Big E on The New Day’s creation: “The original pitch was for us to be the new Nation of Domination”

But I’m telling you, people didn’t get to see the best of Abe. Abe is one of the best talkers I’ve ever been around. He would come into FCW, and he would cut these promos for Dusty. We would usually have these hard outs. You have a minute, maybe give you a minute and a half. Alex Riley and Abe Washington were the two guys who had an exception to just go. People didn’t get to see the best of Alex Riley as a promo, either. Dude was just incredible on the mic, but Abe was also just a masterful talker.

So we were in FCW. It was me, Byron Saxton was still an active wrestler at the time, it was me, Saxton, Woods, and Abe. We all talked, but Abe was kind of positioned as the leader, and we had this group.

Abe was very much someone who unfortunately liked to push the envelope a little bit too much. I’m not going to talk about the reason he got fired, you could look that up. But he’s someone who always liked to kind of put his foot over the line and see how far we could push things.

We originally called the group the Clan, and it stood for Citizens Liberation of American Nationalism. It was supposed to be this militant black group, much in the vein of the Nation of Domination. We all grew up loving The Nation, and we wanted to do something in that vein.

That group initially, it was initially the Clan, then we became The Plan because the office said we’re not doing that. So we exchanged citizens for people, so that was it.

We came out in white and red, so that very first suit that you see Woods come out in, that was like his old stuff from when we were pitching The Plan in FCW. So we never got to do that on FCW TV. We did a few weeks of that, and then eventually the office in FCW said it’s dead, you guys can’t do this anymore, move on.”