‘Speedball’ Mike Bailey Says He Wasn’t That Close to Joining WWE

“Speedball” Mike Bailey has weighed in on the reports from last year that he had been in talks with WWE at one point. Bailey spoke with Denise Salcedo and you can see some highlights below, per Wrestling Inc:

On reports he was in talks with WWE about signing with them: “Not in any concrete way. There were like discussions but they’re kinda always are, you always hear rumblings and I never know how much of that is true. So that’s always a weird thing, I’ve heard people say that people have said that they heard someone say that they were definitely going to sign me. I don’t know how much that’s worth.”

On his ban from wrestling in the US for five years that started in 2016 for entering without a visa: “You assume that things are gonna go a certain way for your wrestling career. A lot of people with whom I wrestled at PWG during 2015/2016 ended up going to NXT shortly thereafter or Impact back then. And that’s sorta what I was hoping would happen with myself as well, and once you know that’s not gonna happen, the trajectory that you had made for yourself is not gonna work out at all.

“You have two options basically. I can just quit, I can stop, I can take the ‘L’ and move on to something else with my career and let pro wrestling go or I can figure out another way to become a successful pro wrestler outside of the United States, outside of the place where everyone wants to be.”

On working in other locations during the ban: “That forced me to look at Europe. Shortly after I was banned, I did some shows in Canada, RevPro, then I got to wrestle for DDT. DDT was really my home from 2016 to 2020 right up until the pandemic. I would have been right back there if the pandemic wouldn’t have made things so darn difficult. DDT became my home. I was able to earn a living as a pro wrestler outside of the U.S. My mission was really to keep as much momentum as I could going up until the end of my 5-year admissibility.”