Folks, the Good Brothers are officially in WWE. That’s right, while the news of Doc-now-Luke Gallows and “Machine Gun” Karl Anderson jumping ship from NJPW and Impact to The Fed is nothing new, as the return of The OC is so well-worn that they’ve already worked a “Premium Live Event” and added a fourth member to the faction in Mia Yim, Corey Graves officially called the team by their indie name, the Good Brothers, on commentary.

But why? Has WWE gotten really liberal with their rules and allowed the duo to stick with their indie team name on RAW? Or was this simply another example of commentary being allowed to mention other promotions, as basically every company save AEW has been namedropped one way or another over the past three months? Or it might just be because Graves had The OC on his podcast, After The Bell, and they explained the Step Brothers-style moment that turned them into Good Brothers.

“I sent my ‘Hey brother’ message,” Gallows told Graves. “’Hey brother, is there anything going on in New Japan?’ and that’s how it all kind of came together. We had, like that Step Brothers moment where, like, we had a really cool match in Korakuen Hall (and Karl asked) ‘do you like Mexican food?’ And I said ‘yeah’ and he goes ‘do you like beer?’ (and I go) ‘yeah’ and he goes ‘do you want to go with my sponsor to have Mexican food and beer?’ (and I go) ‘yeah’ and about an hour in, we were like, ‘did we just become best friends?’”

So there you go, the Good Brothers nickname belongs to a night of drinking deer and eating tacos on a night after wrestling under the “bright lights” of Korakuen Hall; though the exact story was unknown up to this point, in a way, it couldn't be any more obvious.

The Good Brothers shoot on what brought them back to WWE.

Elsewhere in his interview with The Brothers, Graves asked about the journey that brought the duo back to WWE, as transcribed by Matt Black of Yahoo.

“It was weird how it worked out because we had gone back and forth with Uncle Al [AJ Styles] before the regime change, but we weren’t talking about anything,” Luke Gallows admitted. “Honestly, we had just done the two years in IMPACT, and we were thankful to them. It was a great two years there, but we wanted to recharge our batteries. We wanted to hit Japan pretty hard. So we were like, let’s just take this time. Let’s go to Japan through the New Year. And then let’s make a decision of what we want to do.”

“So we’re in Dallas, and we’re doing our last match with the Motor City Machine Guns there. And we just get a text from Triple H, ‘Hey, guys, can we talk?’ and we went, well sh*t, here we go! Maybe we should text back and say let’s talk. But we still didn’t know if this was something that we could do or wanted to do or what was gonna come out of it after what had happened the last time. Then we got on the phone, and we could feel the new vibe and how positive everything was. And one thing led to another from there.”

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“Bright Lights” then cut into the conversation and explained why the duo were willing to leave NJPW, especially as the NEVER Openweight Championship, even after being fired by WWE back in 2020 in a move that had made Paul Heyman public enemy number one in the eyes of A.J. Styles.

“We always had a really good relationship with Triple H,” Anderson said. “He was always our guy that when our contract was coming up at the end of 2019. And it was Hunter who we talked with and ended up signing a new deal with in 2019. And so we had a good relationship, and I think that’s why when we got released, I held some angst to even if we would ever go back again or ever speak to him again.

“I didn’t know that we’d ever talked to him. So we didn’t talk to Triple H for two and a half years. Besides one text like July of 2021, Gallows sent a selfie of me and him drinking beer to Triple H that said, ‘Hope you’re doing well, baby boy.’ About three days later, I said did Hunter ever text you back? And he goes no. Then about a day later, he goes, hey Hunter wrote back and said, ‘I hope you’re doing well.’

“But besides that, we didn’t speak at all, and we were just getting home from an IMPACT Wrestling weekend. It was, ironically, our final IMPACT Wrestling weekend. We get home, and we do a FaceTime with Hunter, and we talked, asked how the families were. He asked if we wanted to come back, kind of talked out our issues. He said, ‘Hey, that was then; this is now. Let’s push forward and go.’ That’s it. Let’s go. Let’s do it.

“I’m getting chills now thinking about it because I didn’t think we’d ever have that talk again. And not just the business talk to get the personal talk out, and so it was nice to just get all that on the table. It’s over. Let’s go; now we’re going forward. Because that was it, it was done like that. And then we still had to go back to Japan. We had to do a 10-day tour. I had a singles match with Tanahashi. Then we had to go to England for New Japan. And that was October 1st and 2nd, and nobody knew that we’d already planned to do October 10 in New York City.”