WWE NXT experienced a drastic revamp when it shifted from the black-and-gold era to the new 2.0 product. But long-time fans know that this change wasn’t the first time the brand completely transformed.
In 2010, WWE introduced NXT as a hybrid of a game show and a wrestling program. The first season paired “rookies” like Wade Barrett, Daniel Bryan (Bryan Danielson), Skip Sheffield (who later became Ryback), and Heath Slater with “pros” like CM Punk, Chris Jericho, The Miz and Matt Hardy. After five seasons, WWE made some major changes and started turning NXT into a developmental platform before it arguably became a third brand for a short period of time.
Barret returned to WWE almost ten years after he won the first season of NXT; he joined the broadcast team for the show, and he has remained one of its consistent members ever since. During a recent appearance on WWE After The Bell with Corey Graves, Barrett looked back on his early days in NXT and recalled how he, along with the rest of his “contestants” didn’t care for the game show concept. He explained that they all were particularly bothered by the way they were called rookies, despite their previous experience in the wrestling business, and the consequence of this label affecting their treatment backstage.
“Yeah, I mean, I’ll be honest with you, the eight of us who were on that first NXT, season one, the entire concept of it, I mean, universally we hated it,” said Barrett. “The concept of, first of all, we’re termed as rookies, which the vast majority of us on that show had been, you know, working in the wrestling [business] for at least kinda six years or something at that point.
“We’d all been traveling around for 13 pounds a night, and you were lucky if you could actually pay your gasoline at the end of the day and you came away with a small profit. You know, we’d done that for years. So we were kind of upset that we’re being billed as kind of rookies, guys who weren’t deemed to be allowed even in the locker room. We were changing in hall ways, so it wasn’t just a storyline of us being rookies and nobodies in the business. We were actually treated like that behind the scenes.”
After he won the first season, Barrett was a member of the WWE main roster for roughly six years; he led the infamous Nexus stable, feuded with John Cena, and won the WWE Intercontinental Championship five times. He also won the King of the Ring tournament in 2015 before the company released him in 2016.
