Things didn't go the way Wesley Blake wanted on the WWE main roster, but he ended up spending over seven years with the company in total.
Speaking to Fightful, the now-Westin Blake opened up about his main roster call-up, his time off television, and who actually helped him pop back up on TV. Blake specifically recalled being told in late 2020 that he and Steve Cutler (now Maclin) would be joining Baron Corbin.
"I’d say we finally got to talk with Bruce Prichard and so, we finally got to talk with him while we went to TVs at one time where we weren’t booked or anything. But, Steve and I were like, ‘You know what? We’ll just go to TVs. We’ll see if we can talk with someone. We can either talk to Vince or Bruce and just let them know, ‘Hey, we want to work’ type thing and that’s what we did. So, we went there and we got to talk to Bruce and once we talked with Bruce, that’s when the wheels started rolling. ‘Okay, we want to get these guys back on TV.’ So, I don’t know if he went to bat for us or if he had an idea already, but I know that once we talked to Bruce, it was probably a week or so later that we got introduced the idea that it’s gonna be Corbin and ourselves," Blake said.
As mentioned, Blake had a long run in WWE, but almost all of it was within NXT. Blake had no shortage of people that helped him creatively.
"Oh, man. There were a lot of people that helped us creatively. With Murphy and myself, we had a lot of people. A guy named Ryan Katz there that would always film stuff and always willing to do promo stuff. Dusty Rhodes was another big advocate for Buddy and myself, and of course Alexa. So, it was just great to bounce ideas and stuff like that off him as well. Then as Forgotten Sons wise, Steve Corino was a huge advocate for us. So much to the fact that when me and Steve were pitching the idea, we would do these Performance Center shows and these are the shows where you get to pitch ideas. This time you’re in front of your own peers, in front of a camera. But, you get to pitch your idea and kind of like how it would look on TV in a storyline," said Blake.
Cutler remembers Corino specifically stepping up to help with a pitch.
"I’ll never forget that Steve Corino volunteered, because me and [Cutler] were gonna beat him down and then we were gonna start shaving people’s heads. He was one of the people that we did, just to kind of show a side of intensity and that type of stuff. So, that was one thing I was always grateful for. He was always great with coming up with ideas, trying to help us like, ‘Hey, how can we write this to get to a writer? How do we present this?’ That type of stuff. So, Steve Corino was always great with that. I think helped out a lot with the Forgotten Sons. He was the one that told us that Jaxson Ryker will be joining us in the Forgotten Sons, that type of stuff. I think he even pitched of Lacey Evans at one time down in NXT for us to have a four person group. Kind of a rival on Sanity, so that we could have some stuff going that way. But, I think creatively they already had some stuff with Lacy Evans going forward, so they just stuck with Ryker, Steve and myself," Blake said.
You can see our full interview with Blake at the top of the page.
