Harry Smith‘s return to WWE didn’t pan out, as he was released before his re-debut, but the company reportedly was planning a new moniker for him.
The former Davey Boy Smith Jr. previously worked for WWE from 2006-2011, and he is a former WWE Tag Team Champion. He spent the next few years working for NJPW, MLW, and AJPW, among other promotions. WWE signed him again in July 2021 after he worked a dark match on SmackDown, but the company released him in November before he appeared on television.
In an interview with Liam Alexander of Inside The Ropes, Smith described how he got COVID, and the setback derailed the plans for his return. He noted that he was told he would have been called “The Stampede Stud” upon his re-debut.
“John Cone said, ‘the next time you are going to come to SmackDown it’s going to be your debut, you did really good [in your dark match], Vince really liked it,” Smith recalled. “So I was like, great, I’ll just wait and then they asked me to do a dark match in Tampa and they were going to do some backstage vignettes with me and my father’s leather vest.
“They were going to show that for the documentary, and then luck be have it I ended up having COVID, really bad, so I was kind of out of commission for about three weeks or a month. Then I was kind of forgotten about, I came to TV one or two times… I was waiting to come back and then they called and Johnny [ Laurinaitis] said he wasn’t a fan of it [his release], he wasn’t happy with the list of names he was given but it wasn’t from him. I don’t know what they were waiting for, the only thing I was told was, I was going to be debuting on SmackDown and they were going to call me ‘The Stampede Stud.'”
Looking back on it, Smith noted that his release wasn’t his fault, as Vince McMahon himself told him that he was “looking good.”
In recent months, Smith has been working for the NWA; he’s set to challenge for the NWA World Tag Team Championship at the “Alwayz Ready” pay-per-view on June 11.
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