William Regal wanted the Young Bucks to sign with WWE in 2011.
During the first episode of his Gentleman Villain podcast, Regal spoke about seeing the Young Bucks train in WWE developmental and was impressed with their match against The Usos. It looks as if Regal wanted the Young Bucks to be part of Triple H’s vision for NXT, but the company had different ideas.
“My first day [working in talent development] was after SummerSlam, and the first people on the tryout … the group of extra talent that came that get brought to every show, and part of that was the Young Bucks. I liked them straight away and we had a great few days together, I talked to them a lot. They had some incredible matches in the afternoon. In fact, I put them on with The Usos to have a tag match … the two teams tore the place down. That’s probably something that the fans would love to see. I saw it in the afternoon, and I was raving about them.”
Regal had been brought in to work with up-and-coming talent for Triple H’s developmental project, now known as NXT. Matt and Nick Jackson were 26 and 22 years old, respectively. While they showed tremendous potential, the company didn’t want to sign talent who were under a certain age.
“I’d been told a few things … the guidelines were ‘We don’t like to hire anybody under 20 something,’” Regal said. “It was something to do with rental cars.”
“We’ve talked a little bit,” Regal continued, “and I heard different people tell me … they’d already made their minds up, they were going to Ring of Honor, they didn’t really care about this gig. I liked them, but I thought just looking at them that they were, like, 18 and 19. So after spending the two or three days with them … they went on their way and it wasn’t till after, and this was a while after, that I found out that they were older than what they were.”
The Bucks spoke in 2018 about the aforementioned tryout and admitted that they didn’t believe the company would’ve signed them anyway. Regal would eventually be on the same roster as the Bucks after recently signing with AEW.
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