Justin Gabriel on The Nexus Debut, Daniel Bryan’s Firing, The Group’s Demise

Former WWE Superstar Justin Gabriel, who now wrestles on the indy circuit as PJ Black, recently spoke with Raj Giri of Wrestling Inc. to discuss his past gimmicks, wrestling in WWE and much more. Below are some highlights of the newest installment in the series.

Black spoke on the debut of The Nexus, which was thrown together at the last minute:

“Yep, it was kind of last minute. We got pulled into Vince’s office that day and he was like ‘this is what I want you to do.’ We were so nervous because we thought we f-cked up the TV show so bad that now he was going to have us do this and f-ck us over somehow, or something was going to happen. We were like ‘are you sure you want this to happen?’ and he said ‘Yes, just tear everything up, break everything. Kick everyone, I’ll apologize later. I’ll pay for it.’ We’re still a bit wary, but everything hit and it was a bit surreal. One of the coolest things I’ve ever done in wrestling.”

The group was worried there would be fallout as a result of the Daniel Bryan firing, which occurred after he choked former ring announcer Justin Roberts with a tie:

“There was. We were given carte blanche to do anything we wanted, and now this guy has gone too far? Oh shoot, maybe we should hold back too. Don’t tell us to go all out, and then all this happened. We thought something else happened. It couldn’t just be the tie or the spitting (in Cena’s face). We kind of held back for a while. We were in the dark for a while. At SummerSlam, we didn’t know that was going to be him coming back, for real. Then we were like ‘oh okay, that’s why they did that.'”

He also believed the booking of “SummerSlam” in 2010 was botched, which he felt should have seen the group win against the WWE Superstars and ultimately led to the group’s demise:

“Yeah, totally. We should have got over. I don’t know what you read online or what you hear, but there was a back and forth between Jericho and Cena about what should happen. We should have changed the finish, but being rookies we didn’t want to be pushy. We all knew we should have changed it. Everything from that point went downhill. It should have ran for at least a year and put more of an emphasis on some of the characters. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if the powers that-be got bored or if someone got in their ear or what.”

Editor’s Note

The booking of “SummerSlam” still bothers me today, because it effectively killed The Nexus.

Follow @JonAlbaSFC