Former WWE star Mason Madden (Mace) recently spoke with Steve Fall of WrestlingNews.co on a number of topics including how he was hired by the company.
Mace said, “What a lot of people don’t know is I was with WWE for a few years, maybe four years, before I even did commentary. After I had stopped playing football, I played for the Houston Texans, I connected with Booker T, obviously, which is where, long story short, I had a tryout that I worked out with Canyon Ceman, the Director of Talent or whatever his job was at the time. He said, ‘Hey, whenever you’re done playing football, you can come have a tryout. We’d love to have you.’ So I had that kind of setup.”
“I decided I was done playing football. I contacted Booker who I had met. I used to go to his shows when I was with the Texans. I said, ‘Hey, Booker, can you train me so I don’t look like a goof during this tryout.’ He trained me so I didn’t look like a goof. I looked enough, not like a goof, to get signed. I kind of waited in developmental. I didn’t get to do any NXT TV at the time because the Black and Gold era was very dependent on, you know, work rate, you know, kind of the focus, so there weren’t a lot of opportunities for guys like me at that time. I ended up on commentary because I was doing, I guess, commentary tests with a friend of mine. He was there doing commentary at the time and he just needed somebody to bounce off of. I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll bounce off you.’ I was friends with him for a while back and I was fine to do it. They sent that into Connecticut. Paul Heyman got his hands on it and he said, ‘Hey, that other guy’, which I felt horrible, because obviously my friend was there to do commentary. I’m just sitting there and he’s like, ‘That other guy. Put him in RAW’, so I ended up on RAW doing commentary. I stood up to Brock and that was the end of it because when I stood up, Vince saw, he’s like, ‘He’ bigger than Brock. Why is he on commentary”, and he sent me back to NXT.”
The Brock Lesnar storyline getting cancelled on WWE RAW:
“As I understand it, it was pitched that I go into some sort of program with Brock, because in my head, like after that (Brock putting him through a table), they told me, ‘Oh, we want you to just sell it’, and I’m like, ‘Okay,’ Then there’s another week went by and they’re like, ‘No, we’re still having to sell it’, and I was like, ‘Okay.’ Then they’re like, ‘Okay, we’re moving on from you’ but in that maybe three week period of not knowing, I’m back in the ring and I’m training because I’m like, oh, surely, because the segment did so well on everything. I looked at the numbers on Twitter or X, and on YouTube, the numbers were tremendous. I’d never gotten a response like that for anything. I’m like, man, even if I just get in the ring with Brock and he kills me in two minutes, that could make my career because that’s a cool story of the commentator that put on some boots and went toe to toe with Brock Lesnar, even if it’s for a minute, but as I understand it, Vince thought that it would confuse the fans because they didn’t know I was a wrestler. Then I had to sneak back onto RAW as Retribution.”
Retribution working with Bray Wyatt and Alexa Bliss:
“The lights go out and Bray appears, right? Are all of these guys about to jump Alexa Bliss? That’s uncharted territory in modern WWE.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
