On August 6, Bobby Fish was released by WWE.
Fish had returned from a torn tricep, which he suffered at WarGames in December 2020, in May and had entered into a feud with his former Undisputed ERA mate Roderick Strong
With NXT going through a transition period and Fish being a veteran on the brand, he was ready to help the next generation.
"The generation that I came up in and the generations that have come since, they don't have...the people I watched as a kid when the business was somewhat protected, there were teachers still working and they would go out and teach you on the fly. I look at a guy like Fit Finlay, who I was fortunate enough to interact with while working at NXT, he was a guy, who towards the tail end of his career, he was doing something that not a lot of people were capable of doing anymore; go out and teach. He did a run on the Indies too where, the people he crossed paths with, he gave them an invaluable lesson, that you can count on one hand the guys that were capable of giving what he gave. The generations that I watched coming up, there were a lot more of them that were able to pass that tradition on and it was a different form of work. Now, that learning curve is different. You can't resist it, it's just the way things go. Everything has to evolve and progress to what it has to be. Change is inevitable," Fish told Chris Van Vliet on Insight.
When it was mentioned that Fish seemed to be on a similar path to Finlay with NXT, Fish replied, "I thought that was where I was headed and I was okay with that. I was welcoming that. I thought, 'Mmm, let's see where this transitions.' Fit, his career path and the way he was doing stuff when he had gone back for that Indie run and back to WWE, that was where I saw myself headed and hoped to have a similar grace in doing what I was doing at that time. It wasn't in the cards. Somebody had different plans and here we are."
Fish has found new life following his WWE release as he signed with AEW following his bout with Sammy Guevara on Wednesday.
Fish will take on Bryan Danielson on this Saturday's AEW Dynamite.
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