MWFP Rewind - Episode 27

You're listening to the Major Pod Network, the only place where your favorite toy store, bar, arcade, and arena are all on the same block. Scratch that major itch. Welcome to the Major Rewind the Only Podcast. That takes some of the best Ultimate Classic and Defining Moments from the Major Wrestling Figure Podcast's rich history and I put it together in a neat little package for new and old major marks to enjoy. This week we go all the way back to the very beginning, the start of Matt and Brian's WWE main roster run. For the first time ever I'm including some exclusive content that you would never hear before unless you have been a member of the Hard Foundation Tier on Patreon. This is just a little taste to what you're appetite to. If you like what you hear and you want to hear the rest, head on over to Patreon and sign up for the Hard Foundation Tier. You have a whole back catalog where Matt and Brian get into their developmental run, their indie run, and their main roster run, the run as the edge heads. I'm going to be including more stuff from the Patreon so stay tuned to that. We also have some classic major pod stuff as we head back to episode 31 where Mojo Raleigh plugs figure it out. Brian spots a Holy Grail Lex Luger and then we get a Hall of Fame induction to the Wrestling Figure Hall of Fame. And then we end things with a classic trifecta, a WTF, an incarnation of domination and a Q&A from episode 30. Enjoy. So let's talk about the call. Where were you guys? What were you guys doing? How did you get called up? We're not together. Do you remember that? We're not together. So I remember deep south closes. We've talked about some many types of deep south closes. A handful of us are going to go to OVW because we're more TV ready. The majority of everybody else is going to FCW, which is going not even there yet. It's going to be a Tampa. They like, I feel like they have like a summer vacation. Like they don't have to go right away. It's not built. It's months. Yeah. So let's say to figure out like people's leases and get them out. Like there's a lot of shit there when, you know, so we was no building. There's nothing. We had a little bit of a break. It wasn't that long. But remember like I went home to see my girlfriend at the time and you and Brad J went to OVW without me and worked a match. Why did we do that? I was thinking about that recently. Because you're a brown nose. I don't remember why or what. But then maybe just to sign the apartment lease or get that set up or something. Maybe you did because we didn't room with him. Yeah. That could have been it. But don't you end up working like a dark match? We worked as singles like a 10 minute Broadway or something bizarre like that. I remember Nova giving me a call and I don't know if he was ripping me. But saying like you might think of things as singles because Brian went there as a singles and they liked him like how he worked as singles. Not like they're ripping a half. Yeah, I'm ripping a half. But anyway. Especially if you guys were getting called up. So it's a very odd situation. Like there's no Deep South. We're getting ready to go to OVW. We're basically off. We knew we had at least two weeks off. At one point you were like why am I not just going home? This is stupid. And you were going to see your girlfriend. I had no reason to leave. So I was like whatever. I'll just hang back. And then Nova called us and was like you debut in bro. You debut when you got to be in Birmingham on Tuesday or whatever. But you had already gone to OVW. I think that was just to like. Right. But like you didn't go to OVW and you didn't go to OVW. No, I mean you didn't get the call and then go to OVW. With OVW and then you got the call. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. That's how I was in our house when I was talking to Nova in my memories. I don't remember the initial call. Unless. Because then you had to like probably get a flight back. Like you weren't scheduled to come back. Or maybe that call. Maybe he was all ribbed and was like oh no I'm just kidding and you are. Oh maybe that's all the same call. I don't really remember. Yeah. Whatever. Long story short I come back. And this time we're living with Danny Inferno, Danny Jamando. And we already know like we're going to move but now it's like alright well shit. We could debut on TV and then come back and move. Yeah. Right. Well I think the day we were supposed to move is the day before we debut on ECW. Right. So we do the show in Birmingham it was like two hour or two and a half hour drive. Drive back and we're already like packed and we wake up in that morning and take off the live drive. That's right. So did we drive to the show with Angel Williams? Yeah there's a bunch of people booked on that. It's like they would just have random people there. I remember. I want to say like Connor the Ascension and Knox maybe. I remember the morning of putting on like some fake Tanner and it's not the fake Tanner I use anymore. You could still buy it and it has like the glitter in it. Oh my god. Like L'Oreal or something like that. You don't talk about it. And like I like glitter like on my face like all day and all of my body but I'm so glad I did because I like no tan. Because you went home. We did still photo. That's our eight by ten. It's all those trading cards. Right. I don't know if we ever took photos again as the major brothers. Yeah so we're right. They never used them at least. Right. Right. And okay so we called up and. So wait hold on are you believing this like this is it? Oh my god. Yeah because it was like the call where he's saying you're going and you have to be in Birmingham. I guess you know because a bunch of other deep stuff people went he's like I'm pretty sure you're debuting to only us though like he didn't say to anyone else. So are you telling your friends and family? I 100% while I was there and I knew it was happening. Yeah. I told everybody hey watch sci-fi at whatever tonight. Yeah. I never told them because in wrestling things change. Believe it when you see it. Right. Yeah. And easy to be was live then or no. It happened so you tell them. It's like an hour later. It was definitely taped that day. Maybe it was like. It's taped that day because this is like the first time in my career like my text messages were like blowing up. I want to say it was live and maybe it was live to tape. Maybe it's like a little delay. Yeah. Right. Okay cool. So keep going. So so. So this is like okay now NXT is NXT. Yeah. You get called up. You're a kid. You're a kid. You're a big pop. Yes. It's different. Yeah. You've been in obscurity. You can change in locker room. Us like we change like it's like under the bleachers and this little like office locker room thingy but Bob thing right which I didn't even realize till years later. Like I didn't put two two together like oh my god this is the building we debuted until like one of those like doors were open. I'm like oh shit this is where we changed. Oh okay. I always remember what that building looks like is that weird chain link fence. Oh yeah now right because that you like park outside. Yeah. And you walk through like yeah yeah. I always remember. I have a lot of it is like a memory to the day. I park outside at most buildings. I don't know why I just said that. Most buildings make it outside. 99% of them. But it has like the up down thing you drive through like the little like like a split level. No no like the little like what's that thing called Mark you're not even looking at me. I don't know what you're doing. Like you drive up like you're getting out of like the rental car place. The spikes. It's a little spike but the thing that goes up and down. Speed bump? No it's like a like a little gate thing that goes up and down. I have no idea. Oh like when you pay a toll. Yeah yeah. Okay. Oh yeah yeah yeah. Okay. Anyway. Great great description there. Yep. Anyway so I mean there's a lot of things I remember the day like where they were like wait you're the majors brothers that sucks it needs to be major. I don't think they change that until the next week. Really? Yes. I maybe you might be right. Because that I know for a fact our gear says majors brothers. Well how are we going to change it during the day? Like Brett but I remember I think Justin Roberts says it and then I don't know. Something trickled down where you're not Brian majors you're not Brett majors you're major Brian major Brett major and then we had to get brand new gear by the next week. Yes. Which we did because we're professionals. Wow. And who's your gear maker at this time that you're getting brand new gear and easy money. You know Rick. So this is the first time I think we maybe it's the first time but we switched to from Rick to the let's the other guy. Robert Adam. Robert Adam. I don't think so. Yeah because he makes the majors and it's like the white with the purple. He makes all those. He makes all the stuff in the edge. No he makes all that stuff. Really? Yeah. I don't want to call that. Yeah. Okay so does do they tell you that you're going to do something that day or you're just hoping that you're going to do something. This is really what memories aren't that clear. Yeah I don't. I know we work. It's a thing where we're it's a work where we're supposed to be perceived as locals. Right. Which is like he said you could never work now if you're an MXD. Right. Because you're already like built up to be this star and like the way developmental was back then it was the complete opposite like they didn't want you to be a star. They wanted you to be a star when they tell you to be a star when they you know decide for you to be a star. Right. It was fun concept that we're supposed to be these locals and we steal one from Monty Brown and Stryker. Right. Remember when the match together and Stryker who we've known literally since like we started so it's very comforting I guess. He gave us the name major it was like a lot of you know. That made it a lot easier for sure. Plus I've made it more comfortable. I remember early in the day me practicing something with Marcus Gervon like a gorilla press into a fallaway slam thing and he's like practicing like the gorilla press like over and over. Jesus Christ my nuts. My main memories are before and after because it's hard to explain but like the way that original sci-fi set was because it was not very like elaborate. It was like there would be the smackdown set and that's real gorilla. Then there would be like almost like a pipe and drape like tarp tunnel. Yep. And you'd walk to like the real they'd send you from real gorilla but you still had like a pretty decent walk to come out this little like mini side stage. And when we got to there the segment before us was Vince in the do rag. He's ECW champion he's in that do rag and he comes back or he's about to go out and we're just so awkward standing there and he looks as he goes you guys want to try this thing on or something like that. And like went and did his promo or came back from the promo and said that we're just scared shit with standing there. And then the other thing I remember is we did the match we came back. I could tell you the producer was in nothing but I remember Sandman's there and he's like welcome to ECW kid and we like shook his hand and stuff. I don't know if I remember those two moments or if I just remember you saying them so many times. Yeah that's the only thing I remember. I don't know I could tell you like the producer was. Like I don't know like just driving home with like Angel Williams. I'm a driver. And my this like I said my first time in my career that my phone was like blowing up and texts had become like a thing a common thing where like you know it was it was cool moment like one of the things that was really cool for me is that I dropped out of college to take my WWE contract and all those people that I was in college with like watch that and they're still there like doing their senior year that I was supposed to be doing. So I found like some kind of like redeem you know redemption in that kind of I thought that was pretty cool and it was this day first. You finally made it. Yeah you know like this not that I finally made it was only a year really but like it was kind of like what I did had purpose kind of you know. Oh 100% You know but and it was May 1st you know the the college year and I did it with like two weeks to spare but they're all there and they all watched and their dorms and stuff or whatever I thought that was cool. I remember just hoping okay well they can bring us back next week. And then I also I don't want to skip ahead but I also remember when we debut with Edge I'm thinking well they're gonna say that that was the major brothers. Yeah. Did they ever? Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. For sure. And then you're you're just excited you're excited broskeen you're like I can't thank God. Dude you debuted in WWE. Yeah. Yeah. Now what about the the moving thing now I know a lot of people when they get the call up like now okay finally I can move. Okay. Okay. Typically when you debut now it's I don't know the rules now but then you had like another like three months like this weird grace piece. There's no real number to it where you would also you'd still do developmental and they pay for your hotels near Cosmo blah blah blah. But since they we just we first we didn't even move to OVW. We moved to OVW the next day. But since we just got there they weren't gonna let us go after three months and it didn't help that the major brothers didn't really take off so we weren't doing much. And Johnny X Johnny Ace explained that if we weren't in OVW that they would just fire us if we weren't doing anything which I understand. Yeah. We basically entered a period where we worked like seven days a week. Yeah. Just like seven months. And what do you mean by didn't take off like let's let's talk about that. Okay. So first things first. Okay. Hold on actually real quick who wrote that storyline of you guys like stealing the win because that's pretty cool. The American dream death they rode baby and he just saw you guys and you're like these guys are such cool baby faces or young her. Dusty never told and I actually ended up spending a lot of time with Dusty and FCW but we were never told to our faces but a lot enough of the boys told us that like Dusty's the one that wanted us he cherry picked us out deep south he thought we had like a cool old school vibe I guess. And he wanted to recreate the Mulkeys basically and that's why we're supposed to be locals when we get this big win and that that was like his vision and then that was just supposed to be like the introduction to us and then like they were supposed to put like Mike Knox with this guy Derek Nikek who's tagging with in deep south and they were supposed to be managed by Angel William and like they're supposed to be like adding tag teams DCW for everyone to work with and that never happened tag team division and it just happened. Right. So there's no tag teams you guys nothing to do really. There's literally nothing to do. I work like striker one on one. I work Elijah Burke one on one and there's just not much for us to do there. I don't know if we ever do we ever wrestle again. I'm sure we did but I don't know. Like as a tag team like there's just there was just nothing for us to do. We get drafted in like June or July so it's not long. We get drafted and this is like back in the day. I remember Nova, students are off who were going to get drafted and then you had to go to like www.com but think about this it was on a razor phone. I'm actually trying to go to www.com on a razor phone. To find out the fate of your shoot career. My God. The draft. I mean I don't know all the drafts were like a shoot that we ever did. At least for me. Maybe like Roman Reigns knew. Yeah maybe Roman knows what he's doing but like everyone else I mean yeah it's fucking crazy. I don't know one year I got like sent home I'm like I'm fired but I got drafted. It was so like weird and then like that I remember it. It had to be that when we landed and that's when Mark Henry lived in New York at the time where we're like yo Mark you got drafted. He's like serious. We had to like tell him. Yeah. What the fuck man I never forget that like even though. Yeah. It's when he had that ACW run. And then so this run until the edge heads. Well so okay so then we get drafted to SmackDown and I believe it's. But it's the same show because it's the same schedule and all that shit. But it's like I guess a new opportunity and they give us a couple of vignettes or at least one vignette. It may just come out of SmackDown. I remember the Benwa weekend and then it was optional to like to go to SmackDown. We went to SmackDown but we weren't booked. We were just there. Okay. And then Stephanie said something like guys don't worry vignette next week or whatever and it did air. Okay. And it was just like the most generic horrible vignette. And then so what was it like what was it? It's like video clips of us doing like armed drags across bodies and it's our song like let's go. The major brother is coming soon. Pretty pretty brutal. So our first match I believe it's Dallas in Dallas. Yes. We're right knocked out the action. Okay. And the problem is this like local extra talent like some guys are guys who really deserve to be there and some guys should burn their boots. And these guys like they're supposed to make us look better. They made us look worse. They didn't like see it that way. And so it is like their big opportunity. And like a bump and feed it's called a bump feed because you're bumping in your feed in and this one mother fucker is not bumping in feeding. He was like dude he like pumped up. He like oiled. He just did a lot of things that you could tell like all that. Yeah. I think he like flames on his gear. The other thing I remember is that I don't know why but John Cena was there. And it's one of the first times they ever like really interacted with us. And he was like this you guys have a squash tonight or whatever. And he's like this is your match. Make sure you take over like don't give him shit beat the fuck out of him. Basically not saying that but he said that. And then I I to this day I don't know if I was too fired up and I was like lace in this dude or he was just like the drizzling shits and couldn't bump would feed. It was never really it's horrible. Yeah, it's bad. It's also okay. It's like a five or seven minute baby face squash match. The shits. Yes. And we went home like crazy early for that. Like how about Briscoe's pissed. Well like three maybe maybe three minutes early and we're like fuck it. Like what else are we supposed to do? And we get back to the back and Gerald Briscoe meets this right there curtain. He's screaming at us like you fucking have time to stick to your time. Like that kind of shit. We're like whoa. She knows that. And he's right. That's like yeah that's not good. That's pro wrestling like you have times that's part of the art. Like you have to stick to it. And then like I think even in the lecture he was giving us he's like well guess what now like undertake us to do three more minutes because you didn't do it like that's not you know not fair and not how it was like okay. I don't know if it's the next week but it's very shortly thereafter. We're wrestling. Chavo Guerrero who's the Cruiserweight champion Jamie Noble. Now first Jamie Noble he doesn't want to work as we're meeting him but there he's like y'all from tough enough right. Something like that. He's already pissed. It's one of my favorites. They're like double pissed because they say oh basically they say like you're not important enough to pin so we're going to pin Chavo Guerrero and the Chavo Guerrero's pissed because he's the Cruiserweight champion he's losing to us. It's like everyone's pissed. They don't want to be in the match. They don't want to call it and like it's a it's it's just not good. We blow a spot and then like they don't edit it on the show. Which is wild to this day. I'm like blown away by that. Yeah very well. Yeah. It's like I think we get flustered we try to just do a spot. Sure like the first it's the first thing and it goes bad and then we're just flustered and just bad. Right. It's a bad combo of like super green dudes like us and grizzled veterans who are not or checked out on the whole situation you know not motivated bad combo. I think we're flustered before him where we're supposed to do something with with Jamie like a double leapfrog. But somehow Chavo's in there so we tried to do with Chavo anyway and Chavo's like what the fuck you would. Yeah. He like rolls through it like a pro like just like rolls literally rolls. We're just so green like and just you know once once. Something goes off the rails. It's just like each. Right. Oh for sure. Yeah. And I don't recall ever getting back on track after that. It's just not a great match. No I mean like major brothers doing anything. No there's just randomly and it's in Bakersfield that because I always think of Bakersfield we randomly win this battle royal to open the show and then we think in our minds it's like this big opportunity to work. But I think that something happened. It was supposed to be on Long Island the week before and someone was hurt. So we end up working like do some domino in a dark and then it happens the next week in Bakersfield. I don't remember that detail of it but I thought it was just the most random thing ever. But we did go on our first overseas tour before that work in do some domino in like Australia, Singapore, Thailand. That's why I said we worked like seven days a week because even if we were on all the live events we'd work like Dave Taylor and Paul Burtchell. Yeah. For the most part or eventually not later on just the infestous but then if we weren't on that we'd have to go to these OVW live events which were like shit. Which was like one of the reasons Deep South closed was because Jody Hamilton wasn't trying to like grow it or get us the reps that we needed to, everyone needed to become better wrestlers. He didn't want to spend the money or take a gamble and running a show. OVW was like the complete opposite bro. They had a full three, sometimes four shows a weekend like and they're like kind of deep drives, you know, two, three hours and then there are these little like podunk towns no fence and there'd be like 50 people there, maybe 40 people and we'd give them a full card and like I mean that I don't regret it right and there was a lot of like great learning experiences from some of those matches and stuff but like you were working bro like you were working. So help me figure out because I'm having a hard time with the time frame here. debut in May, get drafted like June of July and the whole and just kind of floating until December. Yeah. It is. It's literally like I go home for Christmas for that right? Yeah. Now there are like there are times where like now it's like a weird dynamic like ECW and Smackdown are like on the same show. Sometimes we're working like Miss and Morrison like I remember like towards the end like we tried being a little more like edgy Christian like not like he was but like at least they gave us at least one like backstage like a box promo and I started where I started wearing like a beanie. That's like major brothers you start wearing like that like sleeve. Yeah. Any more follow up? I have a couple things. So Dylan Horn Swaggle, Postl star of leprechaun two and Muppets to and Muppets to or no leprechaun origins. So I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. I'm going to say that. 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