You certainly don’t have to be a wrestler to have an endless amount of stories from your time within the WWE.
Broadcast personality Matt Camp has no shortage of tales to tell from his time with the company, which started in 2019 and came to a close earlier this year.
He worked for the promotion as they maneuvered the COVID-19 pandemic, saw Vince McMahon leave, return, then leave again amid disturbing allegations, and played a part in their evolving and experimental attempts at producing digital content. To say he was on the inside during turbulent moments for the promotion would be an understatement.
A few months removed from his WWE run, Camp has been willing to talk about his time with the company. He has opened up about the WWE stint on his new channel, The Wrestling Matt, where he also goes live on weekdays to share thoughts on the industry’s biggest stories. He recently joined an episode of Pollock & Thurston to discuss his thoughts on being inside the wrestling goliath for years.
Camp joined WWE back in 2019 as they launched a new web series called “The Bump.” The weekly YouTube program was a studio talk show that hoped to feed their younger, more online audiences with a variety of content. He recalled the digital team’s work on the show not always being approved, at times receiving criticism from the promotion’s TV team, in part because it would push the envelope of what would be allowed by WWE.
“It was pitched to me as ‘We want to have a talk show. We want it to be a little different, we want it to be younger,'” Camp told Pollock & Thurston. “I can tell you, TV was never really a big backer of the show. Behind the scenes, it was called ‘The Dump’ at times. It was very rarely mentioned on Raw or Smackdown. It didn’t get that love, the stuff that happened on that show, I don’t think TV – an earlier regime, the KD [Kevin Dunn] regime – liked how it was shot, how loose it was.”
While Camp remembers hearing that Dunn liked him, he mentioned that the digital and television sides of WWE would clash heads often, hence the negative reception to The Bump.
Camp’s work was so much more than “The Bump,” often providing pre and post-show coverage for the events, hosting live watch parties for major cards, and even serving as a reporter for the show at press conferences. He recalled being busier than ever during the pandemic, taping numerous specials and recording an extra episode of “The Bump” so the promotion could have extra content to air.
As an on-screen personality for WWE, Camp’s job was to discuss the product in a way that would uplift the programs and those on it. “I wanted to get the people I was talking to over,” he said.
This meant that he couldn’t be as critical of wrestling as he is on the platform he now finds himself broadcasting on, for example. This became a challenge for him when WWE was at its low points and producing wrestling that was critically panned.
Camp remembers being happy when McMahon departed the promotion, noting that some of his ideas during their era of hosting events at the “Thunderdome” were particularly bad.
“I think people were happy [when McMahon left],” he said. “I was happy. I know the Thunderdome was tough, but there was some awful creative there. That was the toughest part of the job, if the show sucked and me having to sell that stuff? The pandemic I don’t even want to count, ’cause stuff was trying. Remember when they used to do two-out-of-three falls matches because Vince didn’t like the commercial break? Just random stuff thrown against the wall. Let’s do [Xavier] Woods and Bobby Lashley at Hell In The Cell. Why?”
After being in a host role for years, Camp suddenly disappeared from programming in early 2024 after he was cut from the staff. He recalled being shocked by his sudden release from the company, especially since the news was dropped on him near his work for a live program.
“I was certainly blindsided because I had worked the night before,” said Camp, on when he was released by the promotion. “I did the NXT kickoff show, and then 12 hours later I got an email saying ‘You got an HR call.’ Michael Cole was my boss for my last two years there, no mention of him. I got on that HR call and they said ‘Just so you know this isn’t performance-based, that’s why your superior Michael Cole isn’t here.’ And then some fancy name for cost-cutting measure, and that was it.”
Camp admits that he enjoyed the job, but doesn’t buy the company line that everyone who works there is family.
“I knew it wasn’t a family,” he said. “I’ve been in businesses for years. I’ve had family that worked for big sports companies and have also been laid off. It’s a job, it’s a corporation, it’s a major business. It was an even bigger business when Endeavor took over and they fired all kinds of people … I never took it as family. I understood when cuts happened. I didn’t always agree with them, but that’s the nature of the business. It was a job I loved and it was a dream job. I got paid to talk about wrestling. I had zero complaints in the world, whether creative was god-awful or great. What did I have to complain about, talking about wrestling? But some people, yes, they did consider it their family.”
Now no longer in his role with “The Bump,” Camp is trying to apply his work with WWE and his lifelong fandom of wrestling to his new web show.
“I cover it coming out of that world for five years, I cover it with 30-plus years of being a wrestling fan, and I try to look at it from ‘What does the audience want, what are they getting from it?'”
