According to former WWE star Trevor Murdoch, he and his partner Lance Cade were buried backstage for refusing to sell John Cena’s street cred.
Murdoch and Cade found great success during their time in WWE, winning the World Tag Team Championships on three occasions. However, speaking in a new interview with WrestlingNews.co, Murdoch recounted one producer getting upset with the team for not taking Cena’s tough guy image seriously.
“I won’t say the producer’s name, but Lance and I on our first run, everything’s going well and a certain producer that was there during our vignettes tried to convince Lance and I that John Cena was a real thug. Like, really from the streets, like a real thug. Lance had lived with him at OVW in an apartment, you know, before he was John Cena and he was The Prototype.
“Yeah. We all know that John is obviously not a thug, thug. You know what I’m saying, and this producer is getting angry because we’re not selling it. Like, he’s just John Cena. He’s a regular guy from Massachusetts. Like, he’s not a thug.”
Trevor Murdoch Recalled “Horse Sh*t Politics” After John Cena Incident
Continuing, Murdoch explained that Shawn Michaels had to intervene in the heated situation with the unnamed WWE producer.
“Well, this producer got so angry that we didn’t cater to that conversation, he went into the production meeting and buried us and said that we weren’t ready, that we were too immature, that they didn’t think it was the right term.
“It was so bad that Shawn Michaels came out of said meeting and came up to us and was like, ‘What the hell did you say to him?’ We were like, ‘Why?’ ‘Because that cat just went in there and buried you to Vince, buried you to Johnny, buried you to the whole writing staff, and you guys aren’t on TV this week.’
“So we explained the situation to him, and he goes, ‘Well, that’s some horse sh*t.’ I go, ‘Yeah, it’s some horse sh*t’, and he goes, ‘Well, you boys better figure out how to fix it.'”
“It wasn’t that Shawn didn’t want to help us, but he knew, like, there’s some things that we have to do for ourselves. You know what I mean? If he goes in there for every fight, every argument, we become, we don’t stand on our own, we stand on him, and it took us a couple months to convince Vince that we were a good tag team and that we should be on TV. It’s just horse sh*t politics that I wasn’t prepared for.”
h/t WrestlingNews.co