Former WWE star Ricardo Rodriguez recently spoke with Doug Mortman and Dave Lagreca on Busted Open. You can hear Busted Open on SiriusXM 92 and on the SiriusXM app. Here are some highlights:
What was the tipping point or the fall out with WWE to get you into this transition in your career?
Well, it wasn’t just one thing. It was a serious of events that I was like ah, just screw it. A lot of was A) they had nothing for me. Del Rio and I kept pitching ideas to bring us back together. We thought we did pretty well together and we eventually knew they were going to split us up. One day they came up to us and told us ‘Okay this is what we are doing’. We’re like oh ok, thank you. It wasn’t just that though they had issues with money, I wasn’t making money anymore. If you talk to anyone from WWE they will tell you that you make your money on house shows and not on TV, your money is on the house show. . I got unofficially sent down and I got hurt by one of their football players and I got punished for it, which I weird and I took all these things into consideration and I realized this is not fun for me. I have been an extra for WWE and they know what I do backstage. Regal and I were running the tryouts for the extras so there is nobody in the world can I tell me I never had passion for wrestling. I was always the 1st person in the ring. WWE in a weird way made me hate wrestling so I got very bitter and I realized I got to stop this and I realized it was the company. So I woke up and said I am not coming in. Yeah I called the office and told them I am not coming in; I want a release.
Does it burn you to go through the motion with someone who is less experienced and knowledgeable in the ring as you are?
Nah, honestly because I was a trainer on the road here in the WWE, everything was official because they did not want to fork up more money. They would tell me go help such and such and I always had patience with it. Yeah I might be a (explicative) when I am training. What bugged me though is when one of their guys got hurt and they punished me for it. So that really upset me.
When you say punished, what kind of situation do you find yourself in because you got dinged?
I wasn’t on the house shows anymore and I wasn’t on NXT anymore. I was taking off of everything. There was a match that I and Kalisto had and by the way Kalisto is a great wrestler and is going to be a great superstar, and they cut our time against The Ascension; our time was cut in half. It was huge and it was less for a little something they were building. Granted, I was hurt at the time. Then they took me off the live events for NXT. They told me it was because of the match I had at Full Sail. I was like (explicative) off. You see me work for 3 years either doing live shows or dark matches and I have one bad one because I was hurt.
Speaking of Triple H, any truth to any disparaging names he used to call you?
I am a little bigger; I am not fat by all means. With my lucha background, I can do flips, front flips, back flips, 450’s, shooting stars, and all that (explicative); Yeah so when I was working with the tryouts and being extras. We would do spots and I would flip around and take bumps like a clothesline and shooting stars. Triple H would call me a bumblebee; I was in Puerto Rico not too long ago and I saw Savio Vega and he used to call him a bumblebee and then I found out he called Super Crazy a bumblebee. He was a referring to an American guy doing flips. He would always make this comment about me being Mexican and Del Rio being Mexican. I and Del Rio use to call ourselves stupid names but when someone else would call us those names we would go whoa hold the (explicative) up.
