Rob Conway says being fired on television by Vince McMahon damaged his standing because he was written off the air in January and did not actually leave WWE until May.
Conway lost to Intercontinental Champion Jeff Hardy in 21 seconds on the January 1, 2007 episode of Raw, having said he would quit the brand if he lost again. McMahon came out, refused to let him quit and fired him instead, using the moment to claim the phrase belonged to WWE rather than The Apprentice.
Speaking to Chris Van Vliet on Insight, Conway explained why the match was as short as it was. He had broken his nose and had surgery on a deviated septum days earlier, and was not cleared.
“I was like, man, I can’t get hit in the face. I wasn’t in great shape. I was still taking pain meds,” Conway said. “So then the match kept getting shorter and shorter, and I was like, how about I just start off on him and shoot him in, and he does a sunset flip out of the corner. One, two, three.”
He said the match was never the point.
“Originally the match was supposed to be just like a normal three or four or five minute match. The match was irrelevant. It was the promo, and to get to Vince,” he said. “We were doing everything we could just to get from I’ll quit Raw to losing, to Vince saying you can’t quit, you’re fired.”
The plan was for him to turn up on SmackDown afterwards, back with Sylvain Grenier.
“I was already getting gear made to wrestle on SmackDown with Sylvain,” Conway said. “They had to keep me off TV till after WrestleMania, because the whole you’re fired was to spark the angle between Vince and Donald Trump. So if I showed up two weeks later, he didn’t do a very good job of firing me.”
WrestleMania came and went. Nobody called.
“After WrestleMania, then I was supposed to start on SmackDown with Sylvain, because together we were gold. Separately, they didn’t really do that much with either one of us,” he said.
His contract had rolled over in January, so he sat at home on full pay.
“I was thinking they would either do something with me or let me go,” Conway said. “It’s not like if they did let me go, six months later I wouldn’t be like, yeah, I’ll come back. Who’s going to say no to that kind of money?”
The cost, as he sees it, was the nine months of silence.
“It kind of hurt my stock, so to speak, because most people get fired, released, and then they have 90 days and you can start on TV,” he said. “Well, I was off TV until I got released, I think in May, and they kept paying me until August. But I’d been off TV for nine months. People thought I got fired on TV.”
His summary of it was blunt. “I’m the only guy who got fired on TV and really seemingly got fired,” Conway said.
The Trump angle he is describing became the biggest thing WWE did that year. The Battle of the Billionaires match at WrestleMania 23 had McMahon and Donald Trump each backing a wrestler with both men’s hair on the line, Bobby Lashley beat Umaga for Trump, and McMahon had his head shaved in the ring. Conway’s firing was one of the first pieces laid for it, and he spent the entire build at home so it would hold.
WWE announced his release on May 11, 2007. Grenier reunited with René Duprée in ECW that February instead, but the team came apart within weeks after Duprée was suspended for a wellness policy violation, and both men were released within months of each other.
On what it was like standing across from McMahon in that segment, Conway drew a line between the character and the man.
“In the ring, it’s just character-driven. He’s just another segment,” he said. “Backstage, on the other hand, he’s an intimidating guy, because he kind of holds your future. It’s one of those deals where if he’s like, how you doing, you’re like, how do you want me to be doing?”
He said the reason that felt as heavy as it did was that there was nowhere else to go.
“He had so much power. You couldn’t just go to WCW, and TNA wasn’t really, it was on the map, but it wasn’t the way it got to be. It’s certainly not like what AEW is now,” Conway said. “The guys have it so much better now. The more competition, the more money guys can make, the more opportunity there is for more people.”
