Simon Gotch was one-half of the Vaudevillains and alongside Aiden English, they climbed to the top of the NXT tag team division. There were a few detractors of their old-school gimmick but many fans loved the blast from the past.
Love them or not, the Vaudevillains never really caught on during their run on WWE’s main roster. They flirted with getting a push as a heel team but nothing really ever panned out for them.
Simon was recently released from WWE and is now known as “Simon Grimm” on the indie wrestling scene. Dave Meltzer noted in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that his mandatory 90-day no compete clause has run out so he is free to work wherever he wants at this point.
The former Vaudevillain recently sat down with Still Real Radio to discuss several topics about his career, the WWE, and his opinion about a few other superstars. He also told a very entertaining story about a great idea he had for the NXT Tag Team Titles.
“One idea I pitched in NXT that I really thought would have been good; this is while Blake and Murphy had the titles and this is before we were in the feud with them. I just thought this would be an interesting way to do it because they wanted us to be heels, so I was like, this would be a good way to get us over as heels and at the same time, it would give a little bit of an injection of energy into the tag division, which at the time was literally us, Blake and Murphy and then Enzo and Cass.”
“The idea was going to be: Blake and Murphy go out there with the tag titles and their opponents don’t come to the ring. They’re declared the winners because their opponents never showed up and this was going to go on for a couple weeks and then it was going to get to a point where they’re starting to get curious why. They’re getting questioned why their opponents don’t show up, they don’t know. Eventually, it’s going to lead to them in the ring, waiting for their opponents and we come dragging the bodies out and basically tell them they’re not going to be able to wrestle anyone until they wrestle us. We’re gonna make sure that every single team that goes to wrestle them is going to get hurt before they get to the ring.”
“The whole idea of this is going to be that eventually, when we take the belts from them, Regal was going to come out as commissioner. His whole idea was going to be: well since you guys decided, you know, you have a whole division that’s very mad at you for what you’re doing, so here’s what we’re going to do. The titles are now on the line in 100 percent of your matches. Not only that, if you’re disqualified, or there’s a count out etc. the titles will change hands. What this was going to do was basically put us in a situation where as heels, there’s a whole division that’s coming after us. Any two guys who they put together have a shot at taking the belts from us legitimately because it could be through disqualification, count out or anything like that. Eventually, when we drop the titles, it’s then a bigger deal because you’ve built us up as these dastardly heels who have been running away essentially and are kind of backed into a corner trying to survive.”
Just imagine if they could have pulled this off. We might be telling a different story when talking about the Vaudevillains if they would have used this idea. We think it sounded like a decent plan, what do you think?
Special thanks to Still Real Radio and Still Real To Us for the transcription
