Roderick Strong is undoubtedly one of the best in-ring competitors in all of WWE NXT and has been a mainstay of NXT since his debut back in 2016. The fact that WWE is now cutting shorter wrestlers over thirty is a new development which was not in place when Strong decided to re-sign with the company recently.
Back in February of this year, Roderick Strong quit NXT as he handed in his resignation NXT General Manager William Regal shortly after The Undisputed Era broke up. The move certainly shocked fans as he was none of the highlights of NXT over the years.
Roderick Strong would later return to NXT back in June as the leader of the new group called The Diamond Mine. While speaking to Fightful, Roderick Strong explained why he quit NXT earlier in the year.
“I did (quit). To me, I did, and I was done. Honestly, there’s a huge influence from Shawn Michaels, but Jamie Noble was one of the first people to tell me, ‘If it’s real to you, it’s real to everybody else.’ In my head, I had (just quit). It’s one of those situations where the highlight was on Kyle and Adam, but the competitor in me wants to be a part of that, but there wasn’t an opportunity at that time. For me, this gave me a chance to distance myself, decompress and really think about what I wanted to do. I’ve been in a wrestling ring for 25 years . . . I told my mom I quit, my dad, my family. I was like, ‘We’ll see what happens down the road.
WWE is already making big plans for Roderick Strong as part of the Diamond Mind stable, so we will have to wait and see how he will be booked in the coming weeks. Tyler Rust, a fellow Diamond Mine member, was part of the recent releases which cut down the factions numbers by a third.
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