Corey Graves Blasts WWE Wrestlers for Crying on Twitter Over the Saudi Arabia Flight Delays

Corey Graves gave his two cents on what went down in Saudi Arabia last week on the latest episode of After The Bell, and the SmackDown color commentator didn’t hold back his opinions on certain outspoken members of the WWE roster. Graves echoed the sentiments made in WWE’s official statement regarding the delay, that it was only caused by mechanical issues with the plane and didn’t have anything to do with a rumored payment dispute between Vince McMahon and the Saudi Arabia General Entertainment Authority. He stated after the initial delay, WWE officials attempted to get every member of the SmackDown roster that had been booked for Friday night’s episode of SmackDown onto a separate plane.

However WWE’s statement read that group of wrestlers, referred to as the #Saudi20 on social media, “felt so strongly that they arranged for their own separate charter in order to make it back to the U.S. for the show.” A handful of wrestlers, most notably Luke Harper, took exception to the idea that some wrestlers “didn’t want it enough to pay for my own charter.”

“So they deplaned everybody, at some point there were some people from management came around and said, ‘Hey, if we can get a group of you guys to SmackDown, would you be willing to do it?’ This is where it comes down to being a professional. We wanted to do it,” Graves explained as he recalled the situation (h/t Fightful for transcript). “So the reported, we’ve been given the sort of nickname, ‘The #Saudi20.’ Depending on who you ask, it was the 20 most important people in the company, or the 20 most important people on the plane. That wasn’t the case. What it boiled down to was the people that were advertised for Friday Night SmackDown on FOX. Your King Corbin’s, Roman Reigns, The Revival, New Day — guys that had advertised matches that did not want to let anybody down, including ourselves.

“It had nothing to do with who was more important or who had the most cache,” he added, saying less important guys than himself and Michael Cole wound up trying to leave on that second chartered flight.

Graves sympathized with the wrestlers who thought it “sucked” that they were stuck at the airport for a considerable amount of time, but he had no patience for the people that spoke up on social media.

“It sucks, no two ways about it. But all these conspiracy theories that have been drawn up, and half of it comes from some of the boys that were on the plane. If you are that insecure and you feel so strongly that you’re gonna get on Twitter and complain because our flight got screwed up for whatever the reason would be, what’s Twitter gonna do? All it is is fuel for these journalists, so to speak, and then it gets on the Internet and everyone puts their two cents in and starts coming up with their conspiracy theories. And if you’re mad that your flight got delayed and you weren’t one of the ‘Saudi 20,’ you weren’t important enough to get on the jet, that’s on you. Quit crying about it on Twitter. You’re a WWE Superstar, this happens, this is part of our life. We all have travel woes, we all have travel issues.”

Graves the commended Randy Orton for not causing a fuss regarding the delay or the second charter.