Shawn Michaels addressed the firing of Mandy Rose on today’s media call, where the Heartbreak Kid was promoting this Saturday’s NXT Vengeance Day premium live event.
During the call, the WWE Hall of Famer would be asked about the former NXT Women’s Champion, and how her situation forced him to make an adjustment for the brand’s creative direction. He clarifies that he was not the one who called for Rose to be released before praising her for being a joy to work with and a solid champion. Highlights from that portion of the call can be found below.
Says he really enjoyed working with Rose, thinks she was a great champion and wasn’t the one who fired her:
Obviously, not the ideal situation. I will say, if I’m allowed to say it for the record, I didn’t fire her. I can’t fire anybody. Only thing correct about any of that is that I handle creative. It was unfortunate. I think Mandy was fantastic for us. I absolutely enjoyed working with her. She was a phenomenal champion. We would have loved things to have gone different and been able to build our story with Roxanne, but I was put in a position to where I had to make a call creatively, and so we did that.
How nothing comes before the brand:
It’s one of the things that I’ve learned, doing this job, nothing comes before the brand. We have to put those things forward and that’s what we did. Roxanne was certainly where we were going regardless, we just went a few weeks earlier than we expected to. The great thing is, now we’re right back on course and I will say, honestly, I think the world of Mandy Rose, she was nothing but phenomenal with us, we’ll miss her, but we’re thrilled about Roxanne Perez being the NXT Women’s Champion and taking us into the future.
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)
