CHAPTER 10

Giving Back

Austin Aries. Samoa Joe. Rhyno. Tyson Kidd. Zack Ryder. Cesaro.

When you think development system and wrestling school, those aren’t the first names you’d think of as talent who need to work on their craft. But NXT isn’t about pitting rookie against rookie and seeing what happens. Every match has a purpose, and to some development talent, the biggest opportunity they could get is the chance to step inside the ring and compete against someone who is more experienced and who can give them some on-the-job, between-the-ropes training.

Paul Levesque explains, “When I started, I was as green as grass—I didn’t know what I was doing. WCW offered me more money to stay, but Vince was offering me an opportunity. That’s why I left WCW and came here. Eric Bischoff said to me, ‘We’re not going to run house shows anymore. You only have to work a couple of days a month.’ Vince said to me, ‘If you come here, you’re going to work 300 days a year and you’ll get the chance to work with everybody.’ That’s what did it for me. I didn’t care about making money. I just wanted to be great at this, and to do that, I needed to do this every night and I needed to work with everybody, especially people better than me. Vince said, ‘I guarantee you, you’ll get your chance to do that.’

Veteran Superstar Rhyno was away from WWE for ten years before returning as part of NXT.

“You have to work with people better than you if you want to get better. That’s just the way it is, so that’s why we’ve started bringing in veteran performers to work with the newer NXT talent. I had a conversation with Rhyno when he was working the indies, and he’s very much about helping out the younger guys. So I said, “Great, I can bring him here, I can rub him up against a couple of guys like Baron Corbin, and it will make the NXT guys better. You look at Corbin, he’s from the NFL and doesn’t have the same type of experience that a lot of guys have. He takes a lot of grief from people on the internet because he didn’t come up through the indies, but he is really good and has a ton of charisma. The WWE Universe hasn’t seen what he can do yet, and I’m milking their reaction by not unleashing everything he can do. I can book him with guys like Rhyno, and he can go out and prove himself for 15 or 20 minutes. Corbin went out and looked good with Rhyno, then he followed up and looked good against Samoa Joe, another veteran. Would Corbin be making these same strides against people with less experience? Probably not. At this point, he’s still learning, but by putting him in the ring against guys like Joe and Rhyno, that rub helps not only in the eyes of the WWE Universe, but also in his work in the ring—it helped Baron Corbin, it helped Tyler Breeze, and it helped Sami Zayn. Working with guys with more experience makes you a better performer, and as long as I’m staying honest to what NXT fans want, I’m going to continue to do it. Some of the Universe look at Rhyno coming in or Samoa Joe coming in and try to say that NXT is no longer about development, but that’s exactly what it is. Did you enjoy the match? It’s a product. Sometimes I book talent against veterans just to give them the chance to learn. I’m not bringing in Rhyno because I think Rhyno is going to be in WrestleMania next year. Rhyno is smart enough to know that being on television makes him hot, and putting him in NXT makes him hot again. Putting him on TV drives his price back up—he makes more money; he gains more popularity. It works for him; it works for me. It’s a good thing.”

Rhyno’s return paid off for NXT and himself, as he later became a SmackDown Tag Team Champion.

It’s also an advantageous play for veterans like Tyson Kidd, Cesaro, and Zack Ryder, who might be getting overlooked on the main roster. They can come to NXT to not only give back and teach the younger talent, but also to redefine and rebrand themselves before moving back to Raw and SmackDown Live.

“Tyson Kidd came back from his knee injury, and he was frustrated because the main roster had nothing for him,” says Levesque. “So I asked him, ‘Do you want to come down here?’ He said, ‘That would be great.’ So I used him in NXT, and it got him noticed again. It’s almost like they started watching his matches in NXT and were like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s right, I forgot he is pretty good. Let’s start using him more on Raw and SmackDown.’ Cesaro is another guy who was percolating around a little bit, so I brought him down to work with Sami Zayn, and the matches these two had made people from WWE go, ‘Wow, maybe we’ll put him in something bigger on Raw.’ We weren’t doing anything with Zack Ryder, so I told him about my idea to team him with Mojo Rawley. I wanted to put them together as a tag team because, with the energy they have, I can show them to Vince after they work together for a few months and he will want to bring them up. It reinvigorates Zack, and at the same time, it hides any weaknesses Mojo, a guy who we put on TV because he has a ton of charisma and energy, may have. He needs time to learn what to do, so by teaming him with a veteran, Mojo gets more experience without exposing himself. Mojo’s now more relaxed in the ring because it’s not all on him anymore, and he’s learning a ton. Mojo is now a thousand times better because of that association and what he learned from Zack. When we can do things like that, it’s great.

Bray Wyatt surveys his family’s damage from his rocking chair.

“Eva Marie is a perfect example. She’s a victim of the Total Divas curse. We had just hired her before the show started; she had never trained, but E! saw her and was like, ‘Wow, she has a great look. Put her on the show as a newbie just starting out.’ Well, the show kept her so busy, she never got the chance to train. So the times we’d used her on TV, we kept it so simple—just showed her what to do in the moment. So she came to me and told me, ‘I love Total Divas, but I’ll quit that show tomorrow. I want to wrestle.’ She really wants to do this. She’s a jock, but she has gotten a bad rap because of the Total Divas thing. So I said, ‘Stick with Total Divas, then I’ll bring you to NXT and I’ll retro-engineer you some street cred.’ If we just train her for three months, and then put her on Raw or SmackDown Live, they will shit all over her. But if I bring her down to NXT, I can give her some street cred as she proves to the hardcore fan base that she wants this and that she’s better than they think. Once she does that and the Universe believes in her, then we can move her to SmackDown Live and it’s not such a giant risk. When she came back, they disliked her because of Total Divas, but she did some moves and the fans were like, ‘Hey, I didn’t know she could do that.’ And during her second match back, they were already going back and forth with chants of ‘Let’s go Eva! Eva Sucks!’ So there are a lot of things we can do with this brand. It’s calling someone down to pitch for us for a few seasons while we teach them a new curveball before we send them back up.

“The be all and end all example of that is Bray Wyatt. Bray Wyatt was Husky Harris. When I took over Talent Development, he was sent down. Husky Harris wasn’t working. He was green. We helped him come up with Bray Wyatt. He created this amazing character and persona, and before you knew it, he was working WrestleMania against Undertaker. He got called up, he pitched a couple of games in the Majors, he got sent back to Triple A, he revamped his entire game, and when he went back up he was closing the World Series.”

Wyatt recalls his time working against veteran Superstar Chris Jericho as his favorite moment in his entire career. “Right before I started on the road, I wrestled against Chris Jericho in one of the first matches in NXT,” remembers Wyatt. “That night, we shot four television shows. On the first show, I had a match and a promo. Second show, I had a promo, and the brothers (other Wyatts) had a match. Then the brothers had a match on the third show and I had a pre-tape. On the fourth show, I wrestled Jericho for 30 minutes and had a promo. It was chaos. It was really cool, and I had that moment with Jericho that I’ll cherish forever. It was like Jericho welcoming me to the big leagues. I’m glad I got to share that opportunity with them.”

When Samoa Joe joined NXT, he saw the emerging brand as both an opportunity and a challenge.

Veteran Superstar Samoa Joe joined NXT in 2015.

“A lot of guys like myself came up in an era where there were veteran guys around to give you experience,” explains Joe. “During some of my first tours in Japan, I worked against some of the biggest names in the country, and just being in the ring with them and being around them really helped shape my style. They taught me certain things that you just can’t learn in a classroom environment or in a ring-training environment. Hunter also came up in that type of era, and he realizes that you can’t teach some things in a seminar. Sometimes, you have to be around great people to understand what makes them great, what makes them tick, to be great yourself. I think that’s a big reason why Hunter chose to add me into the mix. A lot of guys like Paul Heyman and Joey Mercury vouched for me, but at the same time, he saw me as a valuable key to help shape all these guys who will eventually move on to greater things.”

“You are bringing in guys who have different styles and different experiences from a bunch of different places,” adds Austin Aries. “That helps because you want more than just one perspective. You want to work against guys who have been all around the world and have wrestled with a bunch of different guys, different styles, and different promotions. It helps broaden their base and they may see, think, and do things differently. Obviously, the coaches are training them on the style that WWE likes to implement, but they also want to have some different perspectives. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, and it just adds a wider range of entertainment value for all the WWE Universe as well.”

Jushin “Thunder” Liger versus Tyler Breeze at NXT Takeover: Brooklyn.

As for Tyler Breeze, now that he’s been called up to the main roster, he can’t wait to go back to NXT and pass on some of the knowledge he has learned. “NXT really started to take off, and people could see that it was starting to become a thing on its own,” says Breeze. “There was Raw, there was SmackDown, but NXT was unique and people wanted to be a part of it. We had guys come down to work with us all the time. We had Rob Van Dam, Sheamus, Chris Jericho, Rhyno . . . everyone wanted to come and be a part of it. And by working with veterans like this, you’re able to gain some invaluable experience. These are guys who have been working on the main roster for years, they’re working on Raw, working on SmackDown Live, and now they’re working with guys who are trying to get there. I think it’s cool, and it’s something that breathes a lot of fresh air into NXT. I know it’s definitely exciting for the guys on the other end of it, like when Bray got to wrestle Jericho. That type of stuff just wasn’t happening, and then all of a sudden, we’re NXT and it is. It even evolved to the point where I got to wrestle Jushin ‘Thunder’ Liger, an international legend, in front of almost 16,000 people in Brooklyn. It was the only match that Liger’s ever had in WWE, and it might be the only match he ever has in WWE, and I got to do it in front of a sold-out crowd. That was a groundbreaking moment for us. We had never worked in front of that many people before. And that was all on us; we didn’t have anyone to boost the sales. The fact that it worked and the fact that I got that opportunity is pretty awesome. I sat back and tried to take it all in for a moment. I went from being Mike Dalton to Tyler Breeze, a guy who was hot and who was working important matches. Getting to work with guys like Liger and Finn Bálor—huge names around the world—and becoming an essential part of NXT was really cool. As I transition my way out of there, one of the things I look forward to is being invited to come back to work with guys in NXT and to give them the experience I got when I was there. I’m also looking forward to going back just to give back to that audience. I was in front of them for so long, and they don’t forget that. That’s what I look forward to.”