Matt Cardona says he was almost given a different role in WWE that would have seen the Nexus stable continue for a bit longer.
On the latest episode of his MC! True Long Island Story podcast, Cardona shared a story about a scrapped WWE angle that would have seen him as the leader of a variation of the Nexus stable. Nexus went through several iterations and members of the group, including their final run as a tag team featuring David Otunga and Michael McGillicutty as the last two members of the group.
Cardona (as Zack Ryder) appeared on the July 4, 2011 episode of RAW and appeared to call out the team, and he explained to co-host Mark Sterling that was supposed to be the start of him serving as the leader of the group. Cardona noted that he didn’t know anything about those plans until years later when a writer told him what the segment was for, and said that he’d love to know more about what was planned.
“Something happens with, I don’t know if they’re the Nexus, or the New Nexus or whatever Nexus they are, it’s [David] Otunga, Michael McGillicutty/Curtis Axel…well I come out [after their match] with my music, I just say ‘Woo, woo, woo. You know it.’ And that’s it,” he noted, “nothing happens the next week. They don’t tell me, I’m not asking questions. To me, it’s like, ‘Alright, I get to come out on stage. I get to be on RAW.’
“I later find out, years later, and I haven’t found like the script, essentially, where, the first draft, I don’t know if it’s supposed to be this RAW or the next RAW, where like I become the new leader of the Nexus. But no one ever said that to me before, like while that was all going down. Like no one said, ‘Okay, and then next week you’re gonna form the new…’ I think it was gonna be the ‘Woo, Woo, Woo Nexus’ or something like that,” Cardona said. “But no one ever told me like this was a plan until years later. I found out because someone, an ex-WWE writer like held onto the script. So if anyone’s listening to this and has that script—now that I think about it, I don’t know if I was ever given the script, maybe just told about it. So I would love to read the script and literally read it out loud on the show. So if anybody has that, I would love to figure out what the deal [was], because nobody at the time explained it to me.”
Cardona shared his excitement and said it would have been great, noting that he would’ve had fun with it and made the Nexus logo a ‘Z’ instead of an ‘N.’
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