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He has not officially made an announcement, but it appears as though the in-ring wrestling career of Tyler Breeze, who now works as a coach at the WWE company Performance Center, (real name Matthew Clement) is over.
The Penticton, British Columbia native joined WWE in 2010 to work in Florida Championship Wrestling, a developmental territory for WWE. He started out with the ring name “Mike Dalton.” FCW eventually rebranded to NXT, where Breeze would develop into a mainstay.
In June of last year, Breeze and tag team partner Fandango (they went by the name “Breezango”) were released from their WWE contracts. Breeze’s final WWE match took place on the June 15, 2021 episode of NXT, where he and Fandango defeated Marcel Barthel and Fabian Aichner (Imperium) in a tag team bout.
During a recent appearance on “The Sessions with Renée Paquette” (h/t WrestlingInc.com), AEW star Marcus Spears, one of Breeze’s close friends, revealed that the 34-year-old is done as an in-ring performer.
“He still works out, he's still in shape," Spears said. "There will be times we'll hop in the ring and have 20, 25 minutes…He can still go, he still does everything. But I say to him, 'Hey man, getting ready for a second run?' He goes 'Nah, (I'm) retired.' So I don't know. That's the true answer. But I see the excitement sometimes when he hops in.”
In his early run as Mike Dalton, he was named the number-one contender to the Florida Championship Wrestling (2010–2012), which got covered by all the Best Betting Apps. The sports betting world has taken off over the past four and a half years, as more and more U.S. states join the industry.
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Dalton lost his first FCW Florida World Heavyweight Championship match to Leo Kruger (better known by the ring name of “Adam Rose”). He finally reached the mountaintop by winning the championship over Kruger on Feb. 2, 2012.
Dalton, then 24 years of age, held the title for 21 days before losing it back to Kruger on Feb. 23 of that year. It was a relatively short run, but also a career highlight for him in WWE.
Tyler Breeze’s Career Highlights In WWE
Breeze was such a fixture in the NXT program, and he once looked poised for a story-filled run on the main roster.
Unfortunately, it never worked out that way. Not that Breeze was the first nor the last ultra-talented NXT star that Vince McMahon decided against pushing after joining the main roster.
But Breeze had his fair share of memorable moments following his lone FCW FCW World Heavyweight Championship. Among them: He sneakily helped Bo Dallas outlast Adrian Neville to retain the NXT Championship on the Dec. 18, 2013 edition of NXT.
Curiously, WWE didn’t use Breeze a whole lot during his short-lived run on the main roster. But there was that memorable match with top main event star and fan favorite Dean Ambrose on the Nov. 9, 2015 Raw show. This marked the first round of the tournament to determine the winner of the vacant WWE World Heavyweight Championship, which Roman Reigns went on to win at Survivor Series 2015.
Breeze and Dolph Ziggler, two of the company’s elite in-ring all-around performers, met in a singles match at the aforementioned Survivor Series pay-per-view. Breeze defeated “The Showoff” in a match that lasted nearly seven minutes.
Though he wasn’t on television for very long in either match, Breeze did enjoy the dream of competing at both WrestleMania 32 and WrestleMania 33. He was a competitor for the André the Giant Memorial Battle Royal for those two events, with Baron Corbin and Mojo Rawley winning it at WM 32 and WM 33, respectively.
As hard as it is to believe, Breeze only held championship gold on one occasion during his tenure in NXT. That came in Aug. 2020, when Breeze and Fandango defeated Imperium on the Aug. 26 show to become the NXT Tag Team Championships.
The “Breezango” title reign lasted 56 days, before they dropped the championships to Danny Burch and Oney Lorcan on the Oct. 21 NXT show. Booth Fandango and Breeze would be released less than a year later.
WWE never fully capitalized on Breeze’s potential after promoting him to the main roster. But he was a key contributor in the early years of WWE NXT, flourishing as a mid-card performer and tag team star.
With Breeze now working in the Performance Center, WWE stars of the present and future will greatly benefit learning from one of the better in-ring workers of his era.
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