A former manager of Cesaro has recalled WWE pairing him with Paul Heyman and ultimately “killing” his momentum.
After Cesaro – now AEW’s Claudio Castagnoli – won the WrestleMania 30 Andre The Giant Memorial Battle Royal, he was paired up with Paul Heyman. Although it appeared that he was heading into a significant push with one of the greatest talkers by his side, WWE split the two. This led to Cesaro going on a losing streak and remaining in limbo until his eventual tag team with Tyson Kidd.
In a recent interview with Wrestling Shoot Interviews, Cesaro’s manager from when he was part of The Real Americans, Dutch Mantell – then known as Zeb Coulter – spoke candidly regarding Cesaro’s short-lived alliance with Heyman and how he thought it ruined any momentum he had been gaining alongside Jack Swagger until that time.
“Well in wrestling when you go into an arena and you got to feel it, you got to feel what the room and how they’re accepting you or what they think about you. And they like these two guys, even though I was the heat magnet for them, they like Swagger and they like Cesaro together.
“Both guys about 6’5, strong, and then I show up at TV one day and they put him with Heyman and I asked one of the agent, and I said, ‘why?’ and I never doubted anything really. I was glad to be there but I’m thinking, why would anybody make such a move?
“He’s getting over. We’re all getting over with this threesome here. Well Vince, he wants to put him with Heyman and then I said, ‘why?’ They said, ‘Vince thinks he can get him heat’. He was getting over with us, he really was and they put him with Heyman and then three weeks later they took him from Heyman because Heyman killed him too.”
Cesaro would continue to have stop-and-start pushes on the main roster for years until he departed from the company earlier in 2022. He recently made his AEW debut at AEW X NJPW: Forbidden Door as Claudio Castagnoli. Heyman, meanwhile, is now the Special Counsel to Undisputed WWE Universal Champion Roman Reigns.
H/t – Sportskeeda