Former WWE Superstar Buddy Murphy has taken to Instagram to share pictures of his incredible body transformation.
Murphy, who was released by WWE at the beginning of June, shared a photo on Instagram of his new, incredibly jacked, look as his non-compete clause winds down. Murphy was released alongside Braun Strowman, Aleister Black, Ruby Riott, Santana Garrett and Lana, while another round of releases followed this week.
Meanwhile, another star who was recently released was Wesley Blake, who told Inside The Ropes‘ own Innes McVey of his origins in NXT alongside Murphy.
“When we first started doing live events, we didn’t have matching gear, of course, but we knew right away we wanted to make this work. He had white shorts at the time with the white kid pads and so I had to borrow someone’s white boots and I borrowed someone’s white trunks just so we could have that cohesiveness when we got out to the ring, so people know, ‘OK, these guys are kind of a team.’
After that first match that we had together, we had just had a chemistry about ourselves that we were like, ‘Man, I think we have something here.’ So we went ahead and started investing ourselves and buying gear and really started diving into our tag team and our tech team dimensions and stuff like that.”
Wesley, now Westin, Blake went on to reflect on the decision to break up the duo a year after losing the NXT Tag Team titles at TakeOver Brooklyn – explaining that they originally thought the split would only be from their manager at the time Alexa Bliss.
“So when we first got told that we were kind of breaking up, we thought that they were just going to break up Alexa from Murphy and myself. We knew that Alexa was going to break off from us and she was going to go have her singles run and stuff like that, which we were both very happy for and very proud of her for everything that she’s accomplished and done.”
Soon afterwards, on-screen tensions between the former tag champions came to a head leading to a split. Blake detailed how they pitched wrestling each other in a Best of Three or Best of Five series at the height of the break-up but the idea was rejected as creative didn’t want one man looking better than the other.
“Then we were just left there, we were tagging here and there, and then eventually on TV they started saying, ‘All right. Murphy, you’re wrestling so-and-so. Blake, you’re going to wrestle so-and-so in singles.’ At that time, Murphy and myself were like, ‘Wait, are you splitting us up?’ and they were just kind of like, ‘Yes and no’ – we kept getting that kind of answer. But eventually, Murphy and myself were just like ‘Let’s just pitch for us to wrestle each other.’ And so we did, We pitched us to wrestle each other in a Best of Three or Best of Five series of matches.
But they didn’t want to pull the trigger on that because they just said, ‘Hey, we want you to have separate entities and we didn’t want one partner to be above the other’ is what we are told. ‘So we’re just going to separate you both and have you both go about your own path.’ So we had that one match which, like you said, ended in a no contest with Samoa Joe coming out.
But then after that, once that happened, we started getting the wheels rolling on our single stuff in which I started doing the Beautiful Blake and he went and… he’s always been a tremendous shape. He went and got himself in even better shape and went down to 205 Live. He, of course, did very well there and for that brand.”
You can check out our interview with the former Wesley Blake in full here.