WWE star Shawn Spears recently spoke with Fightful on a number of topics including talking with the WWE prior to his return to the company.
Spears said, “I think it kinda goes back to the respect and the mutual respect and the contacts that I have made over the course of a pretty lengthy career. I had a few friends that still work in WWE and I’ve kept in touch with them all throughout the years that when it started getting floated out there that I was leaving my previous stop, then it was more about, ‘Well, what do you want to do next? Did you want to come back? Do you want us to reach out?’ Everybody was offering a helping hand, so-to-speak. Eventually what it boiled down to was me just, after having conversations with my wife and weighing out what was best for us timing wise, I reached out. I reached out and thankfully there was a possibility there. That’s the thing. You said, ‘A year ago, there’s nothing happening. A year ago, no one’s getting hired.’ This business, and you probably know better than anybody else, it changes almost daily. It’s ever evolving. It’s fast and when we’re talking about the biggest company in the world, when we’re talking about WWE, who is beyond global—to the point we’re talking universe—it is a massive company, it is a massive, fast machine. So things are going to change and business takes precedent. So if there’s an opportunity or a star like a Cody Rhodes available, you’re going to take him. A star like Jade, you’re going to take her. It’s just good business. Even Lexis King, who you mentioned, there’s a big difference between a Lexis King now and Brian Pillman that you’ve seen before. A lot of it is just the big WWE machine that has a wonderful history of making superstars. So, yeah. It came about rather quick and happily quickly. It’s an ever changing business and you never know who’s going to pop up when. That’s the biggest thing I was happy about, is that we were able to keep things a pretty quiet until we unleashed it in NXT.”
On keeping his return a secret:
“That first quote I gave you, it’s spun you guys—left, right and center. Yeah, and that’s the thing. We understand how the world works nowadays. Everybody wants the information and a lot of people want to be the first to reveal the information. But this was pretty much kept close to the chest. I didn’t tell a lot of friends. I didn’t tell a lot of close friends. I told my wife and I told her, ‘Do not tell your friends. Don’t tell your best friends. Don’t tell anybody.’ I didn’t tell my family. I didn’t tell anybody. The main people that knew was Hunter, Shawn, his team here and that was pretty much it. A lot of the coaching staff had no idea. The talent had zero idea. I was kept in a room for the majority of the day. Even when that news broke that Shawn had stood in for me, I was there. I was already there. I was already in the building. It was just a matter of keeping things as tight lipped as possible. Because I get excited, too. I get excited when someone shows up out of the blue. I get excited when, ‘Oh, this is gonna happen,’ and they throw me a curve ball and I go, ‘Oh, I didn’t see that coming.’ I love that feeling. In a day in age where information is so accessible or things are taped or things are aired in advance or spoilers get out or stuff like that, it’s still nice nowadays to get hit off guard. So that was our goal and kudos to Shawn Michaels, Matt Bloom, Johnny Russo—who’s the lead writer here in NXT. Setting that debut, setting that to debut a masterpiece tee, to be a part of that and to feel that moment, it was a homerun in terms of, ‘Ah, there he is. He’s back.’ So shout out to those guys. Obviously, wonderful minds. But big, big, big shout out for being able to keep it quiet as long as they did. Because it was probably about four weeks we were able to keep things quiet.”
You can check out Spears’ comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
