Rob Conway Says La Resistance Broke Up Too Soon, How He Was Put In the Team

Rob Conway recently recalled being made part of La Resistance, and why he believes the team was broken up too soon. Conway was put with the group, which consisted of Renee Dupree and Sylvain Grenier, when he was debuted on WWE TV in 2003. Dupree was split from the group in the 2004 WWE draft, and Grenier and Conway carried on as La Resistance until they split in May of 2005.

Conway looked back at his time in La Resistance during his appearance on Insight With Chris Van Vliet. He spoke about how he was brought into the group and then explained why he felt the team was split too soon, believing that they would have continued to get heat as an alliance. You can see the highlights below:

On How He Was Put in La Resistance:

“So Renee had already been in OVW for like a year or so, and then Sylvain came, he was a referee at Hulk Hogan versus The Rock or something. He was learning to wrestle, but he was already under contract, and they sent him to OVW, and he wasn’t real popular with the other guys, because he got into the business from not going the indie route and stuff like that. Back then, they were a little tougher on the Tough Enough guys and stuff like that, because everybody, for the most part, was still coming up through two or three years of the grind. But I hit it off with him, he’s a fun guy, and so they were going to bring me up, and I went to TV, and I had hair like I’ve got now. It’s a little bit longer, blonde hair, curly. I wore white and pink trunks, and they brought me up specifically to team with Stevie Richards, and Victoria was going to be my girlfriend, and they were going to call me the Golden Boy, and I was going to wrestle Tommy Dreamer, and we already had the match planned out. That was my TV debut as an actual character.

About an hour before the show starts, John Laurinaitis came to me and says, ‘Hey, Robbie, we should change your match tonight, and you’re not on the road next week.’ Because I’d already got an itinerary that I was going to be on four nights a week, and that’s pretty much there goes your dreams. But [he said] ‘We are going to bring you to TV next week. We think we got something better.’ I was like, okay. So they called me during the week, you see that number, and you think either something good or something terrible. They told me to get a military outfit, so I went with my dad, he had got drafted in the army, so he was in the army at one point, and we went to army surplus store, and I got the nicest army outfit you could imagine, even said R. Conway on. I think I made myself a sergeant. We don’t want to be like a four-star general at 29. So I got to TV, and they said, ‘Let’s see it, and I showed it to them, and they said, ‘That is beautiful, but we can’t use it because the army is one of our sponsors. So the seamstress backstage, her husband was retired from the Air Force. I’m not sure, that must have been where they live, because she brought that uniform. So I debuted in the uniform with La Resistance that night, but first they set me down in a chair and cut off all my hair. I actually sat with Robbie Roode, Tyson Dukes and Showtime Eric Young, that’s first time I met him. So yeah, I had an outdated Air Force uniform on, and they gave me tickets, and there was a girl backstage, it was an extra too, so we went through the front with the ticket. I sat in the front row with my cell phone, just in case they decided to do something different, and I ended up coming out of the crowd and leaving the Dudleys laying and joining La Resistance.”

On their Heel Heat:

“They never stopped hating us. They broke us up way too soon, like you took one faction that had more heat than anybody and broke us up into three not that strong of characters. So I felt like it was kind of a demotion when they broke us up. Went from being all the shows, being on pay-per-views, to having bad music, and being on middle to low card, having bad music.”

On Believing They Were Split Up Too Soon:

“Absolutely… I don’t believe we would have ever stopped getting heat, because that’s what we were good at. I grew up watching professional wrestling. I didn’t grow up watching sports entertainment, so when I grew up, and when I got into the business, it was still considered pro wrestling. The heels are heels. You want to be entertaining, but if you’re that hated, you shouldn’t be selling t-shirts and stuff like that. That was kind of what I got into, so all of us had the mindset of getting heat, not trying to do cool moves. I could do cool moves, I just didn’t do them, and if you do something like that, you got to put it in the right spot. Randy Orton is a heel, he throws a beautiful dropkick, but he has to do it when the babyface starts making a little comeback, and then he hits that dropkick when people don’t want to see it.”

On If He Was Promised Anything For His Singles Run:

“Not really. They didn’t say, ‘Hey, you’re going to be the Intercontinental champion or anything like that.’ But I had talked to Vince at one point, and this is going to seem outlandish, but Sylvain was there, and this is when we were still in La Resistance. I know Vince liked me as a wrestler. We were in La Resistance. He pulled us aside one day. He said, ‘Rob, I consider you to be just one tier below Bret Hart as a worker.’”