Wade Barrett spoke with Corey Graves on the WWE After The Bell podcast.
During it, the WWE NXT commentator talked about the initial concept of NXT where there were developmental rookies being paired with veteran WWE stars as their coaches.
“Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest with you, the eight of us who were on that first NXT, season one, the entire concept of it, I mean, universally we hated it,” said Barrett. “The concept of, first of all, we’re termed as rookies, which the vast majority of us on that show had been, you know, working in the wrestling [business] for at least kinda six years or something at that point.
“We’d all been traveling around for 13 pounds a night, and you were lucky if you could actually pay your gasoline at the end of the day and you came away with a small profit. You know, we’d done that for years. So we were kind of upset that we’re being billed as kind of rookies, guys who weren’t deemed to be allowed even in the locker room. We were changing in hall ways, so it wasn’t just a storyline of us being rookies and nobodies in the business. We were actually treated like that behind the scenes.”
