A former WWE Superstar recalls the time he and his tag team partner were almost fired from the company before their main roster debut.
Former and longest-reigning WWE NXT Tag Team Champions Konnor and Viktor, The Ascension, were recent guests on Rewind Recap Relive. During the conversation, Viktor revealed that a WWE higher-up once told him that he and Konnor would be released if they didn’t get called up to the main roster within three months. Canyon Ceman, the company’s former Senior Director of Talent Development, had allegedly told them that they were too old to be in NXT.
“At one point, when we did our quarterly reviews of talent with the higher ups I got told by Canyon Ceman at the time that if we weren’t brought up within the next three months, we were going to be fired. Because we were too old and we’d been in developmental too long to stay there any longer.
The Former WWE Star Explained Why He Was Disappointed With WWE’s Threat
“I always took those reviews pretty good before this one, and I looked at Canyon, and I go, ‘That sounds like some really bullshit bad business to me.’ He goes, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you guys make us somebody for all these kids out here and everybody else to look up to. Like we’re examples for the entire Performance Center of what all the future talent is supposed to aspire to. We’ve carried your tag titles for this long at NXT. We’ve done quite a bit doing that here in developmental with a lot of the developmental talent, and we’ve never been brought up for a live event, even. Meanwhile, we’d had a European tour taken away from us at one point in time that we were supposed to go on. So now you’re going to tell me that if Vince doesn’t get this in three months, you’re going to fuc*ing fire us?,’” the former WWE star said. [H/T Fightful]
The Ascension eventually made their main roster debut in December 2014, but couldn’t replicate the success of their dominant NXT run. After hanging on for a few more years, they were released from their WWE contracts in December 2019.
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