During his recent interview on Shoot Conversations with Chris Hero pro-wrestling star Mojo Rawley spoke about his Hype Bros split with Zack Ryder in WWE, and why he was frustrated that the duo didn’t receive a proper feud. Highlights are below.
Says he was frustrated that he didn’t get a proper feud with Zack Ryder:
We were the Hype Bros for years and I thought with the real-life dynamic, if they had put that on TV, the whole locker room loved it. They loved sitting there and listening to me and Broski go on each other and hear about our adventures. I was like, ‘Man, we need to be doing this on TV.’ I turned on him and they told me from the start, ‘You’re going to turn on him, ya’ll are going to have one match, and then we’re deading this thing.’ I was like, ‘Man, we have such a good story here.’ They even put it on the pre-show. After I turned on him, we didn’t have anything on TV the next week, they said the video package they made for us, which I liked, was too long for the time slot, so they didn’t put anything. Then I had my first match as a heel on the kick-off show at Clash of Champions. Broski and I talked and were like, ‘Let’s just go after each other on social and cut real-life promos.’ We did and I remember cutting them in my garage and the internet went nuts over them. It was kind of frustrating because we could have been doing it the whole time.
On his main roster call-up and how the Hype Bros tried to get over:
Broski had a set way of doing things. He was there for a long time and he knows what was successful for him and what didn’t work out, so he had a lot more refinement. I had a lot more raw ideas. When it worked out well, a lot of times, it was him taking some of my ideas and my energy and finding the best way to filter that for the crowd and for both of us. We did have different opinions on what that team should be. Broski wanted to focus on the wrestling and in-ring and I wanted to focus on real-life components and entertaining side. For me, I knew most of our matches would be five-minute segments on TV so we had to find ways to get over, the wrestling is so much secondary. The closest thing I could think of to what I wanted the Hype Bros to be originally was probably The Street Profits, being hyped up and running through the crowd. That was stuff I think I did on live events and they were like, ‘Chill out.’ We did a little bit of it in NXT, but on the main roster, we never got to. The only thing we knew was they were putting us together in NXT and we were supposed to be there a very short amount of time, do a handful of matches, get a few reps, and go straight to the main roster. Hunter told me from the get-go, ‘The way the NXT crowd is evolving, you’re a main roster guy.’ That short amount of time turned into a year or whatever it was before we got called up and then it was with the draft and we were sent in at the same time as American Alpha. We had all the NXT hype in the run and we kind of debuted as the real-life B Team.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)
