Scotty 2 Hotty On Frustrations With WWE

During an interview with Fightful, Scotty 2 Hotty spoke about his decision to leave WWE.

“It wasn’t an immediate thing. Well, it was building over the last six months. It all started during the pandemic and everything started to change. Moreso over the last six months, I started having thoughts come into my mind. I saw people outside of WWE independent wise, AEW wise, international wise out there having fun. I just wasn’t having fun anymore. I had a great thirty years working for them and I’m so thankful for everything they did.”

“They gave me a platform. You and I probably wouldn’t even be talking if it wasn’t for my time that. So, that’s why I say I have to be thankful for that, but I just wasn’t having fun there anymore. I’d be driving to work at the Performance Center every day and I’d have my stomach in knots. I blame a lot of it on the pandemic because that started, which seems like it started the releases and all of these people that I had coached and been friends with. Some of them became like my kids and all of a sudden they’re getting released and I’m finding out about it on Twitter. I’m their coach, I’m encouraged to build a relationship.”

“I was finding out from you. I would literally be sitting in class with somebody and then three hours later—there was one person, in particular, I’m having a heart to heart talk with and I’ve earned that person’s trust over the last couple of years and I’m giving them the best advice I can and then three hours later my buddy from Nashville texts me and he says, ‘Hey, looks like releases are happening again.’ So I jump on Twitter and see this guy was just released. I always said, ‘I don’t ever want to know that one of my talents was getting a release before they know,’ but I feel like the coaches deserve the respect of being told as soon as the talent knows. I shouldn’t be finding out on Twitter. That was, really, my biggest beef, if anything.”

“C’mon, man. Give me a little bit of respect. Give me a heads-up before I’m finding out on Twitter and it goes back to the same thing as a guy like Otis and Tucker, who I had worked with. When Otis came to me and asked if he could do the Worm and I told him to hold off, go out there and get over first, and then add the Worm in. That’s what they did. Heavy Machinery went out there, had maybe six months, they started to get over and I pulled him aside one day. I said, ‘Hey, go ahead. Add the Worm in now.’ So he started doing the Worm and I had this relationship with him and I love the dude. I find out that they’re going to RAW watching the show with everybody else. Like, dude. C’mon, man. Just a bit of a lack of communication there. I understand it’s a big machine, it’s running a hundred miles an hour and they’re probably not worried about my feelings. It’s an oversight. I don’t believe it’s a deliberate thing. It’s just an oversight.”

Scotty went back and discussed some of the younger talent having to deal with being put into high-pressure television situations when they weren't necessarily ready for it.

“Maybe it was necessary. I heard recently like 181 people since the pandemic started. That’s a lot of people that weren’t being used, maybe. So I understand it from a business perspective. If you have a lot of people that you’re not doing anything with, you have to just let go. That’s part of what we do. But at the same time, just give us a bit of a heads-up. A guy like Maclin, him, and Wesley Blake, two of the best there are. We used to open a lot of the NXT road shows with Street Profits versus the Forgotten Sons. It was a perfect opening match and they understood how to go out there and work an opening match. Those are guys you can really use right now, in my opinion, when you have so many green people that you’re just throwing out there. Once you start throwing green people versus green it gets a little bit scary and dangerous, especially when it’s on live television.”