Dirty Dango (formerly known as Fandango) has returned to the ring following his WWE release on June 25, and his next bout is at WrestlePro’s “Welcome Back” show tonight. There, he’ll face Brian Myers, once known as Curt Hawkins during his WWE run. This contest will be one of the first times fans will have the opportunity to see him in the ring since his WWE run ended.
It’s fair to expect some difficulty in his transition back to an active schedule, as Dango hadn’t wrestled in four months prior to his first match back. But this obstacle isn’t entirely new to him; in a recent interview with WrestleZone, Dango described the challenge of shifting from working as a comedy wrestler on RAW and SmackDown to facing some of the best in-ring performers in the business when he moved to NXT.
“Dusty [Rhodes] always talked about your body of work throughout your career, so it’s kind of like the analogy of being an actor where [Tyler] Breeze and I were in that comedy role, which we did well, that’s why they kept us doing it, and we did The Fashion Files. [But] everything has a shelf life, so you can only do one schtick for so long that it’s eventually like, ‘Alright, we get it,’ and you kinda have to evolve and keep moving forward. So obviously the comedy had kinda ran its course, so when we get to go down to NXT, not down to NXT, I shouldn’t say, when we went to NXT, it was kinda time to challenge ourselves and put in some ring time.
“Having two-to-three minute comedy matches on RAW or SmackDown, now doing 15-20 minute Tag Team Title matches, for an old-timer like myself, who’s about to be 40 in a couple years, it’s kinda like, you gotta challenge yourself and get your cardio up and they’re the top-level performers, guys and girls, in NXT, you know, the Roderick Strongs and Bobby Fishes, the Kyle O’Reillys, just the best wrestlers in the world. So we went from doing comedy matches, two or three-minute dance-offs or whatever, now you’re wrestling the elite, no pun intended. So yeah it was challenging for us, and it was challenging for me.”
Looking forward to his journey on the independent scene, Dango named Jon Moxley and Matt Cardona as two stars he’d like to face at some point. He commended both men for their character work and spoke highly of Cardona’s remarkable run as a heel in Game Changer Wrestling.
“I’m intrigued with a few different guys,” said Dango. “Obviously Moxley, I’m a big fan of his. I like the way he makes people believe who he is in wrestling, which I think, it’s not hard to do nowadays, but he commits to his character. There’s a couple other guys. Cardona, which, you know what man, that kid, he loves the business, and you can just see how much he invests his time, and he puts a lot of thought into what he does, which I like. The [Homecoming] show he was on with GCW, was like the first wrestling show that I’ve bought in years, next to, I’ve bought two wrestling shows in like the last 20 years. One of them was Gallows’ Backyard wrestling thing, [Talk N’ Shop A Mania], whatever the f*** that was, which was awesome, and then the second one was Cardona’s match.
“And he did just a good job of playing a heel, man, like it reminded me of an old Memphis match where he played…a lot of guys are booked as heels, but they’ll go out and they’ll do a bunch of cool moves, and they don’t want to show ass, and then they’re just really kickass heels, which are babyfaces. So [for] him to go out there and play a coward, Andy Kaufman-type of guy who’s going into someone else’s environment, he’s like a Red Sox player going into Yankee Stadium and just totally playing his character to a T.”
Dango elaborated on Cardona’s success by noting that he was happy to see the Internet Champion, among others, thriving after their WWE releases. He stated that independent wrestling is booming right now, after the year-plus absence of fans, and he also shared his excitement to get out there and enjoy it first-hand.
“That made me excited about going to work on the indies, just seeing [Cardona succeed],” said Dango. “Because you know, companies are drawing really good houses right now and fans are really invested because they haven’t been able to go to shows for a year-plus.
“But it yeah it’s cool to see Matt just doing really well outside of WWE because I know he loved being at WWE and that was his obvious dream job, but sometimes man, you think your whole life and your whole career has to be WWE but at the end of the day, it’s wrestling, so, you know. It’s good to see guys step away from there and still be successful.”
The full interview with Dirty Dango is available below:
