During a recent interview with Tony Maglio of The Wrap, Bobby Lashley revealed how The Hurt Business name came to be.

“It was me. I was thinking about this before, I was thinking about the whole thing before. Originally, a boxing coach that I had down in Coconut Creek at American Top Team. He used to always wear this T-shirt and I was like, man, that is incredible man, that needs to be in WWE because that’s my character. I just need a group. So I just loved it forever. And this was several years back, several, several years back, and I held onto it. And when we came, I was still holding onto it. And I was like man, I wanted to do something like that, but I need the right people involved.

"Then when MVP had that Royal Rumble, he was only going to do that, but when he was there, we had worked before and I told him, ‘Man, you know what character you are… you are kind of a mix between Suge Knight, and Don King.’ I said, ‘If you mix all those up that is you.’ And I told him about this and then me and him got together and he was like, ‘We can make a real little faction out of this.’ And of course, we thought about Shelton (Benjamin), because Shelton wasn’t really doing anything, everybody knows how good Shelton is but everything really depends on timing and finding the right role for you. I was like, man we got to bring Shelton, because Shelton gets it. And then we needed a young boy to come up, and Cedric (Alexander) is phenomenal. But when we went to go look for The Hurt Business at that time, I was like, man, let’s try The Hurt Business, and we sent it in, and then when it came back it shocked us. Like, what? Nobody has it? Nobody copyrighted it or nothing… And the merch guy came up to me and was like, ‘Bro, you’ll never believe it, it is open.’ I said let’s go, let’s start printing. And as soon as we put it out, the T-shirts went like crazy at the beginning. Black and gold, The Hurt Business, it was beautiful. And then our group just kind of formed from there.

“And then before I ran with it, I called my boxing coach down there at Coconut Creek and I asked for his blessing and he was like, ‘Use the name, just send me a few T-shirts.’ I said cool.”