Earlier this month, WWE fired almost a dozen employees including some NPCs like former Smackdown general manager Teddy Long and referee Marc Harris. It’d been relatively silent since then aside from some cutbacks related to production and travel, and employees had started to settle back into normalcy and not fear a really, really bad phone call.
Today, according to the Wrestling Observer and the Internet at large, Josh Mathews got that really bad phone call.
WWE hasn’t publicly wished him the best in his future endeavors yet, but a variety of sources point out that WWE.com has moved Josh’s profile from its main roster page to the alumni section. So he’s either fired, repackaged as a boring guy with a different name, or dead. Or somebody on the website messed up and this is a false alarm. I think #1 is the best case scenario.
Mathews has been in WWE in one form or another since 2001, when he appeared as a contestant on Tough Enough. He didn’t win, but his moxie (or whatever) convinced WWE to bring him on as a backstage interviewer and play-by-play announcer. Regular readers of With Leather recognize him as one of the voices who’d rather be anywhere else on the early seasons of NXT. Raw viewers may know him as that weird guy who asks a question backstage, stands quietly and then stares off wistfully into the distance as the wrestler leaves.
Mathews will be … missed? Here are some of his finest moments:
Leave the memories alone.
