For close to a full year, Kendrick and London were champions.
With one reign as SmackDown’s WWE Tag Team Champions under their belts, Paul London and Brian Kendrick held the belts for 331 days.
London looks back at that time of his career as ‘heartwarming’, he told Captain’s Corner as he was doing a virtual signing. London feels that WWE did not have any intentions of he and Brian being Tag Team Champions, especially for as along as they were.
He feels the reason they held onto the titles is because they delivered with every team that they were paired with.
That’s a very heartwarming memory [London & Kendrick’s WWE Tag Title run]. That was a very exciting time in our life and the career we had, so, yeah, we just did the best we could and I think the thing we took away from a lot of that too was that we were never, or seldom ever written into any plans. They didn’t have any intention for us to be tag champs, especially for that long. They didn’t have any intention of incorporating us into big storylines or teaming us up with somebody to get the rub or whatever. That was rarely, if ever, a part of the conversation so, for us to have maintained being on top for almost a year, that was really just because we kept knocking it out of the park with every team they sent our way. We were doing our best to come up with just the most original matches that we could and so we just take a lot of pride in each team that we worked with for any considerable amount of time, whether it was on Velocity or Heat or, you know, we put our all into it and there’s something kind of memorable about each team that we ended up working with.
Getting into the conversation about how tag team wrestling was once viewed under Vince McMahon’s regime, London recounted Shane McMahon telling him, Kendrick and Gene Snitsky that no one has cared about tag wrestling since The Legion of Doom (Hawk & Animal). That led to Paul questioning the company’s ‘TLC era’.
This is from Shane McMahon’s mouth himself, he said, ‘Nobody’s cared about tag team wrestling since The Legion of Doom’ and he told that to Brian [Kendrick] and I and [Gene] Snitsky when we were at the offices in Connecticut… because we were trying to figure out like what? How are we not able to get to the next level here? The company didn’t create shirts for us until after our tag run which makes — that makes no sense. Why wouldn’t you capitalize on it? So yeah, it was things like that but for him to say, ‘Nobody’s cared about tag team wrestling since Legion of Doom,’ it’s like, well what was your whole TLC era?… So you’re sh*tting on all of them? So yeah, I don’t know. That was a weird period of my life.
Paul London is taking pro wrestling bookings again. Brian Kendrick is working the independent scene and runs his own promotion that is based in California.
If the quotes in this article are used, please credit Captain’s Corner with an H/T to POST Wrestling for the transcriptions.
