Hey, at least for that first night, the Nexus angle was a hit.
Stu Bennett, formerly known as Wade Barrett, spoke with the Buzzards of Wrestling podcast where he talked about the night that the Nexus angle started. He and the seven over NXT rookies destroyed John Cena, the WWE ring and everyone around it in an awesome display of domination. Bennett recalls when the angle was over with, they got a standing ovation from the locker room:
But then when we got to the back, we were kind of given a standing ovation by the locker room and all the guys that were working there and people were kind of blown away by what they’d seen. Then they started showing replays of crowd reactions and stuff and that’s when it started to sink in that, ‘Whoa, this was pretty big’ and then we realized afterwards, ‘Wow’, you know for us as young wrestlers, we’ve put up and taken down rings a million times by that point. That’s kind of part the breaking into the business, that’s what you have to do, you put up the ring, you know what it looks like when it’s taken apart
They weren't treated too differently after -- as unproven talents, they still dressed in corridors and weren't allowed to dress in the locker room -- but people did give them respect for what they did, and on a personal note doing something like what they did was really cool:
We had to change in corridors and stuff like that, so to come to the back and have these people actually show us that respect and say ‘Hey, you guys are going to go somewhere with this’, that was really cool and it was a huge weight off our shoulders and to be honest with you, all 8 of us that were in The Nexus at that point, we’d all scratched and clawed for years in Independent Wrestling, getting beat up, driving 300 miles to be paid £30, which wouldn’t even cover your petrol money and we’d all fought really hard to get to that point.
“It almost felt like a huge weight off our shoulders that no matter what happened here, we have now made a mark in the world of professional wrestling. We didn’t know where it was going to go from there, we could’ve been fired in four weeks anyway, who knew, but at least we will always have this thing that we have managed to achieve in this company that we grew up loving and wanting to be a part of
While the Nexus angle started off hot, it started to cool off by around Summerslam, when the Nexus lost a 7 on 7 elimination match against the WWE, with John Cena picking up the win. From there, the group mainly feuded with Cena, losing key matches until they were disbanded by the end of the year when CM Punk formed a new version of the group that lasted until the following summer.
