Scotty 2 Hotty spoke with Chris Jericho on this week’s “Talk Is Jericho” to discuss leaving the WWE, as well as the old culture of NXT.
Scotty talking about leaving WWE:
“The coolest part about it was that it was my choice. That was the goal,” Scotty shared. “It goes back to 2007 when I was released as a wrestler. In 2006, my contract was up. They asked me to sign a three-year deal. I was on the fence for like a month. I wasn’t happy. I was doing dark matches. I was doing matches with the new flavor of the week and not really having fun. I said, ‘The hell with it’, and I signed that three-year deal.”
“A year into that three-year deal, I was released. I told myself, ‘Never again would I do that.’ That’s kind of where I was at this time around. I was not having fun, and I knew it was time to move on. I told myself when I came back that one of my goals was to walk away on my own this time.”
Scotty said the NXT locker room before the rebranding believed in the “We are NXT” slogan:
“Hunter used to say that we have this culture here, and if we could bottle it, we could make millions off this culture,” he said. “The backstage culture of ‘We are NXT’ was a real thing.”
“That was a real pride amongst the roster. I feel like that’s been lost to a degree. It was the coolest environment I’ve ever been in my 30 years in wrestling. It was still a wrestling business, don’t get me wrong, but there was a certain pride there that there wasn’t anywhere else.”
“It started to change. They started coming in with rules. One of the first weeks since COVID was, they started to let us wear NXT tracksuits to TV because we don’t see anybody. We come into the Performance Center for television. We don’t have any fans waiting outside, and for the longest time, there weren’t any fans. In the building, it was all in house people, so we were wearing NXT tracksuits.”
“As soon as it started to change, Hunter went away, and the other guys started to come in, it was, ‘Ok, we gotta get back to business casual again.’ The next week it was, ‘Vince wants the coaches looking younger, so we need you guys to start dyeing your beards and cutting your hair.’ I literally lost sleep over it. I’ve had every kind of facial hair, dye, goatee, the beard, spiked up hair, bald head. It’s not about that. It’s like, if they’re going to have us jump through hoops like monkeys just to see if they’ll do it, so if you do that, what’s next?”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Talk Is Jericho with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription
