Tyson Kidd On The Major WrestleMania Match He Was Supposed To Produce, The New Day Turning Heel

Arguably the most successful run of Tyson Kidd’s career came when he tagged with Cesaro from 2014 to 2015. During their time as WWE Tag Team Champions, Kidd and Cesaro had a notable feud with The New Day, matching up against the Power of Positivity trio on multiple occasions. Speaking on The New Day: Feel the Power podcast, Kidd revealed his career has been tied to New Day’s Kofi Kingston since the beginning.

“My tryout match for WWE was against Kofi,” Kidd said. “I was unsigned, and then I got signed by working the dark matches. I wrestled with Kofi in my first TV match at Deep South Wrestling. We’ve done single matches, tag matches, all the way to producing. I was actually supposed to produce Bryan and Kofi at WrestleMania.”

Kidd and Cesaro’s feud with The New Day launched the former on their path to stardom. As fans will remember, The New Day received an overwhelmingly negative reception in their first couple months as a group, and it wasn’t until they turned heel in their program with Kidd and Cesaro did they really hit their stride. Kidd recalled one of the first moments they experimented with making The New Day heel, crediting a European tour crowd for the impromptu switch.

“We just wrestled on SmackDown in Dallas,” Kidd said. “We went to the European Tour, and the first day– I don’t know if everyone knows how our travel works, but we wake up Wednesday morning and we fly all through Wednesday. With how long the traveling takes, you are in Europe Thursday morning. Everybody’s tired and no one’s on the proper adjustment of the schedule. It becomes a camaraderie with the boys, and it can be the most fun time.

“We’re all tired, and Nattie is on the outside, Woods is on the outside. I remember they booed you guys and they cheered us. I remember doing a couple of things and it wasn’t going anywhere – for example, that first night I hid behind Nattie, they cheered. We switched on the fly and went with you guys, [The New Day], as the heels and us, [Tyson Kidd and Cesaro], as the babyfaces.

“It was so much fun, and then, the next day, it’s like, ‘Is Nottingham going to react the same way as Belfast? We don’t know.’ You guys weren’t purposely cutting promos to turn them heel. I remember being in Poland on that tour. You guys would cut a babyface promo about being positive – smiles, clapping infectious, and all that, and when we came out, they booed you guys and cheered us. Every night, we didn’t know if we would get that same reaction. Originally, we were supposed to wrestle The Usos on that entire tour, but Jey got hurt.”

That European tour reaction showed how the crowd viewed the two teams, but that didn’t mean the turn was ready to be executed. Kidd noted that it took more boos from a pay-per-view crowd to encourage the switch to be made.

“Just because we did that full two-week tour of the audience booing you guys and cheering us, doesn’t mean when we get back home and we get back to doing things normally – doesn’t mean that’s going to be the case,” Kidd said. “We wrestled you guys in Philly on the Kickoff of Royal Rumble [2015], and it was the same kind of thing, where they cheered us and booed you.

“We wrestled you guys in Chicago at Extreme Rules, and the company goes with it. We do the title switch. Not only we did the title switch, but also the double switch, and it was cool that it translated through and it carried over. It wasn’t just a stained kind of loss in time in Europe. It’s something, later on, that translates to pay-per-view and TV. Then you guys blew up, and you blew up on your own course.”

While Kidd has been retired for five years, and Cesaro moved on to tag with Sheamus and Shinsuke Nakamura, the former Tag Team Champion looks back on his time with Cesaro fondly. He says the pairing came about because of how well they worked together when on opposite sides of the ring.

“We had good chemistry as opponents,” Kidd said. “I wrestled in Cesaro’s debut. I don’t know why were thrown together in that gauntlet. We wrestled you guys in that gauntlet. There’s some interference with Stardust and Goldust in that match. There was some kind of thing, and we eliminate you guys, and The Usos eliminated us. The next day, we wrestled you guys on SmackDown in a very short match.”

If you use any quotes from this article, please credit The New Day: Feel the Power with a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.

Mehdy Labriny contributed to this article.