"The trombone found me" - Xavier Woods looks back on when he started playing the trombone
The New Day's Xavier Woods has quite the history with the trombone, his trademark musical instrument fans see him with every week on WWE RAW.
Woods, a former tag team champion, regularly competes on the red brand. He also accompanies Kofi Kingston to the ring and plays the trombone at ringside.
Xavier Woods was this week's guest on Insight with Chris Van Vliet to talk about all things WWE. When Van Vliet inquired about the origins of the trombone, Woods explained that it dates all the way back to when he was in sixth grade.
“The trombone found me," Xavier Woods said. "So I wanted to play drums, but 6th grade me had no idea what the word percussion meant. When they called out percussion and we went into a room, I was like I don’t want to do that. Then they went on to the next instrument. Later I asked when are they doing drums? They told me that they called that 10 minutes ago and that door is closed now. They gave me a brass mouth piece and asked what I thought I should do with it. I made the sound instantly and then they asked can you do it with this smaller one? I could and then they tried the smallest one, which is the trumpet, which I couldn’t do. Then they said cool you are a trombone player.”
As it turns out, Woods' musical prop has quite a lot of personal meaning for the New Day star.
Xavier Woods says Vince McMahon loved the trombone the first time he saw it
During the same interview, Xavier Woods recalled how he originally thought that the trombone would be a one-off, so he wanted to make the most of the opportunity while he had it.
“At that point we were trying to see what they would say yes to us doing," Xavier Woods continued. "They had an idea after we won the titles in New York and they wanted us to sing a song. They wanted us to sing ‘New York, New York.’ We were in the car and I said do you think they will let us have a trombone, because I could figure it out on that. The guys were like let's see. We texted them back and they told us yeah we can get a trombone. We played it during the show and I’m supposed to give it to someone so we can do our match."
Much to Xavier Woods' surprise, he was told that Vince McMahon loved seeing him play the trombone and wanted him to keep going. Then, when he got backstage, McMahon told Woods that he never wanted to see him without the instrument again.
"In my head I’m thinking I’m never going to be in this situation again," Xavier Woods admitted. "I get to take my passion of professional wrestling and my passion of trombone and experience this feeling again. So I’m going to keep the trombone and play it during the match. One of the camera guys is crying as he is trying to record. We go to commercial and the camera guy says ‘You got to keep playing that trombone. Vince is loving this.’ We got to the back and everyone is loving it. Vince told us ‘I never want to see you without a trombone when you go out there.'”
Are you surprised that Xavier Woods' history with the trombone goes back so far? Sound off in the comments section below.