Mustafa Ali went through quite a few gimmicks during his WWE run. One of which ended due to a power struggle within management.
TNA Wrestling‘s Mustafa Ali was a recent guest on Casual Conversations with The Classic. When asked about his Hacker gimmick and why it didn’t end up going anywhere, Ali said it came down to a power struggle between Paul Heyman and Bruce Prichard.
“So the initial pitch for the hacker came from me,” Mustafa Ali said. “Because I was like so many guys, there’s only so much time on the show. So like a lot of people, I was at home, not doing much, paranoid for my job.
“So I pitched this idea about a hacker, and it was received really, really well. And then these vignettes started, and I genuinely thought I was onto something. The only actual creative plan that I knew about was that the first program, the first feud, was going to be me and Dolph Ziggler. Dolph was doing this romance story with like Mandy Sacs and Otis, and then there was to be a WrestleMania blow-up.
“And the idea is that I leaked footage, or somehow I inform Mandy that Dolph’s intentions aren’t true, and Sonya is in on it. So that’s as far as I went. They had the Mania match. I did the hacker reveal, and then the character just died. The reason the character died is because there was a dynamic power shift at the time where RAW had its own writer, and SmackDown had its own writer, I think it was Paul Heyman and Bruce Prichard, and there was some sort of power struggle with that.
“And ultimately, the character suffered because of that, because I believe both shows wanted the character, and there was like a fight over it. I suffered from being too popular, legit. I’m really tight friends with some of the social media people from WWE, and they would give me the metrics for what the hacker stuff does.
“Because there was speculation, at one point, people thought was CM Punk, right? And then they thought it was Xavier Woods. So the fans are crazy, in a good way. I was doing these voiceovers. And people would take software and slow down the voiceover and decode it, and you can hear my voice clearly. So then I had Xavier Woods do a voiceover, and then I had my wife do a voiceover. I had all these different people do voiceovers.
“At one time, they thought it was Sasha [Banks]. So it creates this sense of like, well, who’s this person gonna be? The hacker character died because of this power struggle. It just went away. And the next thing I know is Vince and I are having conversations about what I could do.”
What do you make of Mustafa Ali’s comments? Were you a fan of the hacker gimmick in WWE? Let us know your thoughts by sounding off in the comments section below.
If you use any of these quotes, please credit Casual Conversations with The Classic with a link to this article for the transcription.
