Breeze further looks back at his time with WWE.
While Tyler Breeze was guest appearing on Busted Open Radio, his run in WWE became the topic of conversation for a good portion of the interview.
Bully Ray asked Breeze how he went from being the ‘flavor’ of the period he was hot in NXT to going to the main roster and not having that same presentation. Breeze is not sure if Vince McMahon saw in him what Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque did.
I have an idea (of why I went from the presentation I had in NXT to where I ended up). So I knew once we started kind of got rolling with NXT, we were creating something special and the group of people that we had and again, at the time, it’s all about time and place and we were at the right place at the time with the right people and luckily, I was prepared enough and given the opportunities at these TakeOvers and these big events to deliver and kind of show what I can do so, once it got to that point in NXT, I knew it was a matter of time before I probably got called up. It’s just the nature of the beast and how it goes. You can’t stay in that atmosphere or stay the NXT guy forever. So when I got called up, I kind of had an idea, you know what I mean? It’s not like you’re clueless going into this thing that like, I’m not the biggest so that’s automatically working against you. I was very much a character that you’re either gonna love it or you’re gonna hate it. I don’t know if there’s a middle ground and when I came up, I just don’t know if Vince (McMahon) saw the same thing that Hunter did and that’s why he paired me with Summer Rae immediately which I love Summer, she’s great but at the time, I was kind of in the groove of my thing and I was very specific on how I made Tyler Breeze where you didn’t really know if he was heterosexual or — I was right on the fence, you know what I mean? But the thing was that he was in love with himself so I didn’t need a tag partner, I didn’t need a manager, I didn’t need a girl, I didn’t need a guy, I didn’t need anything and as soon as they paired me with her, I went, ‘Okay. This is already changing the dynamic of what it was in NXT. So we’ll kind of have to see where it goes from here’ and as the ball started rolling, I just kind of went, okay, I don’t know if he takes this seriously enough or if he thinks I’m too small or whatever it is and it just never really got the same opportunities on a TakeOver or something like that for NXT and just, you know, kind of does what it does where you blend into the pack of people that are there until you kind of get proactive again because you go, man, I’m not getting used here. I should probably think of something. That’s when me and (Dirty) Dango found each other and started doing the Fashion Files and everything else…
Later in the conversation, Breeze recounted when he had meetings or brief interactions with McMahon. He shared the story of when him and Dirty Dango went to talk to McMahon, but he was getting a massage. He shared another interaction with McMahon that came when Breeze was dressed as Nikki Bella and McMahon wanted to see how he looked.
One of the reasons why I never wanted to go up and knock on the door (of Vince McMahon) is because what if I don’t know — and this is just one of those funny, weird, personal things, but what if I don’t hear what he says? What do I do? Do I just walk in or do I not walk in? That’s always one of those thoughts in your head so I’m like, ‘Okay, let’s just do it, let’s do it’ and I go, oh, (Dirty) Dango obviously, he’s got some experience here, he’s talked to Vince, he knows the right stuff, I’m gonna trust him. So we walk up to the door and there’s no one standing there and I go, alright, here’s the thing. So I walk up, I knock on the door and I just hear (a grunt noise) and I go, ‘Oh no,’ and so I look over at Dango and I go, ‘Do I go in? Do I not go in?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, just go in.’ I said, ‘Alright.’ So I open up the door and Vince is laying on a massage table getting a massage and he just looks up and he goes, ‘Not now’ and I go, ‘Alright’ and I close the door and Dango’s rolling on the floor. He’s just laughing his head off and I go, ‘Why’d you tell me to go in!?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know!’ He goes, ‘I would’ve gone in too’ and I was like, ‘God!’ I was like, of course, the one time I go to talk to him, it’s that and that kind of sums it up. The other time I talked to him, I was dressed as Nikki Bella and it was just kind of like, alright and he just wanted to see how I looked so I walked in, he was sitting in a chair in the middle of a room and I go, ‘Hey Vince’ and he goes, ‘Haha. Yeah, cool’ and I go, ‘Alright’ and so it’s like, that was my interactions with Vince up until that point.
Alongside Shawn Spears, Breeze runs the Flatbacks Wrestling School in Forest City, Florida. Breeze is back on the independents in addition to the work he does with Xavier Woods on UpUpDownDown.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Busted Open Radio with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
