Real Reason Scotty 2 Hotty Quit WWE

The itch to get back in the ring contributed towards Scotty 2 Hotty's decision to quit WWE back in November.

Revealing as much in a new interview on Chris Van Vliet's INSIGHT podcast, the former Too Cool member said that at 48 years old, the timing felt right for him to return to the squared circle (h/t WrestlingNews.co):-

“What a crazy time in my life. I’m taking this crazy step where I’m 48 years old and I’m going back into the ring. But I feel like I can go and deliver. If I couldn’t, then I wouldn’t do it. It just felt like the perfect time to do it.”

Prior to his departure, Scotty had worked as an NXT coach since 2016. He used Twitter to reveal that he had asked for his release, claiming that while he held "special memories" from his time in the job, he had promised himself that he would never stay in a role solely for the paycheck. Soon after, Scotty was let go.

1 January saw Scotty work his first match since 5 November 2016, falling to Joey Janela at GCW's Die For This event. On INSIGHT, he said that as much as he enjoyed his NXT spot, he missed competing and was exciting by the possibilities in the new wrestling landscape:-

"I missed being in the ring, and I never said that I was retired. I took the job as a coach in WWE at the Performance Center back in 2016. I had my last match in August 2016, and that was it. I never said that I was retired, but I also never really saw myself having another match again. But I was ok with that. I look back at some of that Attitude Era stuff, and it is crazier than I remember. Nobody can take that away from me, my career peaked at the peak of professional wrestling. It was such a cool time with cool energy and cool characters, so I feel like I did everything that I wanted to do. But I missed traveling. NXT wasn’t doing any live events, and all the TV was shot in house. I wasn’t traveling and I wasn’t having fun. I saw people from AEW right down to the small independents having fun. The independents are on fire right now. So I started asking around, things like, ‘Well, what can I make?’ I was doing the numbers and thought to myself that I can go out there and kill it.”

When asked if leaving the market-leading company was a tough choice, the 48-year-old claimed that WWE's recent swathes of releases (involving wrestlers he had formed bonds with) took a toll on him:-

“It was over the last couple of months. Once the pandemic happened and all the releases started happening, I think the releases took a big toll on me. When I became a coach, I had no idea how much I would love that job, and those guys are then like your children. You create these relationships with people, and you see them get released, and you find out with everyone else when they come up on Twitter. My buddy in Nashville texted me, ‘Oh, the releases are happening again.’ So then I jump on Twitter and I see somebody released that was in my class that I just saw three hours before. That’s how I’m finding out, and dude, this is not cool.”