A former WWE star who was released by the company this past April has said he believes the company stole the Raw Underground concept from him.
When EC3 was let go by the company and his non-compete expired, he released a video of him fighting in a very similar situation to Raw Underground – a ring in some kind of garage/warehouse setting with people around the ring. This was of course before Raw Underground came to be.
Speaking on the ROH Strong podcast, EC3 said:
“I knew it was going to be stolen, so I was prepared for it. I didn’t know it’d go to that length, and I know mine played to a minor bubble of the professional wrestling audience while the majority of it saw whatever the hell they put out there. The way I look at it is kind of like I was Wayne’s World. I was producing this show in Aurora, my basement with my buddy Garth. We’ll call him JC in this instance, and then Rob Lowe came in, bought us and when I saw Shane McMahon in the ring, not in a real underground, mine was a real underground. [This] manufactured, heartless, desolate studio, I’m looking at Shane and it felt like when Noah was rapping on Wayne’s World after they bought him out. It was just inauthentic and like I said, it had no heart. So I knew something would’ve been taken from it. I didn’t expect the whole aesthetic, and while it upset my friend JC who I worked very hard on with it, at the same time, it’s just a challenge to do something different, better next time which I definitely plan on doing because again, control your narrative, again, Ring of Honor provides freedom. I’m not tied to doing just that. There’s things I want to do in the future and continue that narrative as sort of supplemental content to whatever other places I’m doing things in and I have bold, ambitious views for it. We’ll see if it works out, I think it will.”
For the time being at least, Raw Underground is no more due to the COVID-19 pandemic and WWE not wanting to mix a bunch of people together. EC3 is currently most notably working for ROH and IMPACT.
Quote via POST Wrestling
