Aiden English almost got fired by WWE before he actually got fired by WWE.
English, aka Matt Rehwoldt, recalled the story about how he almost got fired in 2018 for having “too much” fun in a dark match after SmackDown. For those that are unaware, Rehwoldt explained the purpose of a dark match and the normally laid-back format of them. He went on to explain how he, Rusev and Baron Corbin were in a six-man tag team match against The Usos and AJ Styles, and they all decided they were gonna do something fun where they start throwing a superkick party.
He went over the plan, which involved a lengthy run of nothing but kicks, then his team would turn on him and the babyfaces would win to send the fans home happy.
“But as we go, they kick, kick, kick, everybody’s pretty much [thrown a kick] in the match—except the referee, so the audience starts chanting ‘Referee! Referee!’ So, I go out again and they roll me back one more time and there’s the referee! [He] kicks me and I go ‘God!’ Everybody exploded. The crowd loved it! And now I figured we were going to go to the ending,” he explained, “So, I go back in one more time, I tell everybody to stop but then everyone’s chanting ‘Ref! Ref!’ and AJ starts taking the referee’s shirt off, puts it on himself and is like ‘Kick his ass!’ or whatever.”
“I don’t know what’s going on, I’m still thinking ‘Are we gonna do the original finish? I guess not, but we’re gonna do something with the ref Dan.’ And then, sure enough, they start lining up and they’re like, ‘everybody kick, everybody kick’ so boom, triple kick on all of us. AJ jumps over, one-two-three,” he said, “Rusev, of course, kicks out from the referee to protect yourself at all times, and the audience popped, it was a blast. End of SmackDown, end of a long weekend for us. It was great. The audience loved it.”
Read More: Aiden English Says He Fell In Love With Doing Commentary More Than He Expected
While the audience might have loved it, those in charge didn’t and chewed them out for going off-script and “burying” the wrestling business.
“We get backstage and we get chewed a new one. Vince McMahon wasn’t there. Triple H wasn’t there. But the producers, for some reason—I’m convinced because it was us and not some other major star. [They said] ‘That’s not how you do it. You buried yourselves out there, you buried the business, you made this look like… all this and that, people are not gonna like this,” he explained, “This was the SmackDown, I believe, right before WrestleMania. We had to fly right down to New Orleans for WrestleMania [34] and we get sat down, we got threatened with release, with gigantic fines – $10,000, $20,000 fines, all of this stuff.
“The referee’s gonna get fired and everything, even though we were all telling him ‘Hey, do it! This is great, this is fun!’ The poor guy, I think he got fined. We got sat down at WrestleMania in the green room at the hotel. [We got reprimanded again] ‘You can’t do this! You can’t do this!’” Rehwoldt said. “It was unbelievable for having some fun.”
Rehwoldt closed the video by saying he hopes that that type of fun can return and no one has to worry about being fined or scolded for having fun, but then added the following tidbit while promoting it on Twitter:
Fun Fact: John Cena apparently paid our fine…https://t.co/qeAwo2TuKN pic.twitter.com/r0qmGB0VZi
— Matthew Rehwoldt (@DramaKingMatt) December 13, 2020
If you use any portion of this transcription, please credit WrestleZone.com
Read More: Aiden English Shares What WWE Tells Talents To Tweet
