While the world dealt with social media apps like Facebook and Instagram crashing on Monday afternoon, WWE Superstar Mustafa Ali decided to have some fun with it. He posted an old photo of the mysterious SmackDown hacker from early 2020 (aka “The Message), then tweeted, “Facebook, IG and WhatsApp down? Yo @TheMessageWWE knock it off.” The hacker gimmick was infamously pulled from TV before it was ever revealed who was behind it, but Ali managed to sneak in the reveal during his first promo as the leader of the Retribution faction late last year.ย
Videos by ComicBook.com
Ali revealed in an interview with ComicBook back in March that he had to audition in order to be slotted in as the leader of the masked group. The group then disbanded at Fastlane after Ali was kicked out.
“When I was initially looking at the mirror, I go, ‘What is wrong with me? Nothing’s wrong with me. Look at me.’ Again, after seven months, you have to eventually have that look in the mirror and go, ‘What am I missing?’ I think the thing I was missing was a little bit of edge. I knew I could cut a great promo. But again, within the confines of being a good guy, you’re very limited as to what you can say,” Ali said. “So I presented the idea of doing something. It wasn’t being the leader of Retribution, it was, I met with Vince McMahon and the creative writing team and said, ‘I think I’m capable of doing more and this is the route I’d like to go.’ And it was basically, ‘Well, you’d have to show us.’
“So I recorded my own promos, my own videos,” he added. “I had to audition basically to not be a good guy anymore. And if you go back and you watch these WWE Main Event matches I was having before joining Retribution, you would see the small details, the storytelling when I was slowly becoming more aggressive, a little bit more violent, having a little bit more of these heelish tendencies in my matches.”
Ali has since started a tag team with Mansoor. The pair were drafted over to the Friday Night SmackDown brand during Saturday’s Supplemental Draft on Talking Smack. The 2021 WWE Draft will continue on tonight’s Monday Night Raw.
