Mark Briscoe recalls why their WWE tryout didn’t go as well as they had hoped.
Speaking on Talk Is Jericho, Mark Briscoe recalled he and his brother, Jay, getting a tryout with WWE.
“I remember when we went down for the WWE tryout at FCW, that’s when one of the trainers or coaches said, ‘Alright, this is what I’m seeing,'” Briscoe said. “Talking about Jay, ‘You’re super real cool, and then you [Mark], you’re just real crazy. That’s the dynamic that you got going here. Then it just, we naturally, as we progressed, we were physically not who we were when we were 18, 19, 20, 21. But mentally and in the mindset aspect of it, we were well advanced from who we used to be. I used to be so timid. You watch old Mark Briscoe, old Briscoe Brothers, I’m so timid and so afraid to cut loose. As soon as I figured that out, it was like, ‘Wow, this is way easier than I thought it was.’ You don’t have to do quadruple springboard 450s, whatever it may be. Just go out there, make a little face, do a little head-wagging, and make some sound effects.”
Mark said WWE passed on them and when they inquired as to why, the brothers were told they weren’t cosmetically pleasing enough.
“Before we left, everybody was like, ‘Man, they really like you. We think they’re gonna bring you guys on,'” Briscoe said. “I guess it was a week or two after we had got home, we were just waiting to hear back. John Laurinaitis called and he told me, ‘We really liked your stuff, but I think we’re going to pass for right now. Let us know if you guys want another try.’ That kind of rubbed me the wrong way. I guess, when he talked to Jay, he called Jay right before he called me or he called Jay after he called me. When we talked, he said, ‘Man, you know what he told me? He said that we’re not cosmetically pleasing enough.’ I was like? That’s cold man. I’m too ugly. It’s like dagone.’”
Jericho responded by noting that wrestlers aren’t necessarily supposed to be “cosmetically pleasing,” and Briscoe agreed.
“That was our conversation, like what the hell,” Briscoe said. “If that’s really how they feel, then that’s not what we want to do anyway, if we’re gonna have to be all prim, pretty and proper and then maybe we got a job in WWE. That’s not what we’re looking for. It’s like okay, then let’s keep on keeping on.
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