In 2016, Darren Young was paired with Bob Backlund, and he was on a mission to find success as a singles wrestler.
Young recently spoke to The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling about his alliance with Backlund, and he noted that the idea was something he came up with and pitched to Vince McMahon.
“I had done autograph signings with Bob Backlund well before Titus and I broke up and one thing about Bob Backlund and I is when we do our autograph signings we do them standing up and we like to get personable with the people because standing down is for lazy people. I’ll sit down when I’m an old man.”
“He’s energetic and I’m energetic and I thought that when I’m done teaming with Titus I’d love to be mentored by him. When the time was right I wrote up a storyline and I had some images to show Vince. The most intimidating thing about Vince McMahon is his office door so when I was ready to propose this idea to him (because I proposed it to him) nobody else did. I knew it would work. I had the visuals and I had it all written out and we looked at it and he was amazed by it. He called Bob personally and asked if he would want to do this storyline with Darren Young/Fred Rosser and Bob was for it. We started filming the vignettes in Stamford, Connecticut and we did have to redo them a couple of times because we needed some bells and whistles to the stuff we were doing but eventually we brought it to TV and the storyline started to get legs behind it. You can go through my social media because I posted tons of stuff with Bob and you can hear the crowd’s reaction and they were getting behind it and they especially did in my feud with The Miz.”
Darren Young’s alliance with Bob Backlund managed to score him a shot at the Intercontinental Championship at Battleground in 2016, but he didn’t end up winning the the title.
He went on to say that The Miz actually wanted to drop the belt, but someone under Vince McMahon nixed the idea.
“When I first met the Miz years ago I couldn’t stand him. He was the loudest person in the room but fast forward to working with him helped me so much in that storyline. The promo segments, the wrestling matches and he was such a great guy. He was actually for me beating him for the Intercontinental title at Battleground and of course, like all heels, he could take it back the next day or a couple weeks from now. It is all like giving a dog a bone and Miz was all about saying to give the title to Darren and then I’ll take it back from him. We are storytellers and I don’t take it seriously, but it is unfortunate the people that are under Vince McMahon I guess didn’t have my back and so I guess you’ve got some favorites and not so favorites. I guess I wasn’t a favorite to someone under Vince and eventually it got kiboshed.”
