Coming up with a successful catchphrase in wrestling isn’t easy. Some wrestlers have tried to push a certain line to the audience but it never caught on. in other cases, something completely random and nonsensical like the WHAT chant ends up being so successful that it ends up sticking around long after its creator moved on from the wrestling business.
This story is a mix of both: it’s a story about a bunch of WWE superstars trying to come up with a new catchphrase until one of them blurted something out and it ended up sticking.
Many years ago, Ryan Reeves wasn’t known as Ryback but as Skip Sheffield of The Nexus. After joining that famous stable, he and some other Nexus stablemates needed to come up with a catchphrase that best summed up what the group was all about.
According to a story posted on TiktTok, a fan asked Ryback if he had any Nexus stories that hadn’t been told before. Ryback answered yes, and explained that this story was never told by himself or any other Nexus members because, according to him, everyone involved was legally high when it happened.
Ryback and several other WWE stars were “legally high” when they came up with a stable’s catchphrase
According to Ryback, he and some other nameless Nexus members were smoking spice, which was a legal marijuana at the time. Several people in that car had partaken in this spice and once a bunch of them were all good and high, that’s when the creativity started flowing,
“This was going around and it had been partaken by several people not driving. We were trying to come up with a new catchphase and I just said out loud, ‘You’re either Nexus or you’re against us’. We all started repeating it, we’re all in this car smoking spice saying ‘you’re either Nexus or against us.
So Wade [Barrrett] has an impromptu promo and he’s doing all of this on the fly. I can tell he’s getting ready to get to the end, and if you watch on this Pay-Per-View, I walk behind Wade and go ‘say the line Wade’ and he literally goes ‘you’re either Nexus or against us’.
They printed shirts and we had them ready the next night.”
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