TNA star “Speedball” Mike Bailey spoke with Chris Jericho as part of the Talk Is Jericho podcast on a number of topics including how signing with WWE several years ago was stopped due to the new hiring guidelines in place by the company at the time.
Bailey said, “January 2022 is when I debuted with TNA, with IMPACT then, but it was a long road even then. When my ban came up, the day I tweeted a little highlight video that I made, a little announcement my ban was ended, and then that got a lot of attention and that got me talking to everyone, that got me signed with NXT for a couple of months until they let me go without actually hiring me.”
“After that video came out, I had already been talking with TNA, talked to some people from AEW, talked to NXT, got a bunch of offers and ended up taking the NXT one, very excited to be there, they do the background check, the do the visa paperwork, that takes a couple of months.”
“Just a couple of days after I submit the visa paperwork, for this one you have to go and do a whole career retrospective and all the articles with all your accolades, you have to gather that and send it in, so I worked on that for several weeks, sent it all in and then I see they’re starting to release a lot of the people in NXT, they’re letting go of people, and the person that had hired me, there were rumors that they had gotten released, so I texted them and I was like hey, is everything okay, are we good, and they were like oh yeah, no problem, contract’s in the mail, we’re sending it tomorrow, and then the next day I got an e-mail saying hey, due to new hiring guidelines, we’re going to have to stop your hiring process.”
“I was not like whatever, I was freaking out, I was pretty panicked. Again, this is a big deal for someone like me, I had made some very serious steps to plan my move to Orlando, uproot my whole life and then, here we are again, so it’s like well, let’s see what we can do to fix this, and so I got back in touch with everyone that I had spoken to and I ended up signing with TNA, with IMPACT.”
You can check out the complete podcast below.
