Wesley Blake Confirms Pitches To Reunite With Murphy, Discusses WWE Release
Wesley Blake gained notoriety during his WWE career when he was part of the NXT brand and teaming with Buddy Murphy. The duo was joined by Alexa Bliss and would capture the NXT Tag Team Titles during their run.
On the main roster, Murphy was a singles star in the cruiserweight division and feuded with Seth Rollins and Rey Mysterio at various points while Blake was aligned with Steve Cutler, first in the Forgotten Sons with Jaxson Ryker and then as the Knights of the Lone Wolf with King Corbin.
Following Cutler’s release in February, Blake and Murphy pitched to get back together before Blake was eventually released in April.
“I was tagging with Steve Cutler [Steve Maclin] and doing the Knights of the Lone Wolf and working with Corbin. We were excited about it, had known Corbin since NXT, and were happy to work with him. We had a lot of promising stories coming our way. Steve got COVID at the beginning of the year and two weeks later was released, which was a huge shock to him and myself. When he got released, they kinda told him that creative had nothing for him. I started wondering what the plan was for myself, so I started to reach out to writers. I started pitching ideas and the one idea, which was the fastest way to get me on TV, was tagging with Buddy Murphy. At the time, Buddy was doing stuff with the Mysterios, but that got dropped. I don’t know why. We were just left there and we reached out to each other and were pitching ideas to get back together. I always enjoyed wrestling with him and learned a lot from him. I talked to him the day before I got released and he was going in to talk to creative to see if something could happen. Unfortunately, you know,” Blake said in an interview with Two Man Power Trip. “We talked about [getting back together] all the time because when we got split, we didn’t know we were going to be split. We knew they wanted to separate Alexa from Murphy and myself. Great for Alexa, it turned out wonderful for her and she is super talented. She helped us out a lot. Splitting Alexa from us, we were still tagging, but shortly after we started getting to TV and were like, ‘maybe we aren’t tagging anymore and they are splitting us up.’ Ultimately, they did. We pitched an idea to have a best-of-three series in NXT, but it got shot down because they didn’t want either of us to get the upper hand on each other to say ‘this guy is better.'”
Blake was part of multiple releases made in April by WWE, which was followed by multiple releases made by the company in May and June as well.
Blake confirmed that he was given the reason of “budget cuts” for his release.
“They said ‘budget cuts.’ I got the call and they laid it out pretty plain and simple. They were doing budget cuts and my name was on the list. It was somewhat of a surprise, but once they released Steve and when they told him there was no creative direction, they probably had no creative direction for me. I can hold my head up high for the simple fact that I did everything I could do to get on TV and stay on TV. Was it a shock? A little. Disappointing? Yeah. I’ve been with WWE for eight years and given so much of my life with the company. Once you get hired, you try to stay there and stay on top as much as you can. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case,” he said. “WWE is a business first and they always seem to make sure they get paid first. They want to make sure they have money. [Cuts] seem to happen the same time each year and that’s the reality of it. The company is going to do what is best for them to make as much money as they can. You kind of take it personally, but then you look at it from a business aspect, but they are going to make cuts to where they feel they can make the most money by cutting talents.”
Elsewhere during the interview, Blake discussed the controversial tweet made by Ryker that put an end to the Forgotten Sons and how he reacted to it. You can find his full comments by clicking here.
If you use any of the quotes above, please credit the original source with a h/t and link back to Fightful for the transcription.