JBL has reflected on the late PAC’s time in WWE as Neville, revealing details about Vince McMahon’s creative vision for the former NXT Champion and the impressive response he generated from fans.
Speaking on the Something to Wrestle podcast, JBL recalled being part of WWE’s production and creative meetings when Neville arrived on the main roster.
“Neville, I was there when he came into WWE. I was in all the creative meetings. We’d have the creative meetings before the shows, with the production meetings, so you’d hear the creative plans and everybody would be on the same page, with the announcers being in there.
Before that, Michael Cole and I got notes directly from Vince McMahon, which was pretty cool, because we’d go in there, just the two of us, and Vince would tell us things that he wouldn’t tell the production meeting because he knew we weren’t stooges. There’s always some stooge in the production meeting that was reporting things online. We always tried to find them, and I don’t think we ever found one.
But when Neville came in, man, he was unbelievable. I mean, just unreal. You know, Vince loved Mighty Mouse, and he wanted Neville to be Mighty Mouse, but he already had one in Rey Mysterio.
You know, one thing with the themes for Rey was that it was based upon what Vince thought Mighty Mouse would have. You know, that’s how much Vince loved that character.
And I remember several times in the meetings, wanting to position Neville more as Mighty Mouse, which obviously he’s perfect for. You know, it was something that he could have done. That superhero, the superhero that could do things. And he was that. He was perfect for that.
I was sitting there one day, and they talked about how many impressions he was getting. He was getting double the impressions of everybody else when he came in, because when social media first came in, we started getting the social media reports and the impression reports about who was getting what.
Vince says, ‘We’ve got our test audience out there, right out there.’ And that was the audience. But Neville always got twice as much as everybody else, which was impressive.
Neville was a world-class talent and a good guy. Neville was always so pleasant to talk to.”
PAC performed for WWE under the Neville name from 2012 until his departure in 2018. He became the inaugural NXT Tag Team Champion alongside Oliver Grey before later capturing the NXT Championship and WWE Cruiserweight Championship.
JBL’s comments offer additional insight into how highly Neville was viewed during his early main-roster run, both from a creative standpoint and through the audience engagement data WWE was receiving at the time.
