NXT’s revenge day The event takes place this weekend (Saturday, February 4) at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina.
NXT President Shawn Michaels was on a media call today offering all kinds of questions about what’s going on with NXT and WWE these days, and here are some of his most famous responses.
First, on the subject of potential main roster call-ups for wrestlers like Alba Fyre, HBK said he’s hopeful there will be roster changes after WrestleMania 39:
“I got my fingers crossed, maybe about WrestleMania, we’ll have some conversations about something, some changes and some rosters. But like I said, for now, I’m just doing the job I’ve been asked to do, doing the best job I can.”
Next was WWE’s decision to fire Mandy Rose due to the explicit photos and videos she was posting on her FanTime page. HBK denied having anything to do with this decision:
“Well, it’s obviously not an ideal situation. I will say, I think if I was allowed to say it for the record, I didn’t fire her. I can’t fire anyone. The only thing that’s true about any of that is that I dealt with creativity.”
But no, look, it was a pity. Obviously I think Mandy has been great to us. I definitely enjoyed working with her. She was an exceptional hero. We would have liked things to have gone differently and we were able to build our story with Roxanne [Perez], but I was put in a position where I could make a call creatively, and so we did it. That’s one of the things I’ve learned while doing this job, and that is that nothing comes before branding.”
“Roxanne was definitely where we were going regardless, we went a few weeks earlier than we expected.”
“And I will say, honestly, I think the world of Mandy Rose. She was nothing but amazing with us. We will miss her, but we are happy to have Roxanne Perez as NXT Women’s Champion, which will take us into the future.”
I have to say, I’m pretty sure HBK was aware of the “nothing comes before brand” mentality. Survivor Series 1997right?
Finally, HBK made it clear that he didn’t know anything about Vince McMahon’s return to WWE. This is Shawn’s response when asked if McMahon has been involved in NXT or WWE creations, and if he expects that to happen in the future:
He didn’t, and then again, I don’t think he does. I imagine Vince probably has bigger fish than us here in NXT… One of the things I enjoy about my job here is the plausible deniability it allows me to get. That’s why I don’t throw in a lot of questions, because as I said, I don’t want to know the answers to some of them.”
“He’s been so good with us down here. They helped us, in a certain way, guiding us the way they wanted it to go, but then, our hands were put up. And (Hunter) same thing again, they’re good with us here in NXT. They’re good.” They understand that’s in a different environment here. So we’re very fortunate to be kind of independent regardless of who’s running the ship there at Stamford. It allows us a lot of freedom here, which we appreciate.”
There you have it, Cagesiders. Do you know as little as Shawn Michaels does about what goes on behind the scenes in WWE?
