Mace On RETRIBUTION: Someone Saw Antifa And Said ‘Look At Those Nerds, Wouldn’t They Be Great Villains?’
On the August 3, 2020 episode of WWE Raw, the Performance Center was attacked by a group of hood vigilantes. In the coming weeks, the masked figures would continue to terrorize the WWE Performance Center and people inside.
The group revealed themselves to be RETRIBUTION, and the rest is some sort of history.
In September, Dominik Dijakovic, Dio Maddin, Shane Thorne, Mercedes Martinez, and Mia Yim were revealed as the main members of the group.
Speaking on Twitch alongside Mansoor, Maddin (who performed under the name MACE in RETRIBUTION), gave the origin story of the group.
Mace: How did Retribution start? That’s fun. It all started, I don’t know if you guys remember this, with a little thing in the news called Antifa. Somebody saw Antifa and said, ‘look at all those little nerds. Wouldn’t they be great villains for our TV show?’
Mansoor: Who are you impersonating?
Mace: It’s up for interpretation. They said, ‘We’re going to get a bunch of little nerds,’ which happened to be every extra we had on set in the PC-era ThunderDome. They got them, they started sawing up the ring, they ripped everything apart. They started spray painting, but it was the silly string spray paint cans so it didn’t get on really good. They were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll just put Antifa’ on the show. ‘Now what?’ ‘I don’t know.’ The backlash from that segment was, ‘look at all these little nerds.’
Mansoor: Why isn’t anyone scared of them?
Mace: Why are we getting run off by 100 little nerds? In that moment, they decided they needed to go from the extras, the little nerds, and they went with big nerds, a bunch of geeks that couldn’t get booked on NXT. Myself included. It was me Xyon Quinn, Von Wagner. They had us as the extras. They had us do a couple of wrestling moves. I did my patented sliding spear, which was a clue. It was me trying to make it so it stuck because I knew I was just an extra. It did stick. The other guys fell off. They added Dijak, Shane, Mia, and Mercedes. They had us as the front of the group, in the center of the little nerds. They still didn’t know what to do with it. They were like, ‘Hey, have you see the Dark Knight Rises? Perhaps we could get them in some Bane masks. He was an anarchist. He was a man on a mission.’ They get these Bane masks made, and the day they had us try them on, they went to Regal [William Regal] and were like, ‘We can’t send these guys out here in Bane masks. It’s owned by Dark Knight Rises.’ They still didn’t know what to do. They gave us a leader, it was Mustafa Ali. We were the hottest act of the ThunderDome, I will say that.
Mansoor: You drew a lot of YouTube views.
RETRIBUTION ended in February 2021. RIP.
Mace and Mansoor were paired together in Maximum Male Models in 2022. They were released by the company on Thursday. Fans can find their comments regarding their release by clicking here.
