Steve Maclin (aka Steve Cutler) was a recent guest on Tommy Dreamer’s House Of Hardcore podcast where he spoke about his WWE career. Cutler explained that he was grateful for his time in NXT with the Forgotten Sons and explained how he reacted when they learned the trio would be moving up to SmackDown.
“I’ll take that run [in NXT]. We were on TV. I got to be on live TV. I can’t complain about that. Did we get the NXT tag titles like we wanted? No. Did we get some of the feuds we wanted? No. Did we pitch a ton? Yes. We worked hard. No matter what, we always wanted to do our job. And at the end of the day, we know we did our part. If it didn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. It’s not our show. And so eventually we get to, two months before Mania, and [in] February [of 2020], we had our match with Grizzled Young Vets. And that’s where Hunter pulled us aside. We were always told, ‘you guys are probably gonna be Vince guys anyway,’ which is kinda funny later on. But he’s like, ‘yeah, he’s gonna have you guys make these guys look good as you can before you leave.’ And now ‘we’re gonna be calling you up to SmackDown, and you guys as a trio. There’s a lot of opportunity there with the Usos and Roman, with New Day.’ And here my mind is just—because that’s who I wanted to work with. Nothing against NXT, but you want to get up there and wrestle at that level because now you wanted to show who you are.
“And I was just so pumped and I laughed in his face a little bit when he told us we’re getting called up. And it was funny because Blake hits me and he’s like ‘stop’. But it was just one of those things where I’m like, ‘ah, hell yes. Thank you, get me out of here.’ Because it was just one of those moments we kind of knew where we were and we weren’t gonna go any higher [than] where we were in NXT. It’s just one of those moments where it’s just like ‘thank you so much.’ And we took a lot of pride in it. We went out, we killed with Grizzled Young Vets, and that was the first time we ever worked with them, too. And we’re like ‘sh-t, now we’re leaving, but we just had a really good match with them.’ Like hope we’ll get something down the road then. But we got that call and obviously, we work another month until COVID kinda hits on the NXT loops and helping some of the tag teams down there.
“Bloom asked us to work some of the matches and he kept booking us. We’re like yeah, all we want to do is work. We love working. And live crowds, I don’t think people understand, the NXT crowds in Florida are great. Some of the crowds are kinda dead, but they just want to see certain things. And that’s the one thing that’s a test in Florida is these ‘Coconut loops’. A lot of the same faces come to those shows so it takes a lot of test to yourself to change up the matches instead of just doing the same match every night on the weekends.”
Read More: Steve Maclin: My New Character In IMPACT Wrestling Combines The Punisher And Captain America
