6. Xavier Woods Helped Him Discover The Tyler Breeze Character
The developmental system is about building up talent, but if they don't have a gimmick that works then WWE is going to cut that wrestler. In Breeze's case, he was told in early 2013 that he had to change gimmicks or he might get released. Breeze explained how he got some help from his good friend Xavier Woods:
He's kind of a genius at all things. And at the time he had somehow got a hold of some video editing softwareHe was figuring out how to edit these really cool videos.
After tossing around some ideas with Woods, they were finally able to settle on something they liked:
I came up with three different ones. One was a snowboarder. One was a darker version of Mike Dalton, which I was at the time. And one was Tyler Breeze. As we were filming it, we were laughing our heads offbut I had eight other characters ready to go. I ended up getting a couple emails back saying, 'You might have something with this Tyler Breeze thing.' None of it would have happened if hadn't made these videos. And he's done a lot for other people down here too.
Considering how good of a performer Breeze is today, it's nice to know that they were able to come up with a character that works so well for him. If he ended up doing the snowboarder thing it likely would have been limited. A heel version of Mike Dalton wouldn't have been a standout performer the way that Breeze is.