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“Can you dance?”
Gerry Brisco knew he needed to offer a lifeline to Nikola Bogojevic if he hoped to get the 2014 Pan American Games Greco-Roman bronze medalist a spot in the WWE Performance Center.
Bogojevic was one of “Jerry’s guys,” a former amateur wrestler with a strong pedigree whom Brisco scouted extensively and thought might be able to make it in sports entertainment.
Bogojevic had all the physical tools. He wouldn’t have gotten Brisco’s attention if he didn’t and his unique personality and look made him a popular attraction at tournaments. Brisco says he had “it,” noting that no matter what else was going on at a tournament he attended, the crowd’s eyes would go to Bogojevic’s matches.
What he didn’t have, though, was a well-crafted promo for when he met with WWE executives at his tryout. Brisco often texts tryout candidates three words, “Promo, promo, promo.”
Bogojevic said his name, slowly pronouncing it as two syllables – “Bogo,” with a pause and then “Jevic.” Then there was an uncomfortable silence. Eyebrows were raised around the room.
Brisco then called out, “Can you dance?” Bogojevic looked up and said, “I can do the worm.”
And he did, to applause from the talent scouts, trainers and other participants. A skeptical Williams Regal responded, “You won me over.”
The worm has morphed into “The Caterpillar” and Bogojevic is now known as Otis, and has become the center of one of the most popular Smackdown storylines with Mandy Rose. He embraced his first WrestleMania moment last month and competes in the Money in the Bank match Sunday.
“That one minute that they get — that’s all they get and need to show us they have the personality,” Brisco told me for a USA TODAY story in 2017. “I’m not worried about the athletic skills. The kids we’ve been recruiting have been athletes since they were 4-5 years old and in multiple sports. … When I tell them to study, I tell them don’t focus on the in-ring product, focus on what these guys do with a microphone.”
WWE’s recruiting efforts have scaled far and wide, both in geography and background, from seasoned independent wrestlers to fitness athletes, football players, bodybuilders and more.
The process of amateur wrestler to “pro wrestler” interested me when I started working on a story before the WWE Hall of Fame ceremony in 2017. Kurt Angle was the featured inductee and I was in Orlando to cover WrestleMania weekend and talked to Chad Gable and Jason Jordan about the transition from amateur star to sports entertainer. A few weeks later, I had a conversation with Brisco while he was attending at Tampa Bay Rays game.
Unlike other sports like baseball or football or hockey, the progression from amateur to professional is not linear. Because unlike amateur wrestling, pro wrestling is entertainment, of course. Brisco says that part of the recruiting process is explaining to the athlete that it’s “show business” and gauging their reaction.
“It was definitely a goal,” Otis, now 28, told WWE’s Kayla Braxton this week of making WWE. “I just didn’t know if it was going to happen for real. At the time, this was my No. 1 dream, that this was my first love. I’ve always told anyone that I’ve gotten in a relationship with that my first marriage was to wrestling.”
And what might you expect from a guy whose great-grandmother went by the stage name “Kettle Kate” and was a wrestler and circus strongwoman who toured carnivals in northern Wisconsin? She weighed about 280 pounds at 5-foot-5 and used to throw around her opponents. At one point, WWE’s Paul “Triple H” Levesque described Otis’ look as an “old-school strongman.”
Otis began wrestling in middle school after his family moved from Minnesota to Wisconsin. As a high school senior at Superior High in the 2009-10 season, he won the state title and went 48-0. He finished his high school career with 135 wins. Originally a University of Wisconsin recruit, he wrestled collegiately at Colorado State-Pueblo. He won the national title in Greco-Roman wrestler at the Junior Pan Am Games in 2011 and then prepared for the Olympics trials in 2012. He took the year off from college and lived with Rulon Gardner, but he did not make the Olympic team.
Another future WWE performer did, Charles Betts, now known as Chad Gable. Gable and Otis are currently working out together with WWE performers largely off the road.
Otis won the Greco-Roman bronze at the Pan Am Games in 2014 as a last-minute substitute on two days’ notice before the tournament. He was working as a landscaper at the time to make money for his final year of college.
After college, he worked some regional promotions in Colorado, going by the name “Dozer.” That later began part of his original WWE surname, “Dozovic,” which combined that and his given name, before he began going by “Otis.”
“Coming up in short in amateur, not making the Olympics, not even being the No. 1 guy in the United States, always being top 3, top 2, top 4, just in between there, it kinda hurts you inside,” Otis told Braxton. “But there’s no room to complain. No one cares about sob stories. They care about people getting up when they fall. This is where I want to be right now. … I don’t really know think back too much. I’m always thinking forward. That’s the past and this is the now, baby, we’re going full into the Money in Bank.”
While Otis’ promo work now includes a lot of “Oh Yeah’s,” food references, calling Rose his “peach” and “Mandy candy” and other guttural sounds, the camera took a liking to him immediately and he rapidly ascended in a tag team with Tucker Knight, another former collegiate wrestler. The team was Heavy Machinery, with Knight doing most of the talking.
Early in Otis’ tenure, Triple H told me a story about watching some sessions in the Performance Center via the closed circuit feed in his office in Connecticut. He said Otis was someone that you just can’t take your eyes off.
Regal told ESPN in 2017 that Otis was “everything you could ever wish for.”
In many ways, Otis helped reinvigorate Knight’s career after he had been at the Performance Center for nearly three years. They made their main roster debut in January 2019 following the Superstar Shake-Up.
A year later, the storyline between Otis and Rose was heating up and quickly becoming popular. There was a smashed holiday fruitcake and a scene with a ham. Otis saved Rose from elimination at the Royal Rumble; their Valentine’s Day date was scuttled by Dolph Ziggler and Sonya Deville; the secret messenger exposed their plot; and then WrestleMania 36.
After a long friendship with Otis at the Performance Center, Rose has said she pitched the idea and likened it to a “Beauty and the Beast” tale.
Otis is working a pay-per-view main event and Rose is in the most high-profile feud of her young career against former best friend, Deville.
And it never would have started without Brisco’s three-word question.
“I was just trying to save him,” Brisco recounted. “I figured if he can dance and be funny as hell, he could give himself a chance to make it. And he took advantage of it.”
Josh Barnett previously wrote about professional wrestling for USA TODAY Sports and For The Win. He can be reached at joshabarnett13@gmail.com
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