Kid Kash Says WWE Wanted Fans To Forget That He Was In ECW After He Was Called Up To SmackDown

Kid Kash reflects on finally making it to the WWE roster and WWE explicitly not wanting him to be associated with his time in ECW. 

Kid Kash first appeared on WWE main roster television in late 2005. By WWE Armageddon 2005, he would defeat Juventud Guerrera to capture his first WWE Cruiserweight Championship. However, Kash first appeared as part of ECW One Night Stand 2005 before heading to the Deep South Wrestling developmental territory.

Appearing on the Developmentally Speaking podcast, Kash reflected on WWE specifically not wanting him to be associated with the Extreme Championship Wrestling brand and being called up to the WWE SmackDown roster. 

“I’m not really sure how that happened,” Kash said when asked about how he finally ended up in WWE after spending some time in TNA Wrestling. “I know that Tommy Dreamer and Paul Heyman were there, Rob Van Dam, all the top ECW guys were there. I think they were on the verge, at that point, of buying the ECW rights. I think Tommy and Paul might have had an idea of bringing me into the ECW portion, you know, the company part of it, but when I got there, they just decided that they wanted me to be a SmackDown [Superstar]. 

“I asked them,” Kash continued. “I was like, ‘Am I gonna be a part of ECW, and they were like, ‘No, we don’t want you to be a part even though you’re one of the original guys. We want the crowd to forget that you were there. We want them to forget about you being an ECW guy.’ Because, even when I wrestled on SmackDown, the crowd would still chant ‘ECW’ whenever I would do a big high-flying move. So I don’t know if that bothered him or what, but they were like, ‘We want them to forget that you were there, and we want them to look at you as a SmackDown-branded wrestler.” 

Kash also reflected on being one of the veterans in Deep South Wrestling and helping train some of the younger guys. However, he says he was only there for a total of six weeks before they called him to the main roster. 

“I was only there like a total of like six weeks. They called me up,” he recalls. “They came down. They brought a lot of agents down one night. We just got in the ring and started working around and stuff and evidently impressed some of the people, and they already knew who I was because when they got there, they walked straight up to me and Johnny Swinger and was like, ‘Hey, I can’t believe you finally made it. ‘We’ve been trying to get you for years, and you’re finally here,’ That kind of conversation.  Then they watched me and stuff. [Michael Hayes and Bruce Prichard], those guys were down there, and Ricky Steamboat. So I think they just liked — because I’m a seller, you know, a lot of the young guys weren’t selling, they were just trying to get their moves in. So I was getting my moves in, selling, and being a ring veteran, putting the guy over that I was working, selling his shit, working with him a little bit. So they liked that. Then they came up with the idea of me and Juventud having our angle for the Cruiserweight Title and all that stuff.”

Ultimately, Kid Kash would only be WWE Cruiserweight Champion for a month before losing it to Gregory Helms at the 2006 WWE Royal Rumble event. He would later be repackaged into a tag team with Jamie Noble taking on the identity of The Pitbulls. 

WWE would release Kash in September 2006. He would continue to wrestle in promotions like TNA and on the independents for more than a decade after. 

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