WWE's Johnny Gargano is known for three things above all else: for being very good at wrestling, for his run in NXT, and for being from Cleveland.

Whenever a wrestling promotion would schedule a show in Cleveland, be it RAW, SmackDown, AEW, or even a random indie show from January through early August of 2022, the rumbling would begin to bubble up that surely this would be the night Johnny Wrestling makes his return to the ring. It happened when AEW held Beach Break in the “City of Champions” back in January, when RAW came to town on August 8th, and would have happened again on August 24th had he not debuted on RAW two nights earlier on August 22nd.

Certainly, the next time WWE brings their show to “Believeland,” Gargano will be greeted like a hometown hero, but why didn't Paul “Triple H” Levesque and company opt to pull the trigger in Ohio for the ex-NXT Champion's main roster debut? Why did they wait until a show in Toronto, Canada, where Johnny Wrestling has very little connection and wasn't showered with praise from his friends and family?

Well, Gargano actually had a very detailed answer to that question that he chose to share with none other than Corey Graves on the After the Bell podcast.

Johnny Gargano wanted to bring an element of surprise to his WWE debut.

Had Gargano returned in Cleveland, it would have been special. The crowd would have lost their minds, his friends and family would have all but certainly been in attendance, and Candice LeRae and their son, Quill, may have even made a surprise appearance, as it's unlikely the not-even-one-year-old baby has a passport. While that would have been special, Gargano feared that such an entrance could have been more of a distraction and taken away from the magic of wrestling, as he detailed to Graves via an expansive transcription from of The Wrestling Observer:

“It was very fun to be able to literally keep a secret in a time period where that doesn't happen. Everything leaks nowadays. Everything in wrestling leaks and I remember when I was younger I loved things during the Attitude Era where you'd be watching Nitro or you'd be watching Raw and someone would just show up and you'd be like, ‘What the hell is going on? I can't believe they're here.' The dirt sheets and things like that were around but it also wasn't as prevalent as it is today with the internet and whatnot.”

“That was the most important thing to me for this secret, for this return was to make it a complete surprise. Obviously, I could have came back two weeks prior in Cleveland but everyone believed that, everyone thought that was going to happen. That's probably why it didn't happen. It would have been great, I would love to come back in my hometown, I still haven't wrestled in that arena, which is mind-blowing to me.”

“It was really important for me to just keep this whole thing under wraps as much as possible. The fact that we were able to do that, the fact that I flew into Buffalo and I was snuck across the border. Snuck legally across the border, we're not getting in trouble here, snuck across the border into Toronto.”

“A big part of me didn't want to come back in Cleveland because I knew if I would have came back in Cleveland it would have gotten an amazing reaction but people would have been like, ‘Oh you know, he's this little kid from NXT and he got the reaction because it's his hometown.'”

“So, to come back in Toronto in an arena, I think, like, 16,000 people might have been in that arena. It was really cool because a commercial break happened, we came back from commercial break and then my music started playing. The reaction was such a cool reaction to experience because it was like, the music hit and everyone was like, ‘Wait a minute, that's familiar, what is this?' And then my name came across the Tron and everyone was like, ‘Wait a minute, what's going on right now? What's happening? And then I walked out and everyone lost their minds, and then the Johnny Wrestling chants started, and everyone was super fun to play with.”

“That, for me, is going to be one of the lasting memories for me is that gradual pop and that gradual reaction when people realized what was happening.”

Frankly, it's hard to rewatch Gargano's return to the ring and not wholeheartedly believe he made the right decision; from the moment the opening notes of his theme song, Rebel Heart, hit in the ScotiaBank Arena, fans absolutely lost their minds both in Toronto and watching from home, and his debut only got better when he finished it off with a swift superkick to the face of Austin Theory. Even if it didn't take place in Browns Country, Gargano got over in a big way and made his presence known to the WWE Universe as he intended.