“Speedball” Mike Bailey Comments On Reports Of WWE Interest

"Speedball" Mike Bailey says he was never close to signing with WWE. It was reported last year that WWE was working on signing him.

"Not in any concrete way," Bailey told Denise Salcedo. "There were like discussions but they're kinda always are, you always hear rumblings and I never know how much of that is true. So that's always a weird thing, I've heard people say that people have said that they heard someone say that they were definitely going to sign me. I don't know how much that's worth."

Mike Bailey is once again working in professional wrestling in the United States after five years of being barred from entering the country. Bailey was trying to enter the U.S. to work a show for Evolve Wrestling in 2016. However, he had not secured a visa to work in the country. Bailey was caught at the border, arrested, and later banned from entering the U.S. for five years.

The ban expired last March. The 31-year-old Bailey signed with Impact Wrestling last October. He's also been working for other independent promotions in the U.S.

Mike Bailey recently wrestled in PWG's Battle of Los Angeles tournament. He reached the tournament final where he was defeated by Daniel Garcia.

Bailey previously worked for PWG before he was barred from entering the U.S. He had to watch from afar as many of his contemporaries moved up in the industry.

"You assume that things are gonna go a certain way for your wrestling career," Bailey recalled. "A lot of people with whom I wrestled at PWG during 2015/2016 ended up going to NXT shortly thereafter or Impact back then. And that's sorta what I was hoping would happen with myself as well, and once you know that's not gonna happen, the trajectory that you had made for yourself is not gonna work out at all.

"You have two options basically," Bailed continued. "I can just quit, I can stop, I can take the 'L' and move on to something else with my career and let pro wrestling go or I can figure out another way to become a successful pro wrestler outside of the United States, outside of the place where everyone wants to be."

Mike Bailey, who is a native of Canada, continued his career in pro wrestling during his five-year ban. He worked for promotions around the rest of the world.

"That forced me to look at Europe. Shortly after I was banned, I did some shows in Canada, RevPro, then I got to wrestle for DDT. DDT was really my home from 2016 to 2020 right up until the pandemic," Bailey said. "I would have been right back there if the pandemic wouldn't have made things so darn difficult. DDT became my home.

"I was able to earn a living as a pro wrestler outside of the U.S," Bailey continued. "My mission was really to keep as much momentum as I could going up until the end of my 5-year admissibility."

h/t to Denise Salcedo for the transcriptions of the quotes in this article