Pretty Deadly were called up to the SmackDown roster during the 2023 WWE Draft, but were they aware of this beforehand?
Elton Prince discussed the team learning about the call-up, whether they knew about it ahead of time, and more on the latest episode of WWE’s “After the Bell” podcast.
Highlights from the podcast are included below:
On getting the call up:
“When I heard the call, there was two words going on on my brain, and that was, ‘Yes, boy.’ I was pumped. We’d been working towards this for a while. Big Road Dogg himself said our names, and a beautiful day. I can’t complain.”
On believing they were probably getting drafted:
“Obviously nobody knew, but for those watching the NXT product, there was an attempted murder against us the week before. Up until the draft, no one actually knew that luckily me and Kit are the best swimmers in the world. We actually grew up giving Michael Phelps someone to race with while he was training. That’s just sort of something that we haven’t really bragged about before. But we managed to make it out alive.
“We felt like we had a pretty good chance of being drafted because our presence on NXT, hence the attempted murder, but we didn’t know when Road Dogg said my name. We always talk about how we heard Elton, and that was it. We were up and excited, and everyone in the room was cheering and clapping. It wasn’t until we sat down that we were like, ‘Wait, where are we? What brand are we going to?’ Our minds didn’t even hear that part. It was just ‘Elton’ and we were just excited.”
You can check out the complete podcast below:
