Erick Rowan On What WWE Had Planned For His Pet Cage Storyline
Former WWE Tag Team Champion Erick Rowan has revealed what WWE had planned for his mysterious “pet cage” storyline that ended in 2020.
When Erick Rowan first became known to the WWE audience, he was a member of the bearded Wyatt Family. Rowan often times wore a plastic sheep mask whenever he wasn’t in the ring.
During his WWE career, he was a three-time tag team champion. The first title reign was with the late great Luke Harper (aka Brodie Lee) when they were in the Wyatt Family in NXT. Rowan also won the Smackdown Tag Team Titles with Harper when they were known as The Bludgeon Brothers and also with Daniel Bryan when Rowan was his bodyguard of sorts.
In the October 2019 WWE Draft, the company decided to split up Rowan & Harper, so Rowan was drafted to Raw to become a singles act. During that singles run on Raw, Rowan started carrying around a mysterious cage that had a cover on it. For weeks, it wasn’t known what was in the cage. On the March 2, 2020 edition of Raw, Rowan revealed a large spider was in the cage.
While talking to Steve Fall of NBC Sports Boston, Rowan revealed what was originally planned for his mysterious pet cage storyline.
“Seth Rollins was the big babyface at the time and I was told it was going to be a pet rat, which is great because it tied into my last feud where I tried to kill a man being Roman Reigns with a vehicle. Probably get a court appointed therapist who told me to get a therapy pet which would have been a rat. I’m like, this is great. This is going to be good for me, and hopefully draw some more eyes to the product and a great story, and Seth backstage was going to curb stomp it by accident. I was like, this is a great idea to start a feud even though I have to carry around the cage and not really tell a story for a couple weeks, but then he turned heel close to a few weeks after that and it just kept getting extended and extended until the awesome reveal.”
Rowan was released by WWE on April 15, 2020 shortly after WrestleMania 36 during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. Rowan went on to say that he wasn’t ready for his WWE story to end after the cage reveal.
“I wasn’t ready for my story to stop on that adventure. It’s been a couple of years. I’ve stepped my toes into other avenues of entertainment which I fell in love with. I’ve been lucky enough to do some bigger arena shows in AEW and get that taste of the crowd, but I haven’t had a story. I haven’t told a story of what’s happened to me since I’ve stepped away from wrestling. To me, I would love to tell that story on some sort of stage because I think it could be very interesting to see what’s happened to me. I love continuity in wrestling. The last time anybody saw me I had a pet spider that died, so I would like to talk about my years of recklessly wandering the earth finding reason and purpose for life without my precious spider.”
Since being released by WWE in 2020, Rowan has wrestled on the indies and appeared on AEW television a few times over the years using the name of Erick Redbeard.