The WWE has recently made a series of releases affecting some Superstars, a referee, a writer and an announcer, and one of those Superstars was recently stopped from attending another promotion's event, according to reports.
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Wrestlingheadlines.com reports that Evan Bourne -- who was one of 10 Superstars released earlier this month -- was scheduled to appear at Ring of Honor's pay-per-view in Nashville last week under his real name, Matt Sydal.
Bourne was supposed to come out before the ROH Championship main event match to say he wanted a future title shot and was coming for the gold, but the WWE put a stop to it.
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The reason the WWE was able to do this was because most WWE talent have a 90-day no compete clause in their contracts should they be released or leave the company. The talents that were released this month won't be free from that until September 18.
According to the report, when Bourne was released from the WWE, he contacted ROH and said that he had the OK to work for them, so the company brought him in immediately. ROH then asked for the approval of the WWE for Bourne to work for them in writing, and they were informed a few days later that Bourne wouldn't be able to work for them until September.
It was reported that Bourne was hanging out backstage at the event and was happy to be there even if he couldn't compete. Bourne reportedly gave advice to young talent backstage in order to justify the cost of his flight to get there.
Bourne had tweeted that he was in Nashville before realizing he couldn't appear:
Earlier this month, the WWE released JTG, Drew McIntyre, Jinder Mahal, Aksana, Curt Hawkins, Theodore Long, Camacho, Brodus Clay, Evan Bourne, Yoshi Tatsu and referee Mark Harris and then they released writer Jay Gibson a day later and announcer Josh Mathews sometime this week.
The moves have been made in a series of budget cuts WWE CEO Vince McMahon is making in order to cut costs after the company's WWE Network subscriptions didn't meet expectations, the organization inked a lackluster television deal and the WWE stock took a hit.
There has reportedly been a lot of paranoia amongst lower-tier talent that more budget cuts are coming as the WWE looks to slash costs and NXT is expected to be scaled back soon.
The WWE has already cut back on pyro use and its ring crew, and more releases could be coming in the next couple of weeks.
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