ROH Hall of Famers The Briscoe Brothers worked a WWE tryout at the November 24, 2009 SmackDown TV tapings. The tryout did not happen in front of the crowd, and word was that officials thought the bothers did a good job, and invited them to come back at some point for a follow-up look. The Briscoes were then brought to Florida to work WWE’s FCW developmental territory the next month, but they were not offered contracts. The brothers later stated that WWE told them they were not “cosmetically pleasing” for the WWE product.
Mark Briscoe spoke with Chris Jericho on “Talk Is Jericho” this week and recalled the WWE FCW tryout, and how it did not go as they had hoped.
“I remember when we went down for the WWE tryout at FCW, that’s when one of the trainers or coaches said, ‘Alright, this is what I’m seeing,’” Briscoe recalled. “Talking about Jay, ‘You’re super real cool, and then you [Mark], you’re just real crazy. That’s the dynamic that you got going here. Then it just, we naturally, as we progressed, we were physically not who we were when we were 18, 19, 20, 21. But mentally and in the mindset aspect of it, we were well advanced from who we used to be. I used to be so timid. You watch old Mark Briscoe, old Briscoe Brothers, I’m so timid and so afraid to cut loose. As soon as I figured that out, it was like, ‘Wow, this is way easier than I thought it was.’ You don’t have to do quadruple springboard 450s, whatever it may be. Just go out there, make a little face, do a little head-wagging, and make some sound effects.”
Mark noted how WWE passed on signing the brothers and when asked why, he repeated the line he said years before in an interview – that they were not cosmetically pleasing enough for WWE.
“Before we left, everybody was like, ‘Man, they really like you. We think they’re gonna bring you guys on,'” Briscoe said. “I guess it was a week or two after we had got home, we were just waiting to hear back. John Laurinaitis called and he told me, ‘We really liked your stuff, but I think we’re going to pass for right now. Let us know if you guys want another try.’ That kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I guess, when he talked to Jay, he called Jay right before he called me or he called Jay after he called me. When we talked, he said, ‘Man, you know what he told me? He said that we’re not cosmetically pleasing enough.’ I was like? That’s cold man. I’m too ugly. It’s like doggone.’”
Jericho said wrestlers are not necessarily supposed to be “cosmetically pleasing,” and Briscoe agreed.
“That was our conversation, like what the hell,” Briscoe said. “If that’s really how they feel, then that’s not what we want to do anyway, if we’re gonna have to be all prim, pretty and proper and then maybe we got a job in WWE. That’s not what we’re looking for. It’s like okay, then let’s keep on keeping on.”
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(H/T to Wrestlezone)