Former member of the NXT Tag Champions The Vaudevillains, Simon Gotch, recently participated in a shoot interview for RFVideo.com. Gotch was no stranger to backstage heat during his time on the main roster of WWE, and he spoke about the guy currently on the hot seat: Enzo Amore.
Gotch, of course, has a history with Enzo, having been the guy that "caused" Enzo's concussion at Payback 2016.
I put the "caused" in quotes up there because to hear Simon Gotch tell it, it was really more of a case of Enzo screwing Enzo.
"He's almost touching the ropes, maybe a quarter of the way off because, obviously, I don't want him to be too close or Cass will tag him. I go, I start running with him, I'm ghosting him the whole way, my hands are here and here, just holding him. He's running, running, running, he hits the slide, boom, hits. I follow through, I go out of the ring. I look at him. I'm like, 'Man, he's selling the shit out of this. Cool.' I go to grab him. I'm a light touch with stuff like grabbing because I know how bad that sucks when someone just grabs you ... so literally, fingers on temples, side of the head. He comes with me. I'm like, 'Okay, he's good.' Charles (Robinson), the referee, says we're in replays, so I let go of (Enzo), turn around, start jaw-jacking with the crowd, I turn back around I see this, I see the 'X'. I go, 'Oh f-ck. He's out.'"
Now as to whether there was any heat on Gotch for the injury to Enzo, he says he never felt any.
"I never knew if there was any (heat). I think most people know that Enzo was kind of a clod in the ring."
Yeah. About that.
Gotch says that, although Enzo was a wizard on the mic, the "Certified G" never really nailed the "wrestling" part of being a professional wrestler, and when he spent the better part of early 2014 in a wheelchair, it was because he had a little trouble performing a simple maneuver.
"He broke his own leg trying to counter a wristlock. Yeah, when he was in the wheelchair on NXT TV, that's how it happened. He broke his own leg trying to counter a wristlock. He blamed it on the canvas being loose."
Blaming your broken leg on loose canvas is a kind of weird pathology, but Gotch says Enzo lives up to his own hype. Or at least, he thinks he does.
"I will say, to his credit, he believes his own bulls--t. He is 100% confident in himself to his detriment and the detriment of others around him. He's an example of someone who has no excuse to not know wrestling, but he doesn't know wrestling."
This excess of misplaced confidence might be what led to the botch at Payback, if you believe Gotch's side of the events. Regardless, he says that the biggest mistake might have been WWE's failure to capitalize on the natural heat that he and Aiden English were getting after Enzo's injury.
"I'm like, 'well, they wanted us to be heels and we weren't getting enough heat. We're going to get heat for this.' And the immediate thing we do, the next night, we job out to Big Cass on RAW. I think we did it three times in a row. We did like RAW, Main Event, and SmackDown. I may be mistaken, but it was three times within a couple of weeks."
The Vaudevillains had two title shots in two months and were relegated to jobber status by the time the brand split rolled around. This was about the time of Gotch's infamous run in with Sin Cara, which may have ultimately been the beginning of the end for him at WWE.
You can watch a 12-minute preview of the shoot interview in the video below.
