Michael Tarver on the Nexus Raw Debut, Nexus Losing Momentum Fast, and Nexus Creating Real Sympathy for Him

Michael Tarver Talks Nexus

Michael Tarver was the most recent guest for the Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling podcast. Tarver talks about his time in Nexus and how that created real sympathy for him. You can listen to the full podcast here. Highlights below:

Daniel Bryan was the only one who didn’t have a gimmick but it all out worked really well. One of the things I had to get myself over or to separate myself other than the promos I was doing was t-shirts. When they took my knockout punch and they took my gloves I was wearing a t-shirt that had a 1.9 on it and I don’t know if anyone else has ever done it on WWE TV before but as far as I know I am the first person to wear merch that’s not WWE sanctioned merch. I don’t know if anyone else got on WWE TV, I know that CM Punk wore his Gracie Jiu-Jitsu stuff but like I wore MY own stuff. Then in every NXT season after season everyone had their own t-shirts and even now everyone on the current NXT roster has their own merch and their own t-shirts. If you ask any of them where it came from. I bet none of them would probably know. 

When David Otunga punched out the ref and Darren Young and Heath Slater took out the ring announcer and Jerry the King and took out the security everyone said wait a second this is different and it was just us and Cena. That was the design and the feel they wanted the Nexus to have it wasn’t “uh-oh” they are about to kick some butt, it was “something is wrong”. That was the feel. We didn’t just go out and jump Cena, we beat the mess out of him. They told us to destroy everything and if you don’t you’re fired. It had to be completely a secret, they gave us the arm-bands and nobody knew that we were there to rip up the ring. We broke cameras, we broke chairs, ripped up the set. I have never felt such a more deafening silence in my life then I did that night in South Beach. It was so quiet but the silence was deafening. It was like when Taker lost at Mania, it was complete shock

We didn’t know what the direction was and honestly I don’t think that they did either. We all had our own experiences and are smart enough to know it really makes the most sense for us to win and it doesn’t hurt them, it actually helps them if we win and continue because then they can keep building. That was the first time in a long time that Cena had real sympathy because people were kind of over him and he’s even though he is always going to be over no matter what because he’s John Cena but that was the first time in a long time that he had real sympathy. He did his thing and John Cena is great, he’s amazing. To me, I think they got greedy.  That storyline should have ended at WrestleMania. We should have won, grown stronger added Mason Ryan, added Bray Wyatt (Husky Harris), added Joe Hennig (Curtis Axel) or maybe even add CM Punk and make it a super or even bigger group.