As the Bullet Club expanded, certain members formed sub-groups within the larger faction. Tama Tonga and his real-life brother, Tanga Loa, started the Guerrillas of Destiny. While competing in Ring of Honor, the Young Bucks and Adam Cole became the Superkliq. After AJ Styles, Doc Gallows and Karl Anderson left for WWE in 2016, the Bucks and Kenny Omega branded themselves “The Elite” of the Bullet Club — a distinction based on the trio’s ability not only to move merchandise but open new pathways for New Japan.
As they traversed the globe, Matt and Nick Jackson chronicled their exchanges with an iPhone. Using the device as an editing system, the pair then posted a web series they called Being the Elite. “It was sort of a documentary,” Matt told me. “Essentially, it was just me and Nick on the show, and Kenny would pop up a little bit. It was just the three of us, so we said, ‘Let’s make this more interesting. Let’s add some characters. Let’s add some storylines.’
“Then we started putting in cliffhangers. That’s what I liked about the old [WCW] Nitros when I was a kid. You couldn’t wait until the next week to see what would happen. And it built and built. Our meet and greet lines got longer. People started referencing the show’s storylines and catchphrases.”
On the indies in the U.S., the Jacksons noticed fans holding up signs related to specific incidents that occurred on Being the Elite, or BTE, as insiders began to say. Once again, they’d taken their careers to another phase. Now, they started to amp up the content. “At times, the show could be sci-fi, where we had superpowers,” Matt said. “Or it could be comedy. Or it could be a murder mystery. It didn’t have to take itself seriously. Because that’s not what we are. We’re lighthearted guys.”
During autograph sessions, fans would occasionally offer suggestions for BTE plot twists. Rather than kayfabe their followers, the Bucks indulged them, periodically incorporating the proposals. “It was a simple way of booking,” Nick said. “We knew what the fans wanted and gave it to them.”
No one in pro wrestling had ever quite done this before. “The mentality had always been, ‘Let’s surprise the fans. Let’s swerve them,’” Matt said. “No, no, no. If the fans want something to happen, make it happen. Make them feel good.”
Remarkably, the promotions where the Elite appeared — New Japan, Ring of Honor and the various indies — also began taking their signals from BTE. While members had previously been uncertain about how they might be booked, BTE gave them an opportunity to take their characters and plots in specific directions.
“Nobody was telling us what we could and couldn’t do,” “Hangman” Adam Page told me. “And if anyone tried, we had the power to ignore them. Wrestling outside the machine, we answered to the fans, not to anybody else.”
The emergence of Cody in the unit added to the visibility. While WWE largely relegated the former Stardust to a mid-card role, as a member of the Bullet Club’s Elite division, Cody carried himself with the bearing of a main-eventer and a haughtiness that lent itself to storyline tensions within the faction.
As with the Bucks, Cody took satisfaction in knowing that the disappointments of the past were over. Utilizing a lifetime of wrestling knowledge, he now had the control to move himself to a place where his success could be assured.
When outside forces impacted the Elite’s direction, members took it upon themselves to explain the real-life dramas. For example, after the Bucks learned that Adam Cole would be leaving the Bullet Club for NXT, they dealt with it by blaming him for an actual illness Nick Jackson had recently suffered. According to the BTE plot, Cole had poisoned Nick and, obviously, could no longer be in the group.
In the midst of the War of the Worlds tour, coproduced by Ring of Honor and New Japan, Cole was officially fired from the Bullet Club by Omega and replaced by “The Villain” Marty Scurll. Eventually, the fans learned the full story when Cole debuted at NXT TakeOver: Brooklyn III in 2017, but they appreciated the clever way that the departure was handled on BTE.
Noted Scurll, “The very core of wrestling is the relationship between the performers and the audience. Just being a good wrestler isn’t enough. You have to be more. Being the Elite became a platform where the viewer could know us in a different way than watching a 10- or 15-minute match. Every week, it was like a Monday Night Raw. It was always spontaneous, and that’s something people could tell. Anything authentic always stands out.”
Even the campiest lines delivered by the various wrestlers on BTE seemed entertaining; the performers clearly were enjoying what they were doing. “It was a camaraderie,” said Page. “The fans were seeing more genuineness than they’d seen in wrestling in a long time. Everyone was legitimately best friends and having fun together.”
The compatibility existed despite sometimes contrasting views of the wrestling business. Cody told interviewer Kenny McIntosh during an Inside the Ropes Q&A in Dublin, “I like a very traditional, conservative wrestling. Nick Jackson wants to set himself on fire. The common thing is pleasing the audience, and that was shared amongst everybody.”
But how long could it last? The two-year contract extension that the Bucks had signed with New Japan and Ring of Honor would expire at the end of 2018. As fans admiringly watched the Bullet Club, it was natural to wonder when the Young Bucks might be sharing the same dressing room again with AJ Styles and Finn Balor — this time in WWE. “A lot of our friends [in WWE] say we might find it troubling that our creativity would be pretty much gone, and we wouldn’t like it, but we’d like the money,” Nick Jackson told the Sporting News. “Right now, we have both of those, and that’s always nice because we’re our own boss.”
Yet, Matt Jackson did not completely rule out the possibility. Since the time they were kids, the brothers fantasized about performing in Madison Square Garden, which, at the time, meant wrestling for Vince McMahon. “If we did go there, it would have to be creatively appealing for me. If we don’t ever go there, I feel like we’re going to be remembered more than if we went there and became a mid-card act.”
As they deliberated the various possibilities, the Jacksons were enticed by the thought of standing out in history as one of the few tandems never to make the jump. “You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Matt told USA Today. “Right now, we’re so happy with what we’re doing.”
Happy enough, he emphasized, that his instincts told him to maintain authority over the Elite in a forum he could manage. “I’d rather have WrestleMania every time I wrestle,” he emphasized.