This is all-time-great tag team The New Day at WWE Live in Honolulu on Wednesday, helping to announce junior quarterback Hunter Hughes is now a scholarship athlete for the Rainbow Warriors. With other team members in attendance, head coach Nick Rolovich takes the ring to deliver the paperwork, and then Hughes must dance to the sounds of Francesca II the Trombone (it’s a long story).
The New Day giving a Hawaii walk-on a scholarship is the best scholarship reveal I’ve ever seen
These are always awesome, but doing it in the center of a WWE ring is a new level.
Teams surprising walk-ons (non-scholarship players) with full rides is one of the best parts of college football. College GameDay made an excellent roundup of the most memorable ones, which include a magician, a T-shirt cannon loaded with the documents, and Sylvester Stallone. It also includes Rolovich bringing in a hypnotist to deliver the news to one player.
However, Hawaii’s new one tops all of this, and it goes beyond just Hughes having a big crowd to cheer him on and all that. The essence of the tag team itself tells the story.
Fans booed The New Day’s original 2014 gimmick, which was being a force of overwhelming and very neon positivity, like a team of anime gospel Care Bears or something. They weren’t really supposed to be bad guys, so this was the point when most tag teams would’ve failed.
But The New Day was one step ahead of the crowd from Day 1, leaning harder and harder into the self-celebratory bit and becoming so intentionally obnoxious that fans loved it (rassling is complicated). For something like an entire year, their personality and bizarre humor made for the only must-watch portions of many WWE broadcasts. They’ve since held the record for the longest tag title run of any team ever, remaining capable of creating poses like this at any moment:
I say all that to say: nothing better defines the greatest moment in a walk-on’s life than having the news delivered to you by three guys who know exactly what it’s like to have no plan beyond remaining as yourself as possible.
Also, that he’s “Hawaii’s Hunter Hughes” makes him WWE’s latest Triple H.
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