Last year, the talk of the wrestling world was the push that Jinder Mahal received when he won the iconic WWE Championship, with the internet blowing up for months until he finally lost the title to AJ Styles. Recently, he went on the Chasing Glory podcast with Lillian Garcia to talk about that main event push.

First of all, Mahal talks about how he really wanted to be on Smackdown Live, because it’s the ‘Land of Opportunity’ (or it was, these days it seems just like a shorter, more boring carbon copy of RAW). He’d often ask Road Dogg in the hallways to bring him to Smackdown Live, so when he saw him again, RD informed him that ‘good things were going to happen to him after WrestleMania 33.’ As he notes, things in WWE can change in the blink of an eye, so he wasn’t getting his hopes up too much, but he did believe he’d be getting perhaps a mid-card push at best.

That was until he was announced for the 6-pack challenge that would decide the No. 1 contender for the WWE Championship. In the match were Luke Harper and Baron Corbin, so Mahal assumed it would be one of them to work with Randy Orton following ‘Mania, until he asked who would be winning, to which Luke Harper replied; “It’s you”, and Mahal was as shocked as the entire WWE Universe.

This forced him to grow up quite a lot as a performer in the ring, as he recalled thinking that this is his time to either sink or swim, and even though you may have hated the move by the WWE and the entire story, it’s hard to say that he was a bad heel, as he drew plenty of heat from the WWE Universe. We all know why Mahal was pushed, so that the WWE could break into the lucrative Indian market, but as a performer behind the scenes, it’s good to see hard work pay off and that’s exactly what happened with Mahal.

So what do you guys think? Do you like WWE taking these kind of risks? Did you enjoy Mahal as WWE Champion? Let us know all your thoughts and ideas in the comments below.

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