Motor City Machine Guns have finally arrived in WWE, but it could have happened years earlier.
Fans finally saw Alex Shelley and Chris Sabin make their debut together on Friday’s episode of SmackDown after decades building a reputation in TNA Wrestling and beyond as one of the most influential tag teams of all time.
However, the duo have exclusively told Metro.co.uk how fate nearly brought them to WWE much sooner.
In 2020, Shelley appeared on NXT for a brief stint alongside Time Splitters partner KUSHIDA, while the previous year, Sabin was brought in as a guest coach at the Performance Center.
‘I was there for a week, got to go down and see the facility, see how everything works. It was an amazing, super cool experience,’ Sabin told us in 2021.
‘They didn’t offer me anything, they didn’t say, “Keep in touch” or whatever. So, I ended up just going back with [TNA] Wrestling, that’s just the way things work out.’
For Shelley, the pandemic put a halt to plans that had been years in the making.
‘I had actually just coached at the PC maybe like two or three months before [appearing in NXT], and I saw KUSHIDA there. That was an incredible experience in and of itself,’ he recalled when we spoke in June 2023.
‘To be called back and asked to perform as a wrestler – and then to be given a very different treatment to most of the people that they would bring in too, o be brought in for house shows and have these video packages and such, it’s like, wow! This is crazy!’
He admitted it was an ‘amazing experience’ with everyone in WWE treated him ‘really well’, but the pandemic meant the stars didn’t align for a permanent deal, while he was still working as a physical therapy clinician.
‘My schooling was four and a half years, but I had been in my clinic for not even a year yet. I was just kinda gathering information, I was in that phase [of getting offers],’ he recalled.
‘Once the pandemic shut everything down it was like, whoa! I didn’t sign a contract with any particular company at that point because you could see the entertainment industry just doing a nosedive, right?
‘Everything was shutting down, and that wasn’t just pro wrestling. That’s concerts, that’s movies, that’s Hollywood, that’s absolutely everything.’
For Shelley, his life could have gone in a totally different direction after he wrestled a one-off WWE match on Sunday Night Heat against Simon Dean in 2005.
‘I’d actually asked for my release from TNA in December and I got it in January. I didn’t really know what I was gonna do, but I knew I was gonna work my hardest,’ he recalled, reflecting on his work at the time with ROH, CZW, Zero-1 Max and more.
In the spring of that year, Jimmy Jacobs asked him to do ‘extra work’ with WWE, which he initially turned down due to jet lag after returning from Japan before being convinced that he would ‘probably just play security guard’ with a chance to see the production up close.
‘I’d never experience that before so it was like, “This is intriguing, I’d like to see the business at that level”. So I get there and there’s 30 or 20 extras, however many. I remember specifically Jimmy was there, Matt Sydal was there, Delirious was there, and a handful of other people,’ he said.
‘They needed somebody to wrestle Nova, Simon Dean. I’d known Tommy Dreamer since I was maybe 19 or 20, and he was handling that that day. He saw me – mind you, full disclosure, I didn’t really wanna wrestle, I just kinda wanted to see everything.
‘I’m pale and I haven’t been to the gym in three weeks because I’ve been in Japan. He goes, “Alex Shelley”. “Oh f**k!” ‘
Shelley knew Dean from early in his career, and he recalled having a ‘somewhat competitive’ match, while WWE ‘mentioned maybe a contract’ to him after the bout was over.
‘Literally the next day, less than 24 hours, Scott D’Amore – who at the time was kinda like an interim booker for TNA – called me,’ he remembered.
D’Amore wanted Shelley to work that year’s Slammiversary, and it meant the well-travelled star had a decision to make.
‘I had to kinda make a choice on what direction I wanted my career to take. My heroes were always the guys who had done everything all over the world – [Chris] Benoit, [Chris] Jericho, [Eddie] Guerrero, these guys are the upmost excellent wrestlers,’ he explained.
‘I thought, “Well I have to do that.” I’d just got my job in Japan and I thought, if I go with IMPACT, I can do IMPACT, Ring of Honor, CZW and Japan, and I ended up doing that for a little while – which is pretty cool for a 21-year-old kid to do.
‘In hindsight, I’m very, very happy I did that because being in Japan was massive for me, just massive.’
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