Shane Haste Talks About His “Comically Bad” RETRIBUTION Stint

In an interview with Fightful, Shane Haste (formerly Shane Thorne) commented on his time in RETRIBUTION and its eventual dissolution. The group — comprised of MACE (Dio Maddin), RECKONING (Mia Yim), RETALIATION (Mercedes Martinez), SLAPJACK (Shane Thorne), and T-BAR (Dominik Dijakovic) — broke up in March 2021 after failing to gain footing in WWE. You can watch the full interview with Haste and read a few highlights below.

On the buzz that FOX didn’t welcome the group’s concept: “We hear rumors like that, but that’s above my pay grade, if that’s true or not. Sounds right. I think that’s maybe why they shifted to less of a mob, and it’s also because we couldn’t have extras because of COVID testing and what not. So we lost all our Putty Patrols, we called them. So that didn’t help. I think the shift from being a more realistic to being more monsterish. I was like, ‘Alright, let’s fully lean more into that then. Let’s go all the way with that then.’ It just hovered and fizzled out.”

On how poorly pitches for the group were received: “I think just how comically bad things were. Like, we’d just keep pitching and they’d come back with something completely from, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and then, ‘Here’s something from a completely different.’ For me, personally, I think I’ve told this story before about where we would do our promos backstage was the same area, there’d always be one building security guard there off to the side. That was his door. I got there to the area earlier one time just to lay out what I was gonna do. He comes over to me, he’s like, ‘Hey, man. Don’t want to interrupt you, but I just want to tell you, man. This is so cool, man. I love Slapshot.’ I’m like, ‘Ahh, actually, the name’s Slapjack,’ and [he] just goes back to his door and stands there like we’d never [spoken]. That was so good. Slapshot would have made sense. I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah. That would have been cool.'”