Shane Haste, formerly known as Shane Thorne, looks back on the downfall of RETRIBUTION.
On August 3, 2020, a masked group of individuals set fire to a generator on WWE Raw. A few days later, the group, which was named RETRIBUTION after its arrival on Raw, invaded SmackDown and cut the ring ropes with a chainsaw.
The group members continued to wreak havoc, and their identities turned out to be MACE (Dio Maddin), T-BAR (Dominik Dijakovic), SLAPJACK (Shane Thorne), RETALIATION (Mercedes Martinez) and RECKONING (Mia Yim). Though the stable was a prominent act on Raw for a few months, RETRIBUTION struggled to find success, and it eventually broke up in March 2021.
In an interview with Fightful, Haste reflected on his time in the group. When asked whether he heard that FOX, the broadcast home of SmackDown, wasn't comfortable with Retribution, he noted that they heard rumors, but he wasn't sure. He pointed out that the stable became less of a mob after its debut and morphed into a more "monsterish" act. Haste stated that he wanted to lean into this in an effort to make it work, but it all fizzled out.
"We hear rumors like that, but that’s above my pay grade, if that’s true or not. Sounds right. I think that’s maybe why they shifted to less of a mob, and it’s also because we couldn’t have extras because of COVID testing and what not. So we lost all our Putty Patrols, we called them. So that didn’t help. I think the shift from being a more realistic to being more monsterish. I was like, ‘Alright, let’s fully lean more into that then. Let’s go all the way with that then.’ It just hovered and fizzled out," he said.
Regarding the apparent interest in RETRIBUTION, given the impressive numbers its clips drew on YouTube, Haste suggested that Vince McMahon might not have been actively searching YouTube and Twitter each day, so he might have been unaware of this buzz.
"I don’t know. I don’t think Vince is on YouTube. I don’t know if he’s scrolling Twitter…. He’s vanity searching every day," he said.
On a similar note, he stated that McMahon had reached the point in his life where he didn't care what anyone thought, given the lucrative Peacock deal.
"The Peacock deal was for, what? Ten billion or million or something? I’m like, ‘He doesn’t give a shit.’ What does he care any more? He doesn’t care what you think. Which is pretty clear. He was a good guy," Haste said.
In hindsight, Haste named the "comically bad" state of things as his favorite part of RETRIBUTION. He described how the group constantly pitched ideas, and none of them went anywhere. He also recalled how a security guard mistakenly called him "Slapshot", and he thought that would have been a cool name.
"I think just how comically bad things were. Like, we’d just keep pitching and they’d come back with something completely from, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ and then, ‘Here’s something from a completely different.’ For me, personally, I think I’ve told this story before about where we would do our promos backstage was the same area, there’d always be one building security guard there off to the side. That was his door. I got there to the area earlier one time just to lay out what I was gonna do. He comes over to me, he’s like, ‘Hey, man. Don’t want to interrupt you, but I just want to tell you, man. This is so cool, man. I love Slapshot.’ I’m like, ‘Ahh, actually, the name’s Slapjack,’ and [he] just goes back to his door and stands there like we’d never [spoken]. That was so good. Slapshot would have made sense. I’m like, ‘Yeah, yeah. That would have been cool,'" Haste said.
After RETRIBUTION broke up, Thorne moved to SmackDown, and he was only used on TV once prior to his release in November 2021. Since then, he has been competing for a number of promotions, including NJPW through the NJPW STRONG brand.
In the same interview, Haste commented on his contract status. You can check out his comments here.
If you use any of the quotes above, please credit Fightful with a h/t and link back to us for the transcription.
