10 Best WWE Tales From Wrestlers’ Court -5

5. Matt Striker Is Acquitted Through Sheer Luck

WWE.com

When he first started out on WWE programming using the wrestling teacher gimmick – a relic of the time before the Attitude Era when the roster seemed to have a wrestler representing every workaday occupation you could think of – Matthew ‘Matt Striker’ Kaye had more heat than he knew what to do with. There was an incident where he’d unfavourably compared the Smackdown locker room with the RAW locker room – but, generally, he just rubbed people up the wrong way.
In shoot interviews since his release from the company last year, Striker attributes it to the fact that he’s a little socially awkward… he talks too much when he’s anxious, and gets anxious quite a lot in social situations. When he first meets someone, he can come across as obnoxious or irritating, something that he believes corrects itself once people get to know him.
That didn’t help him at the beginning though, and Striker would find himself hauled into wrestlers’ court at the beginning of his WWE career in 2005 – although Shane Helms recalls trying to advise him to avoid it by simply getting JBL and Undertaker some Jack Daniels and Booker T some cognac, and so buying his way out of the beef.
For whatever reason, Striker failed to do so, and matters came to a head in the lobby of a hotel late one evening. Having had a few, JBL called him down from his room, and began to drunkenly present the issue to him, offhandedly telling him that he could easily take him outside and kick his ass. Striker was beginning to learn that a beef can be easily quashed by just standing up to handle it physically, and had resigned himself to being on the receiving end of a traditional Bradshaw ass-whupping. When Layfield made his comments about beating respect into him, Striker sighed, and stood up to get it over with.
This was an unexpected turn of events, and Layfield didn’t immediately react. The way Striker tells the story, he had no idea whether JBL was simply too drunk to stand, or whether he just took him by surprise: but perception being reality, when it appeared as though Striker had stood up to the intimidation and JBL had good-naturedly backed down, the beef instantly went away.
In reality, Striker says this was absolutely not the case: he wasn’t fronting up, and JBL, drunk or sober, could have kicked his ass to the moon and back. But the matter was never raised again. Since then, he asserts that he simply earned his way out of the heat he’d acquired by working hard and proving to people that he wasn’t the obnoxious chatterbox people thought he was.