Fandango Reveals He Was Almost Put Into WWE Faction
In an interview with Such Good Shoot podcast, former WWE star Fandango talked about how he became Fandango. Originally wrestling under the gimmick Johnny Curtis, Fandango got the dancing gimmick after a previous idea geared towards joining 3MB fell through.
"It's actually it's a weird story," Fandango recalled. "So at the time, my old tag partner, Tyler Rex, and I were tag champs in FCW. And he got called up to ECW around like 2008 or nine, and he didn't really end up doing too much. Then Curt Hawkins was kind of floating so they put Curt Hawkins, Brian Myers, and Rex together. And they had they wanted them to come out every week as like firefighters or doctors and do a strip stripper gimmick, which is kind of like what Breeze and I were doing in NXT. So they did it a couple times. I think they debuted once on TV. They came out did, some dance and then I remember they were in like Texas or something and Rex just asked for his release. He just didn't want to do it anymore. Hawkins just like 'what the f**k', you know. They were booked on every live event for months, and then he just didn't want to do it. So which I can understand. It's his life, it's his career.
"So Hawkins went to the office and goes 'what about John Curtis? You know, put me with Johnny Curtis.' And they go 'yeah, that's a good idea.' And then the office comes to me and goes 'we're just gonna have you do the dancing gimmick. Myers isn't gonna do it.' Like, Hawkins will tell the story cause Hawkins didn't really want to do it anyways. But if it's one of those things, man, they come up to you and are like 'you're going to be a cheerleader and we're going to put you on TV for a year straight. And you're going to be on everything, but you're going to be a stupid gimmick.' What are you going to do? So I was in the same kind of situation. Like obviously I wanted them to ask me to be in the shield. But they're like 'Vince, you really likes this character.' I mean, what are you going to say?"
Fandango also revealed that he was nearly a member of 3MB. He revealed that Heath Slater approached him and current AEW star Jon Moxley, formerly Dean Ambrose in WWE, to be part of the group. Ultimately Vince McMahon vetoed plans for them to join, choosing Drew McIntyre and Jinder Mahal instead.
"So at the time, Mox, and I were going to every TV and we would just sit in the back and do like dark matches and shit," Fandango said. "So it was like 2012. And, you know, you just go to TV every week and get a dark match, they look at you to see if you grew any taller, or look different than you did last week. I remember sitting in the back and then Heath comes in. He's like 'man, I just pitched this idea to Vince. He's like, I'm the one man rock band, but I need a band.' So he's all fired up because Heath wasn't doing shit at the time. So he's about to get an angle and he's all excited. He's like 'Vince just told me to go pick out two people. And then we'll have a band.' So he comes up to me and goes 'you want to do it to me? I'm like, Yeah, whatever.' I don't care. And Ambrose, he's like 'yeah, whatever.' So he goes back to Vince. And he's like 'no, I got something for him. I got something for him.' He's like, he's like 'Drew McIntyre and Jinder.' The weirdest combination, you know, so yeah."
As of now Fandango is sitting out his 90 day no compete clause following his release from WWE. He talked about using the time to plot out his next move and work on some potential new characters for when he resurfaces.
"I'll be 40 in a couple years, but there's some other things and some character shit that I do want to do that I feel like I probably wouldn't be able to do unless I stepped away," Fandango said. "Obviously you're upset that you know, you're not going to be getting compensated as well. But as starving artists, I think we all still have inside of us, you feel a little bit stoked that you can go do some shit, you know? Yeah write your own promos. Try some different characters stuff out."
You can watch the full interview below.