Grizzled Young Veterans knew they had to leave the WWE when they did.
Zack Gibson and James Drake were one of the top teams in Britain when they signed to the WWE in 2018. They excelled in NXT UK, but struggled when brought over to America as “Schism” in NXT.
The pair were released by the WWE last year, six months after originally requesting their release. Grizzled Young Veterans recently spoke to Cultaholic, revealing how they knew it was time to leave the WWE. James Drake said:
“We decided just before Stand & Deliver last year that we’ll tidy up the storyline at Stand & Deliver. Because at that point everything’s done. Then we would go and talk to the office and have conversations about us wanting to leave. We did the match and both myself and Zack were on the ramp looking back at the ring. At that point, myself anyway, I was genuinely ready to move on now… As a whole, WWE are doing great business, and it’s a great place to be. It wasn’t a great place for us.”
“We were being optimized to help the younger talent get ready. Because there was an influx of brand-new wrestlers from 2.0 that really didn’t know anything about wrestling. We used to own a wrestling school, so we could actually articulate things as well. It was a nice compliment that they could see that in us. They trusted us to get people essentially prepared for a main roster run. On the flip side, we were kind of locked in a situation where we couldn’t progress, and we could see that. So we got to a point where we’re still grizzled, young, but we’re only young for so long. It was one of those times where it was now or never, essentially.”
Grizzled Young Veterans Made The Right Decision In Leaving
Zack Gibson continued to speak for the Grizzled Young Veterans. He told Cultaholic that the pair saw the WWE getting better, while their own personal careers were faltering.
He said that it’s clear from how their career is going now (working for companies like TNA and AEW) that they made the correct choice.
“It was a big decision to make, it wasn’t something that was made overnight. There was no one big thing that made us do it. It was more of a combination of a lot of things that came together…The easiest way that we have found to describe it is in a nutshell, WWE’s stock is going up and up and up, but our personal stock at the time was going down. Regardless of where their stock was going, obviously we are our own business. We looked at ourselves and noticed that our stock was going down, so we did something about it. Now, six months out, our stock is going up again, so we made the right decision.”
