Trevor Murdoch On His Brief WWE Return Back In 2011

In an interview with Fightful, Trevor Murdoch spoke about his brief return to the WWE in 2011 and what kind of job he was offered by the company at the time. He was originally released in 2008, but came back in 2011 and worked some dark matches. Here are highlights:

On his brief return to WWE in 2011: “That was a strange scenario in itself. Shawn Michaels and I have a relationship/friendship, especially with Lance. We ended up on a phone call, I forget why. We were just talking about the business. I’d been away from the company for several years and he had mentioned, ‘You ever thought about coming back?’ I was like, ‘Well, I don’t even know who to talk to.’ ‘Cause things change in that company so much. He was like, ‘Give me a minute, I’ll call you back.’ I get a call ten / fifteen minutes later. Johnny Ace, ‘Hey, Trevor.’ We talked for about ten minutes and asked me if I wanted to come in and do a dark, take a look at me. I was like, ‘Sure, yeah. Let’s see if we can do some business again.’”

On the kind of job he was offered: “At the very least I felt, at that time, I can get a Val Venis job. What I mean by that is going out there with young guys, helping elevate them, making them look good, still keeping myself strong, but obviously they win. But go out there, have good matches, and try to take young guys to the next level. So I go in, and I do two dark matches. I think I did a singles match with Evan Bourne and then the next night was against one of the Usos. Had great matches, let everybody know you can still work. You’re still in decent shape. I got a call from Hunter that next week saying, ‘Hey, listen. We’re gonna go ahead and bring you in. We’re gonna basically put you in that Val Venis role. But I want to tell you something, Trevor. We brought Steve Austin in as a ‘Val Venis role,’ so the opportunity is really up to you.’ I was like, ‘Great, man. This is awesome.’ He goes, ‘We’ll call you, get everything set up and start getting on the road.’ I waited around for like a week and a half, I got a call from Johnny Ace and he gave me damn near virtually the same exit speech as he did when I lost my job. ‘Trevor, with budgets and stuff right now, we’re having a bunch of budget cuts around here. We don’t feel right now, financially, would be a good time to bring you in.’ I was like, ‘…alright.’ It was a really weird scenario. I just laughed about it. Because at that time, man, with WWE the worst thing you can do to a WWE wrestler is fire them. That’s the only thing we’re ‘really’ scared of. So once you are fired once, well, we’ve already been through the horrible feeling of being fired and we know what the emotional rollercoaster is. So if you bring us back and let us go, I already know what’s going to happen. It doesn’t have nearly the effect as it did the first time. So I just laughed about it and just continued to look forward. Now I’m at an age where people go, ‘Hey, never say never about WWE.’ There’s a different system there and a stress level there that I don’t ever want to ever deal with again.”