WWE NXT star Carmelo was welcomed onto The Black Announce Table podcast to discuss his journey in the pro wrestling business and more. Here are the highlights:
Help from MVP:
“That’s my dawg. Man, MVP, I’m so grateful to have him in my corner. He’s one of the — he’s like an O.G. that will give you the realness of it, because he’s not — he’s not gonna get anything out of me in that way, so he’s like, ‘Hey man, don’t do this, don’t do that. Do this, do that,’ like one of the — like a father figure for real. Actually, more even like a cool uncle, you know what I mean? If Shawn [Michaels] is like the father figure, MVP is like the cool uncle who’s like, ‘Hey man, I’m gonna give it to you for real’ but, yeah, I shot my shot with that [training with MVP in the ring]. He showed up one time at the P.C., I said, ‘Hey man, can I talk to you?’ And I pitched him an idea I had and he was like, he liked it. He was digging it and stuff and from that point, I was like, yo, let me take down your number and now, we cool and he requested to train with me to help him get back ready to get back in the ring and me and him, we got in the ring, working for a couple weeks and now, he’s like a mentor to me for real.”
His on-screen partnership with Trick Williams:
“He [Trick Williams] was here. They were trying to figure out a way to get him on TV and I had just won the [NXT] Breakout tournament and we were just getting ready to rebrand. They were trying to get a bunch of these 2.0 — I don’t wanna say ‘2.0 guys’ but, you know, all the guys that you saw introduced within that first couple weeks on TV. So Road Dogg, that was Road Dogg, he was like, ‘Hey, let’s put him with Melo’ and we didn’t know what we were really gonna do but I told Trick, I’m like, ‘We not funny.’ I’m like, ‘We’re not a comedy act,’ because I didn’t wanna be a comedy act bro [Hayes laughed]. I didn’t wanna be funny guys. It’s so easy to fall into that, you know what I mean? It’s so easy and I wanted to be entertaining but I didn’t want to be — I wanted to be fun, I didn’t want to be funny if that makes sense. That’s an Undertaker quote, ‘You wanna be fun. You don’t wanna be funny.’ But we worked it out and we figured out our dynamic quick, you know what I mean? We were like, all right, yeah, you be funny, I’ll be kind of straight up but then we’ll have fun together and that’s our formula.”
Quotes via POST Wrestling
