Jordan Garber of NOW recently interviewed Former WWE Superstar Caylen Croft, here are some highlights….

On the differences between Ohio Valley Wrestling and Florida Championship Wrestling:

“When Ohio Valley Wrestling first became a developmental territory that was a familiarly new concept at the time. OVW was already it’s own established promotion run by “Nightmare” Danny Davis. Then the WWE and Jim Cornette decided to make that a formula. So when I was training with OVW it was it’s own independent company under the umbrella of the WWE which was really cool. That’s why I chose to begin my training there in 2001. Now fasting forward to late 2008 when I arrived at Florida Championship Wrestling. It had now changed to where developmental was strictly a WWE owned company and FCW was the first time where they put all the WWE money into the production and the whole thing. We had a TV Studio with WWE lighting and more equipment. Those were the two major differences.”

On working with The Miz:

“I’ve been in developmental for a few years and they opened a second one called Deep South Wrestling. I caught one episode where this guy was calling himself The Miz and he was drunk and screaming and saying he was going to be a wrestler and that is how I knew about him. In 2005 Matt Cappotelli and The Miz were set to be a tag team of rising stars and than Matt got hurt so they put me on the road with The Miz for all the summer of 2005 just as a filler and then Matt came back and we found out he had brain cancer so Matt was out and I was back in and then it was a sign that me and The Miz would be a tag team. So we did all of the RAW house shows for the first few months of January of 2006 and I didn’t know much about The Miz and I thought “is he in this for the wrestling or is he in this to be famous” but we got along immediately and he was a great guy, in fact he had to overcome a lot of crap. A lot of people suspected him because he was just here from the reality TV world. But obviously Miz has proven himself way beyond that now all these years later. It was a lot of fun, and we were set to debut in April of 2006 and literally vignettes have been released and then I got fired for excessive partying.”

On his WWE firing:

“It was St Patrick’s Day in March 2006 and we just went all out and I ended up in the hospital that night for drinking and partying and it was pretty serious as I almost ended up dying and I was hospitalized. Then the office found out about it and this was the time when the Wellness policy first got into effect. Because past wrestlers were dying too young. For example Eddie Guerrero just passed away months before and there was lots of stuff surrounding that so WWE was really coming down and started doing drug testing which is still in effect today. So I made it from debuting on SmackDown to being fired in a week. It ended up being one of the best things to happen to me because that really caused me to look at myself and how I’m doing and how I am living. Over the next couple years, I have made a couple of huge changes in my life because I wanted to.”

On The creation of The Dudebusters:

“Almost immediately in FCW people stared saying to me “Hey! You look like Trent Baretta” so almost right away they put me and Baretta into a tag team and then Dusty started booking us as a team on FCW TV. At first we were just “Trent Baretta and Caylen Croft” and then we got along immediately and we started calling ourselves “The Dudebusters” because Trent had that name on the indy scene. We started using it and then Curt Hawkins came to FCW to stay in ring shape and then we became a 3 man team. All of a sudden around this time we got the call that we were going to the main roster, Trent and me. Which I believe was due to Edge who was a friend of Curt Hawkins. We had a match for the office, and Edge just said “Bring up Croft and Baretta man.” Then the office said. “Come to tv” and we debuted.”

Click here for the full interview.