Wade Barrett Joins NXT Commentary Team This Week
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Wade Barrett is coming back to WWE … at least for one night.
Pro Wrestling Sheet reports that the former Bad News Barrett will do commentary on this week’s episode of NXT. This isn’t a long-term deal, at least yet, as he’ll only be there for one night. This comes a few days after NXT announcer Mauro Ranallo missed NXT TakeOver: XXX. Barrett currently works as an announcer for NWA Powerrr under his real name of Stu Bennett and has been focusing on commentary and acting since he left WWE in 2016.
Barrett (aka Stu Bennett) has been preparing for a career outside of the ring a lot longer than people might know and credits Dusty Rhodes for being an earlier supporter of his commentary abilities.
Bennett recently spoke with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard and was asked when he knew he wanted to transition from the ring to the broadcast part of wrestling. Bennett says he knew early on in his WWE career that commentary is something he’d like to explore and explained that Dusty Rhodes saw something in him early on in Florida Championship Wrestling. He added that getting the opportunity to tell a story in that form is something that has always appealed to him.
“Before anybody knew who Wade Barrett was, I was a commentator in Florida Championship Wrestling in 2008 and 2009. I was in developmental at the time and this was a time when developmental was seen as the “red-headed stepchild” of WWE, it was never mentioned and you’d never see references to us on the WWE website, anything like that. Nobody really knew what was going on in Florida apart from the people in Florida that got the local network’s show.”
“Dusty Rhodes, who was the head of creative at that time in FCW, liked the way I presented and liked the way I talked. He was a supporter of mine and gave me the opportunity to be the color commentator down there. He liked what he saw and he left me on there for the better part of a year, and soon after that the writers of WWE TV took notice and said, ‘We like the way this guy talks, can he wrestle?’ ‘Yeah, he can wrestle.’ ‘Let’s get him on the show!’ And I was on NXT season one straight away then. That took me in a different direction and obviously I wrestled for a long time, but in the back of my head, I knew that when I was done in the ring, whenever that would be, I would want to go on and commentate in some capacity, someplace.”
“To this day, it’s something that I love doing. It’s a chance for me to add story, add character, add personality to essentially what is a stunt show in the ring. It allows me to tell other people’s stories by commentating and that has always been the draw of pro wrestling to me above anything else.”
Check out the full interview below:
Related: Stu Bennett: Pro Wrestling Would Be Better Off With More Guys Like Baron Corbin