Legendary WWE Tag Team No Longer Working Together

The Dudley Boyz have not wrestled a match together since December 2016. And according to D-Von Dudley, there's a good reason for that. The WWE Hall of Famer recently appeared on The Cut Pro Wrestling Podcast and explained that after their 2015-16 run the pair were offered new WWE contracts, only for Bubba Ray to say no after Vince McMahon turned down his idea to bring the Bully Ray persona to WWE. 

"Well, Bubba didn't want to play fair. And I know Bubba will have his own opinion about what happened, but again, that's the majority of it. They gave us both the contract. I signed it. He didn't want to sign it and it left a bad taste in their mouth," D-Von said (h/t Wrestling Inc.). "And by the time he was ready to sign it, some time had already went by. Let me give you a timeline: when Shane McMahon came back in Detroit, that was when I signed the deal. That was in March. So the deal actually came to us in February of that year. Now they've been trying to get us to sign it and Bubba wouldn't sign it. Now all of a sudden we go forward and I've signed it and he hasn't because there's still things he felt he had to take care of on his side. By the time he got through that, the company was like, 'Nah, we don't want it anymore. We're not dealing with the headaches.' And they decided not to do it."

"It wasn't like the WWE did a bad thing by us," he added. "Let me put it to you this way — they gave us a contract that was great, and at 44 and 45 years of age, I even told Bubba, 'We need to take the money and just go. We're not gonna get another opportunity like this again. We just need to sign this contract and do another year. If you don't do another year after it, don't do it. I'll go on my own.' But I couldn't make him sign it."

After the deals fell through D-Von became a backstage producer while Bubba went on to work as Bully Ray in Ring of Honor. D-Von emphasized that there is no beef between the two.

"I wish him nothing but the best. We do not do business anymore. There's no hard feelings and I don't have any animosity towards him. It's just he's doing his thing and I'm doing my thing," D-Von said. "Bubba and I are not at odds with each other. We don't hate one another. We just went different ways like most tag teams do. This is not a Marty Jannetty and Shawn Michaels thing where we hate each other. We don't. We just had a difference of opinions at that time and we went our separate ways. Even the wrestling school, he has the wrestling school in Connecticut, I have the one in Winter Park over here. So we both individually own our wrestling schools but we just do things separate now. That's all."

Normally that would be the end of it. But then Velvet Sky, Bubba's significant other, retweeted the story and wrote, "Fiction can be fun.... lol if y'all only knew the truth. Cuz this ain't it." She has since deleted the tweet.