Jesus Rodriguez Looks Back At Matches With Bret Hart & Roman Reigns During WWE Run

Jesus Rodriguez worked as Ricardo Rodriguez in WWE, and he recently reflected on battling Bret Hart & Roman Reigns during that time. The MLW star spoke with Fightful and talked about facing Bret Hart and John Cena in a tag team match alongside Alberto Del Rio, as well as facing a young Roman Reigns in FCW. You can see highlights below:

On his match with Hart: “I mention that a lot and I feel like the more that I talk about it, the more they’re going to be like, ‘You know what? Let’s take that away from him.’ Yeah, right? Don’t give him ideas. I’m grateful for it, I’m grateful for that. To this day, that’s still a thing and I hope it stays that way because it’ll stay in the record books. ‘Cause I know for like the longest we were Edge’s last match. We were his last match and obviously he came back and I’m very happy that he came back. But we had that distinct honor for a little bit, for a couple years.”

On facing Reigns in FCW: “Roman, yeah. Roman back when he was Leakee. He was married to me for a couple months and when he was first starting to get his groove there was a couple of us that were assigned to him. So him, Husky Harris. I have Bray’s early ones. There was this other character he was doing before he became Bray. It was Axel Mulligan.”

On other talent he faced in FCW and NXT: “That was his first match or two. When Kalisto came up to NXT, I was his first match. Yeah, there’s a whole list of series. But then this is one of those things where I didn’t get at the time. Because again, the ego, how it works and you’re like, ‘Man, why am I losing? Why am I this? Why aren’t I the big star?’ Until later on you realize like, ‘I get it, they trusted me to be able to guide these talents.’ So in retrospect, it’s one of those things that after the fact you realize why and you appreciate it and I get a chance to do that sometimes at MLW as well too. Where it’s like, ‘Hey, we need somebody to put this guy over, who can we trust to make him look good?’ That’s where I come in. We used to call them like the workhorses or like the [caballos de batalla] in Spanish. Where they’re like, ‘Yeah, we can trust these guys to go and get something out of them,’ and I was very lucky that I was placed in that position quite a bit.”