In an interview with The Carroll County Times, WWE Intercontinental Champion Curtis Axel commented on changing his name from Michael McGillicutty, winning and being the WWE Intercontinental Champion and more.

Highlights of the interview are below:

On the Curtis Axel ring name: “When I became Michael McGillicutty, ever since that point, I was throwing hundreds of names at them. And I’m sure Axel Curtis or Curtis Axel was in there somewhere. I was talking with a guy that works for WWE, Joey Styles, he actually brought that name up as one of the possibilities. But they didn’t want to go that route with me at first. They wanted to have me do my own thing and not even pay homage to anything to do with my family. Which, you know, is kind of nice, so I can try to do this on my own, and I tried to do the best I could with Michael McGillicutty without any TV time or whatever. But I’m sure that name was pitched as one of the hundreds I threw at them.”

On being the WWE Intercontinental Champion: “Dude, it’s unbelievable. When I got put into that Triple Threat match at Payback, that was the first thing that crossed my mind — that I had an opportunity to win the title that my father made famous in the ’90s, the Intercontinental Championship. And if I were to win it, we’d be the first father-son duo to ever hold that title. So that whole week building up to the pay-per-view, that’s all I could think about. My grandpa was like, if you win this, it’s going to be crazy. So when I did win it, it was pretty emotional. My dad was the first thing I could think of when I grabbed that thing and I held it up. I called home afterward and talked to my wife and my grandfather and I had my whole family at my house, and I guess from what they were saying everybody was crying. It was very emotional just because of how much that meant to me to hold the same title my father held.

The interview is available in full at this link.