Finally on his own on the main roster, Murphy is no long a disciple to anyone. And if you ask him, he’s been trying to be his own person for a while.
While speaking to Corey Graves on the After the Bell podcast, Murphy didn’t just reveal the name he almost had in NXT, but some details on his time spent on his tag team with Wesley Blake. The team wound up becoming best known as Team BAM thanks to the addition of Alexa Bliss in their alliance, but there were lots of ideas that weren’t used, including Blake wanting to do some interesting things based on video games. Murphy originally suggested their gimmicks were based on the video game and movie Tron.
“I remember we wanted to become these Tron guys. My vision of Blake and Murphy with Alexa was this Tron-like world. We’re energy, we’re power, and we had some cool little concepts. We had these masks. We had those masks, which we thought were cool. We were like the hype and the upbeat guys. We were dubstep. ‘Dubstep Cowboys’ we were called by the wrestling community, but they went to the music. Picture a [Mustafa] Ali mask that has LEDs, and we thought it was awesome. We were obviously thinking outside the box, but I felt everything that we did was to get out of NXT and to the main roster because that’s where you wanted to go. It would make you try stuff if you weren’t doing anything, which was great. People are content, and I don’t like being content, and to get where you need to get, you need to do some stuff. It forced you to be creative and draw out different stuff.”
Tron wasn’t the only place Murphy found inspiration. Murphy once suggested an idea for their tag team based on Super Mario Bros., something that could’ve given the team a different feel compared to other tag teams at the time.
“We did the mask. We had this concept of this invisible paint. When a black light would hit, you’d see the full design. And I had a pitch because Sin Cara was kind of doing lights at that point, so the idea that I pitched was like where Mario gets the star, he does the (Murphy makes the sounds from Mario). “
“So the idea was when we get a hot tag, the lights change. There would be a black light, and you’d see us in neon paint and we would become like Supermen. There was nothing stopping us. (Murphy mimics the Mario music) The when we get cut off, the lights change. So it was a very cinematic kind of thing, but I thought it would be really cool. But that never made it.”
Murphy and Blake seemed to have a lot of great ideas that never made their way to television. In an era of NXT where they had hot tag teams like American Alpha and The Revival, people may have forgotten just how good that tag team was. However, Murphy has proven on Raw and SmackDown that he’s still just as creative and talented.
h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the quotes.
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