Parker Boudreaux (aka Harland) was one of 10 NXT wrestlers released by the WWE roster on Friday, bringing his career with the company to an end after just over one year. Boudreaux built up a name for himself in the online wrestling community without even competing in a match thanks to his resemblance to Brock Lesnar, but WWE veered away from that when he made it to television by shaving his head and giving him a silent persona to work alongside Joe Gacy. He has since changed his Twitter profile back to his real name and proclaimed, “PARKER BOUDREAUX… is back.”
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Shortly after his release was made public, Boudreaux got an endorsement from MLW founder Court Baurer — “Know Parker Boudreaux (@harlandwwe) well. He used to come to our @MLW shows with his crew from @UCF_Football. Beast of an athlete. Will be a big player one day, if he keeps putting in the work.”
According to Fightful Select, part of the reason Harland was let go was due to coaches not being satisfied with how his in-ring work had progressed. While Gacy has made his way up to an NXT Championship match this coming week, the big man only wrestled six times in NXT.
Boudreaux’s hype was so big when he originally signed that Paul Heyman even commented on his potential. He told Esquire Middle East last March, “Parker Boudreaux is a very interesting human being that took his education very seriously. He’s not just a meathead. He’s a six-foot-three, six-foot-four, 300-pound athlete who has one hell of the head on his shoulders. So Parker Boudreaux is doing what everyone else does. He’s starting from the bottom. He has reported to the WWE Performance Center. And he’s got to work his way up to the top. There’s a lot of roadblocks on the way. Do I think he can navigate them? Absolutely.”
