David Otunga on whether he’s retired, says John Cena buried The Nexus, recalls working with Bret Hart

By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)

Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest David Otunga
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com

On whether he considers himself to be retired: “No, I just consider myself as having not wrestled in a long time.”

On when he knew it was time to step away: “It wasn’t necessarily my last match. That’s the thing, in my mind, I’ve never had my last match. It’s just where I was in the company and becoming an announcer and doing all that, they didn’t really want me doing in-ring stuff. You actually get a different contract where you are on an announcer’s contract instead of a talent one. So it just was they weren’t even thinking about me, booking me creatively, although I did pitch some ideas, and was gonna have my own stable. I wanted to, got a little bit of traction.”

On who was going to be in his stable: “Well, I don’t know. I pitched something, I don’t know if I called it The Firm or what it was, but it was kind of what The Hurt Syndicate ended up becoming. But it was before that, so it was three years before that. I don’t know when they came out. It might even been longer, because it was 2019, this is before COVID, at least. But anyway, I was going to be the leader of that as a heel lawyer. And, yeah, they liked it, but it obviously didn’t [happen], they liked me better as an announcer.”

Whether John Cena buried The Nexus: “Oh yeah, that’s 100 percent accurate. I mean, that’s what happened, that is what happened.”

If it’s because Cena wanted to go over in that match: “Yes. And I don’t know why he wanted to go over, but we knew all day we were supposed to go over, and then things started getting weird, and then they tell us, no, the finish changed, and it’s because John wanted to go over, and we weren’t happy about that. The other guys in the match weren’t happy about that. If I’m being honest, I think John probably knows that wasn’t the right idea. I mean, maybe obviously, at the time, he thought that was the right call, but in retrospect, I don’t even think he would agree that that was the right thing to do.”

On what was the finish supposed to be: “I know we were supposed to go over. I don’t know how. I don’t know how many of us there were [supposed to be left in the match], but there were some shenanigans [planned] and ultimately, we went over. [For those that don’t know, Cena took a DDT on the concrete, it was two-on-one, and he still won the match] But either way, you spend six months or however long it was building this faction, and we’re the strongest thing, we’re the hottest thing they have. Then now, why would you have us lose that? This is the main event. To really build these new stars, you want us to keep going. We could have rode this all the way to Mania, but then after that, we’ve now lost, and that took us down a few pegs. After that, we never regained the steam. They ended up separating us.

“Even then, they started to have a good storyline going where we were gonna oust Wade Barrett, and I was gonna take over. I remember I kicked him out of the group. I think it was Raw, and then the next week, I was supposed to then become the leader. However, then it’s hey, surprise guys, we got a new leader for you, CM Punk. Wait, what? How does this fit in? And I guess he needed a faction. Straight Edge Society was done, and he needed a new faction. So I don’t know why they decided just to give him Nexus. So then the storyline that we had going just stopped, and now we’re The New Nexus with CM Punk, which, eh. It never really took off, I think, because it was a disconnect for the fans too.”

On sharing the ring with Bret Hart: “That was awesome. Just to share the ring with him, and getting to talk [to him]. Bret is one of my favorite people in WWE, period, in all of professional wrestling. So just getting to talk to him, getting to know him, that was awesome. He’s so humble and so knowledgeable, and then being able to share the ring with him, it was awesome, but it was nerve-wracking a little bit because we didn’t want to hurt him. We know that he’d had some injuries and some health problems before. So we were very, very careful with him. But it was awesome.”