Nicky Rodriguez has just revealed that he’s actually gone for WWE tryouts on two separate occasions and has now been accepted too. While it’s surprising to here that he’s considering making the transition from real combat sports to the fake version, BJJ and WWE actually have had a number of connections over the years. Not only have several professional wrestler decided to get some experience on the mats over the years but a number of veteran MMA fighters have joined the WWE, like Matt Riddle and Ronda Rousey. Now it seems like Rodriguez might be making an appearance for the organization too, and this isn’t the first time that he’s actually been in touch with them:
“Previously like two, three years ago I went to a WWE tryout and recently I had like another WWE tryout and… It was pretty sick. I pretty much had to act. I had to act a little bit right? Like, obviously we know the world of professional wrestling isn’t like a real fight. It’s totally choreographed, I don’t know if you’ve heard. Obviously these guys are taking damage when they’re falling and stuff. I went to tryouts and I had to some promos. I had three total promos. Two which were a version of myself and.. the third one I tried to do a little bit something different and be like, a little funny…”
That might sound like it’s just fun and games of course, but any actors will tell you that there’s a surprising amount of time involved in that sort of work. Rodriguez actually confirmed that himself too:
“So pretty much it was like a three or four day tryout and each day we had to give a different promo. We were filming from like 9am to like 10, 10:30, or 11:30 at night.”
Of course there’s no guarantee that Nicky Rodriguez will ever make an appearance in the WWE, but the tryouts he’s had send a very promising message for any professional wrestling fans who’d want to see him make the transition. According to Rodriguez, it wasn’t just about trying to make it into the WWE this time around:
“The previous tryout was strictly a tryout, but here it was more like a… We had a film crew documenting it. I can’t say where it’s going to be released at, but it’s going on some substantial network TV channel.”
All in all, Nicky Rodriguez seemed to enjoy the experience of attending WWE tryouts and it seems like something he might genuinely be interested in pursuing. That isn’t all though, he was also surprised at how well known he was already just from his work as a high-level BJJ competitor:
“Jiu-Jitsu’s grown pretty well because the second I pulled up to the tryout, there was a group of like 50/60 people and pretty much everybody knew who I was. They were all just like professional athletes or D1 athletes, and even the producers knew who I was. It was pretty sick to see.”
Nicky Rodriguez has actually already heard back from the tryouts he attended too, as he also told the story of how he got accepted and what the offer that the WWE gave him was:
“They call me in as the first athlete, I open the door and it’s Coach Bloom, HHH, and Heartbreak Kid Mr. Shawn Michaels… So I open the door and it’s them 3 sitting there and just 1 chair across the table from them… So I sit down and they pretty much tell me ‘listen you’re tall, handsome, strong… Super coachable, extremely fast, we’ve never seen anything I like you… (laughs)’ so they were like ‘listen we want you to come spend a month in Orlando and we’ll help build this persona a little bit more and then, you know, we’ll get going from there’.”
Nicky Rodriguez revealed that he had gone for WWE tryouts in a recent episode of The Simple Man Podcast, the full episode was uploaded to their official YouTube channel:
