There was a time when the Grizzled Young Veterans, Zack Gibson and James Drake, looked like they had the potential to become one of the hottest acts in the WWE Universe.
A throwback tag team with a recognizable gimmick, a tough style, and the legacy of British wrestling behind them, GYV looked about as can't-miss as they come from a wrestling standpoint, but much like FTR before them, sometimes it's not about how well you can wrestle but how much creative has for you, and in the group's case, when NXT transitioned from its Black and Gold heyday to the 2.0 era, their push fell by the wayside, as Zack Gibson noted in an interview with Fightful.
“I don’t want to air too much of WWE’s dirty laundry because that’s obviously for them to talk about, but there was a lot of changes. There were so many changes happening backstage that one week, there was this new directive, they just tore it all down, decided to go in this completely new direction. So now the writers have a completely new direction to go with, they have new targets and quotas that they have to hit. We have to put X amount of new athletes on the show, so suddenly we’re not the focus anymore. Then two weeks go by, there’s another huge shift behind the scenes, now we’re doing this. They were just, I don’t know what the f**k they were doing, for lack of a better term, to be honest [laughs]. But it was changing every week, it seemed, and there were so many things going on until they finally found their feet again. Maybe not found their feet’s the right word, but until they decided fully what they were doing,” Zack Gibson told Fightful.
“There was a couple of weeks where it was just a different thing every single week, a different directive every single week. Within that period of chaos, we were not the focus. Again, they don’t owe us anything. The company owes us nothing. Pro wrestling owes us nothing. But us, we care about our own career. Our main focus is our career. Their main focus may not be, but our main focus is. So when we don’t become the focus anymore, and we start getting shifted into a different role where we almost become player-coaches, on-screen but kind of helping out a lot more talent, then over a longer period, we realized, ‘Well, our career’s not going anywhere right now. This is not going in the direction that we want it to.’ The money’s good, but it’s not worth feeling this way, so it’s time to move on and go and have fun again.”
Whoa, so you're saying NXT 2.0‘s creative was that segmented? Well, if the goal of the brand's relaunch was to make it more of a developmental territory and less of a super indie fed, then having those changes would have perfectly prepared performers for working under Vince McMahon, who'd re-write episodes of RAW in the middle of the live broadcast famously. Still, it wasn't just that uncertainty that left the Grizzled Young Vets interested in a release, as James Drake noted in the interview, too.
The Grizzled Young Veterans didn't see a bright future in WWE.
Chiming into the conversation, James Drake added his two cents to the story, noting that while he appreciated the lifestyle NXT afforded the Grizzled Young Vets, neither saw a future with the promotion long-term, as they didn't want to be player-coaches in their early 30s.
“Yeah, definitely, I think it’s a nice complement, and it really is a nice complement when the office trusts you to guide people through live TV. A lot of people have done amazing for themselves, but at that time, they were literally thrown in the deep end, and they’ve done really well for themselves now. But it was a nice complement, it was nice that they trusted us to get people through two-segment, three-segment matches, but then we became player-coaches, and for what it’s worth, I felt, we became old furniture, so to speak, because of how quickly everything turns over there. Especially with NXT, it’s such a fast business model where characters are on TV six months to a year, maybe two years at a max, and then they’re off onto the main roster,” James Drake explained.
“By the time me and Zack decided, we were already three years in, and we were very much good tools for them to get people ready. But again, it’s good money, and it’s a comfortable job. Myself and Zack, we didn’t have to turn up to the PC. The PC was for people who were learning to wrestle. We didn’t have to do that. Our actual schedule near the end was just a Tuesday, and I live ten minutes away from the Performance Center, so I would do my match, and then I’d go home, and I’d see my lovely dogs and my wife. It’d be very comfortable, but that’s not why I moved away from my friends and family and why we didn’t close our business in the UK. It’s not what we sacrificed all this for, and it wasn’t a fallout or anything with the company. It was just, we need to move on, to either move on and just progress our careers elsewhere and never look back, or go elsewhere, and if everything aligns a certain way, we might go back. But we just don’t know how things are going. We just know we needed to shake it up.”
Could WWE have figured things out if they really wanted to, allowing the group to leave Schism and go back to their old gimmicks? Sure, the main roster is having a bit of a tag team renaissance, and it would have been cool to see them duke it out weekly with the Creed Brothers, DIY, and the New Catch Republic. Still, good on Shawn Michaels and Matt Bloom for letting them leave and look good on the way out, as it helped to set up new opportunities in TNA, RevPro, and around the world.
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