During their heyday, there wasn't a faction in WWE, especially in NXT, that was putting on more five-star matches than The Undisputed Era, the union of Adam Cole, Kyle O'Reilly, Roderick Strong, and Bobby Fish, who came together in developmental in 2017 and worked together more or less continuously until the spring of 2021, when members of the team slowly started leaving the promotion.
Though the group regrettably never made it to the main roster, and ultimately fell apart in less than spectacular fashion when Cole, then Fish, then O'Reilly, and finally Strong left the promotion to make their way over to AEW, fans still wonder what could have happened had the group stuck it out and stuck together – assuming Vince McMahon kept them incorporated – and stayed in WWE long-term.
One of those fans is none other than Fish himself, who noted on the Tru Heel Heat podcast that no one, not even the members of the group, wanted to see their association come to an end.
“If I’m being honest, I don’t think anybody wanted that. I think that at some point the powers that be thought, but I don’t think they were even sure that they wanted it at that point. I think the pandemic turned everything on its head. I think there were some things that were on with Pat McAfee who was kind of the entity that was going to help us turn babyface with the War Games and all that stuff, which we did. We definitely felt like and I believe WWE felt like we had a babyface run in us and who knows how long that’s gonna go before things were, and then like who knows you can’t predict so especially in pro wrestling,” Fish said via Fightful.
“So I think that decision ended up being because they just ran out of the other options and the pandemic. And everything was, you know, no audiences and everything was changing and now they needed, you know, there’s just, it’s just life. That’s how it goes and I’m a firm believer, my faith tells me that it’s his schedule not ours and there’s a reason for this stuff and he was preparing us for something else, you know, not for the four of us to stay together. And who knows what that is and we may never know, but I have faith that it’ll make sense.”
Fortunately, when KOR is healthy enough to wrestle once more, it looks like fans will get a new Undisputed Era run, even if they don't necessarily go by that moniker. Unfortunately for Fish, he's the only member of the faction who isn't signed to AEW at the moment, and the jury's still out on whether he will ever return again, considering the comments he's made about CM Punk in the past.
Bobby Fish finally explains where the reDRagon moniker came from.
Elsewhere in his appearance on Tru Heel Heat, Bobby Fish finally explained where the moniker reDRagon came from and why the duo strangely decided to capitalize the “DR” in the one-word name.
“The name was me. I was reading a book at the time and it was something I took from the book. It was Red Dragons with an S, but I shortened it to just reDRagon and I thought because Kyle and I both did martial arts and we’re trying to be heels, so a couple of little extra detail layers that were things that as a kid, growing up that I loved about wrestling were the details. And so I figured, ‘okay reDRagon, anything dragon is very, you know, commercialized, American martial artsy, you know.’ So anything Dragon they’re gonna think like, ‘oh these guys, you know, these two karate guys think they’re dragons’ and you know, reDRagon, I don’t know it just sounded douchey to me. I was like, it’s perfect and then as we’re trying to, I’m trying to come up with a way to like, you know, design what the logo might look like I realized like, ‘oh my God, there’s a D and an R simultaneously in the spelling next to each other.’ Davey Richards, it’s perfect, it’s perfect, it’ll be all lower case and we’re capitalizing the D and the R and we’re never gonna acknowledge it. We’re never ever going to say that that’s what it is, let people come to their own conclusion,” Fish said via Fightful.
“I mean, that’s truly what it was because the way we were coming into things was through a feud with Davey Richards, and it was Kyle’s bone to pick with Davey Richards. So it was kind of like that shot at Davey, and it put, you know, and I think it was putting some heat and some steam on the thing unspoken, but with Ring of Honor fans between me and Davey gave us a bone of contention because you know, here I kind of, you know, influenced his guy to, you know, further get away from him. So yeah, I mean it was just fun to like layer in those details just so much fun.”
Wait, so the entire reDRagon moniker is because Bobby Fish was reading a book and Kyle O'Reilly doesn't like Davey Richards of the American Wolves? Well, that makes about as much sense as MJF saying he, like Vince McMahon, doesn't consider Adam Cole a top guy.
Follow Us
Subscribe