
Jiu-Jitsu. The gym owner told Joe that if he was really looking for an intense workout,
he should stick around after the Jiu-Jitsu class for "when the pro wrestling guys come
in."
He took the owner's advice, and found a whole lot more than an intense workout. Joe's background,
athleticism, and dedication gave him a knack for pro wrestling, leading him to quit his
mortgage broker job after a year of training to go full-time.
In addition to the intense workout he was promised, the new career, and an eventual
path to worldwide fame, Joe's time training gave him something else he didn't expect:
a name that would stick with him for the next 20 years.
As he told Sam Roberts,
"There were two dudes in the gym named Joe, and of course, instead of calling the other
guy Caucasian Joe, all the sudden I'm Samoa Joe...I was pretty decent at this wrestling
thing, and promoters started asking for Samoa Joe, and I got so terrified of changing my
name because I liked the work. I couldn't show up the next week and be Johnny Thundermountain."
Most wrestlers you see on television don't actually own the names you know them as. Instead,
those names represent "characters" that are owned by the company; WWE owns "Seth Rollins"
and "Roman Reigns" the same way Disney owns "Spider-Man." That can make it difficult for
a wrestler to maintain their momentum if they leave the company to work elsewhere. Samoa
Joe, however, has made that name a part of his brand, and is on a short list of wrestlers
alongside CM Punk and AJ Styles who have made it to WWE without being given a new ring name.
In the early phase of his career, Samoa Joe spent some time in WWE's developmental system
and even wrestled a few matches against John Cena back in the days before Cena became pro
wrestling's biggest star. That first brush with WWE didn't go too well, though; Joe was
even told by Jim Ross, who was both an on-screen personality and WWE's executive in charge
of talent relations,
"We know what we're looking for in terms of talent, and you're not it."
With that, Joe decided to make a name for himself elsewhere, and the first place he
did that was Ring of Honor, a Philadelphia-based company that would eventually become the biggest
indie wrestling promotion in the country. It was the springboard for wrestlers who would
eventually find themselves at the top of the card in WWE, like Daniel Bryan, Seth Rollins,
Kevin Owens, and more.
"Keep your eye on Joe!"
Only five months after he joined the company, Joe won the ROH World Championship, kicking
off a title reign that would last for 645 days with 30 successful defenses. For most
fans, there were three that stood out well above the rest: a trilogy of matches against
ROH's other top star, CM Punk.
The first two both finished as a 60-minute time-limit draw. It was the second one, at
a 2004 show appropriately titled Joe vs. Punk II, that wrestling critic Dave Meltzer gave
the five-star rating, an honor he hadn't bestowed on an American match since 1997. Oh, and that
third one? It went 31 minutes before Joe choked Punk out in the middle of the ring, cementing
himself as one of the best wrestlers in the world.
While Ring of Honor was well-known to hardcore wrestling fans, it still didn't have the reach
that other promotions did. Total Nonstop Action, however, was a company with a weekly show
on international television. While it had its share of well-known and older stars at
the top of its cards, it was also building a big part of its reputation around a roster
of exciting younger talent. It was a roster that Joe fit into very well.
At first, Joe was featured in the company's "X Division," where wrestlers with a high-flying,
high-risk style gave TNA its most thrilling matches. Before Joe's arrival, the X Division
was thought of as a junior heavyweight division, full of the smaller wrestlers and their flippy,
acrobatic moves. Joe, however, is not a small man. He's 6'2", and he's billed at around
280 pounds, normally heavyweight numbers. But Joe had incredible conditioning, the kind
of thing you need when you're wrestling 60-minute main events, and was capable of explosive
speed and power. He could keep up with the smaller wrestlers while still throwing them
around like he was Godzilla.
"Set up the Muscle Buster out of the corner. Bam!"
Joe exemplified the X Division's oft-repeated tagline, "It's not about weight limits, it's
about no limits," something that was proven when he got a shot at the X Division championship
in the main event match of TNA's Unbreakable in 2005. Along with his opponents, AJ Styles
and Christopher Daniels, Joe earned yet another of Meltzer's five-star ratings for this match,
the only match in the company's history to get that rating.
Samoa Joe spent a full ten years with TNA, later known as Impact Wrestling, where he
was undefeated for a full 18 months after he debuted, and won pretty much every title
and accolade that it was possible for him to win. Even so, his most notable moment in
the company might not have happened in the ring. In fact, it didn't even happen with
him onscreen.
In 2008, Joe was booked in a match against Scott Steiner and Kurt Angle at an event called
Sacrifice. The match didn't happen as planned, Angle was injured and replaced with Frankie
Kazarian, but nobody really remembers that. The only thing they remember is the infamous
"Steiner Math" promo that Scott Steiner cut in the run-up to the feud, which went viral
years later. The entire promo is incredible, but the short version is that Steiner worked
out that he had a "141 ⅔ percent chance of winning."
"SENOR JOE! THE NUMBERS DON'T LIE, AND THEY SPELL DISASTER FOR YOU AT SACRIFICE."
When asked about it on Sam Roberts' podcast, Joe said that he was watching it from off-camera
cracking up the whole time, and that they had to keep starting over because Steiner's
protege, Petey Williams, kept breaking out into laughter while they were trying to film
it.
In 2015, 13 years after Jim Ross turned him down, Samoa Joe signed with WWE and made his
debut as part of their NXT brand. While NXT was considered to be a developmental promotion,
it also played host to international stars who were acclimating to the distinct WWE style.
That led to what many fans considered to be an absolute dream match: Joe taking on Japanese
superstar Shinsuke Nakamura. Like Joe, Nakamura also had an MMA background that he'd combined
with more traditional pro wrestling to become the "King of Strong Style, a style pioneered
in Japan by Antonio Inoki. When it looks like the wrestlers are hitting each other really
hard, it's because they are. The big difference was that while Joe had always been the straightforward
badass, Nakamura combined his hard-hitting style with charismatic flair inspired by Freddie
Mercury and Michael Jackson.
The two wrestlers provided a great example of Strong Style when they clashed over Joe's
NXT Championship at Takeover: Brooklyn II. At the end of the match, Nakamura hit his
finishing move, a running knee-strike to the face. Joe suffered a legit dislocated jaw
after the first knee strike. Yes: the first one. The match went on for another two minutes,
during which Nakamura hit two more knee strikes. It's not often that you can see a guy get
pinned to lose a title belt and feel relief for him, but if you want that experience,
that match exists.
With his years of experience performing at a top level, worldwide fame from working the
indies and Japanese promotions, and a string of classic matches in NXT, Joe getting called
to WWE's main roster sooner rather than later was inevitable. If there was even a shred
of doubt, however, it was obliterated within about a week of his debut in NXT.
Joe later told the story of meeting with Triple H, WWE's Executive Vice President of Talent,
shortly after he was hired and getting a congratulatory handshake.
"He says 'Hey, you're #2 in merch last night.' I went 'Oh, #2 in merch for NXT? That's pretty
good.' He's like 'No, for the company.' I was like 'Who the hell was #1 then, man?!'"
Clearly, that long road from the '84 Olympics, through Japan, the indies, Ring of Honor,
and TNA had paid off.
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