Big Damo Talks WWE Superstar Shakeups (Patreon)

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Killian Dain/Big Damo

Call-up

That’s a really good question—I think at that point they were filming the call ups. I remember, I think they used the IIconics footage and stuff like that, but they didn’t use our footage because all of us went, ‘It was just Nikki going up.’ We were all quite disappointed. They probably got the opposite reaction that they were hoping for because they never used the footage. But we found out maybe a week before they announced it. But I know for a lot of other people, it’s on the day. You can be very unlucky or whatever else.

We know somebody had seen one of our promos or something like that and went, ‘Great! We’re gonna call them up.’ So all of our stories suddenly changed to whatever else. I think I was feuding with Lars at the time. Literally, ‘Oh! We need to end this very quickly.’ So they did. That was just the way it was. It was funny it was all hurried and then we sat for two months before they realized what they were gonna start us with. Then they changed it anyways. But that’s just the way it is. That’s a live television show. There’s no way to predict it.

Like, Shinsuke Nakamura gets bitten by a dog for real, a bomb dog, it was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen. We were doing the house show circuit and we were about to debut on television and it all had to change because something as random as that happens. You just have to roll with it and sadly it meant we started at a loss. It was meant to be something very different. The week before we were meant to debut at the end of Smackdown in the main event, but they went over time so we’re all standing at Gorilla in our gear. It was the most bizarre… But that’s live TV. You just have to smile and wave and hope it gets right next week, you know what I mean? But then in between those two weeks, the thing with Shinsuke happens. It was the most bizarre thing that I ever seen."

2019 Shakeup

"WrestleMania week we had a match against Undisputed Era on one of the Worlds Collide events. We didn’t know that was gonna be our last match. That was crazy that we found out a couple of days later speaking to Hunter. He said, ‘Listen, we’re gonna send you to NXT. Wolfe’s going to NXT:UK and EY’s going to RAW.’ I’m like, ‘That was it?’ It’s one of those things you just have to smile and wave. We knew that something was gonna have to change one way or the other. The sad part is we didn’t expect it to come about out of nowhere. We felt there might be a couple more ways, but the way it’d been leading up to that, there was something gonna change.

For all of us it was an opportunity to go off and try something new. We were all singles wrestlers going into this, so it made sense that we’d all go for singles matches elsewhere. We had a lot of fun together. Sanity was so much fun to be apart of it. I can’t even begin explain. But realistically, you take Nikki right out of the group at the start; you’re being hamstrung right at the start because she was such an important part of the act. Then they want us to be slightly different than what we were in NXT, and that’s fine. You expect a things to change. Then it was little things here and there, and that’s fine. We all got to go do what we did after. It worked out, especially in Alexander Wolfe’s favor. Because he got to go showcase he was a great in ring talent. For EY, it didn’t work out as good for him because I think he was more involved backstage than he was in ring. He ends up back in IMPACT Wrestling, he’s killing it all across the globe."