Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to After the Bell. I am still Corey Graves. I am still joined by my tag team partner as I am each and every week the fighting Irishman himself Kevin Patrick

K.P. It's been a rough one. It's been a rough week within the WWE universe. How are you holding up? Yeah, I'm good. Thank you, but it's been a rough week for everybody. All the viewers around the world that have been with WWE since the beginning and then a rough one for our friends and colleagues, you know, that new Terry funk really well and certainly new Bray White so well throughout. So, you know, look credit to everybody for getting through Friday and Monday because it's been an emotional place to be. No doubt about it. Emotions have been running extremely high since the

entire world was shocked last week. We're going to do our best here on ATB to lift your spirits, help you through this. I just want to take a few moments to pay some respects. Obviously, I want to start with the great Terry funk. I actually had a moment K.P. After we got off the air Friday night at Smackdown, which I want to talk about in depth in a few minutes. I got to run into Paul Heyman and I was able to thank Paul Heyman because it was because of Paul that I got to know and understand the great news.

That was Terry Funk. Terry Funk's heyday was obviously many, many years ago, despite the fact he had a 50 year active career, which is unheard of. But for my generation in my age range, ECW was sort of a rebirth for Terry Funk.

It introduced the Funker to a whole new generation of fans who may not have been familiar with his epic, epic rivalries with Rick Flair and matches with the great Muda and the territory days.

Terry Funk has truly done it all. I think he's been in the ring with literally everybody of all time. He was that accomplished and had such a career.

So it was definitely heartbreaking for the business as a whole. As you mentioned, Terry Funk highly respected by everyone who's ever encountered him.

I didn't know Terry very well. I had the opportunity to meet him a few times and he was always as advertised just as friendly and happy and really lit the room up.

It's very odd that you hear about someone in any walk of life who is simultaneously revered as being one of the toughest people ever in that business, yet also simultaneously being one of the most well liked.

And I to this day don't know anyone who's ever said a poor word about Terry Funk without at least being quick enough to give him his flowers that we lost one of the all time great.

That in and of itself very sad, very tragic, but not necessarily totally unexpected or out of left field. Terry was getting up there in the years. He's had some health problems over the years.

So while that in and of itself was extremely tragic Thursday evening, we all received the horrible news that we lost.

Bray Wyatt, our friend, Windom Rotunda, and as anyone who watched Friday Night Smackdown could see the outpouring of support and emotion from the locker room from everybody backstage from the very top of the mountain on down.

And I'm not speaking out of school saying that everybody you were in the same production meeting I was people were wearing their emotions on their sleeve, there were tears choked back before the show ever began.

I walked into the arena and I saw Berkeley ottman who is our bell ring or our time keeper who I met back in the days of FCW there's a whole generation of us who populate WWE now who all sort of began at or around the same time in Tampa at FCW and Berkeley was just just a young guy who'd kind of hang around and help out wherever he could and he scratched and clawed and worked his way into an actual position and I walked into the arena into our locker room.

And Berkeley was the first person I saw and he had you know tears in his eyes understandably and he came up and just gave me a big hug and thankfully that would be the recurring theme of the day and as much controversy as there could have been not that I really noticed much about going on with the show and having everybody doing their job performing their roles with such heavy hearts in hindsight to me there's nowhere else I would have rather been.

Then at Smackdown helping construct this tribute in short order and kudos to our amazing studio in Stanford to be able to put together the amazing Bray Wyatt video package and everyone who sat in that meeting and discussed the best way to honor the memory of Bray within the constructs of a two hour Smackdown show, it was just the outpouring of support and emotion from everybody being able to see Braun Strowman being able to see Eric Rowan, you know I don't know.

The first person I texted once I found out was Seth Rollins who's going to be our guest here in a little bit heavy hearts across the board, we did the best that we could on Friday under those circumstances, I think it was a home run, I think we did a great job honoring the memory of Bray and Terry funk and trying to help the WWE universe who all had collectively heavy hearts sort of just deal with it.

I've had a few days to actually speak to my therapist and really sit with this after Smackdown went off the air, went back to the hotel, walked into the hotel bar and saw a few of our regulars, you know Michael PS Hayes and a few others and we did one shot that a shot of Jack in memory, I went back up to my room and full disclosure, I fell apart man, I really sat with it, everybody grieves differently, it hit me really hard because I was just looking back and thinking to having

wind them as such a constant throughout my career in WWE dating all the way back to the FCW days and I want to take a minute before I get any further to send my condolences to Mike Rotunda and his wife Stephanie Taylor Rotunda who we all know as Bodalis, Micah Rotunda their little sister who is as close to a little sister that the entire business has, Micah always is just smiling and great to be around and of course, Bray's wife, Wyndham's wife Joe Joe.

Joe Joe Offerman who we all know from WWE was a ring announcer here for a long time, absolute sweetheart of a human being, their children, the entire family, you're not going to find a tighter knit family within this industry, I think then the Rotunda's, if you knew Wyndham and you knew Taylor, you know Taylor, you knew how close they were with their family, if you knew Mike when Mike was around as a producer, how highly he'd spoke of his children and he loved to just brag.

Just a beautiful family unit, they all to my knowledge live within a very, very short distance of one another in Florida, almost like a compound, that was a few years back, I'm not sure, I'm sure people have shifted and moved, but I think the important thing to take away is while the WWE Universe understandably is morning, Bray Wyatt, those of us who were lucky enough to know Wyndham, we're mourning the loss of our friend and to take it back to the FCW days, Wyndham had come up as Husky Harris to WWE.

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