JBL apologises to Bully Ray and Devon for Smackdown announcing error

In something that is becoming a bit of a habit for John Bradshaw Layfield (JBL), he's had to apologise to TNA's Bully Ray and Devon for an erroneous remark on Friday night's taped edition of Smackdown. Unlike joking that Carlos Colon owed him and a bunch of other people money, this wasn't a malicious mistake; he merely cited The Dudley Boyz as an example of a tag team that didn't make it as singles wrestlers when they broke up their act together.

This was certainly true in their case in WWE when the company split them up for a short period of time in 2002, but not in TNA where the former Bubba Ray Dudley has excelled as one of their most versatile singles acts for over two years now and to a lesser extent even Devon has started to hold his own of late as a key member of lead heel stable Aces and 8s.

However, far be it for me to put words in the eloquent man's mouth. Here's how JBL explained the unfortunate mistake on his own personal Facebook page:

"Anytime you do a ton of TV every week you are bound to make mistakes. I made one this past week on Smackdown and tried to correct it on air but wasn't able to get it done sufficiently, so I want to apologise to my good friends the Dudleys openly - and to all you twitter police so you can get out of Momma's basement and enjoy the weekend.

I was trying to make the point that a lot of tag teams never make it, or try to make it, as singles wrestlers and listed the Killer Bees, LOD and Dudleys (and I think The Hart Foundation). Sometimes on air you try to go somewhere entertaining and you get caught and try to correct it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

I realized as soon as I said it that both the Dudleys and Hart Foundation had become huge singles stars - I was thinking about my time in WWE where the Dudleys had been mainly just a tag team - and one of the greatest of all time in what I think was the greatest era of tag teams in history when you had Edge/Christian, NAO, DX, Dudleys, APA, LOD, Hardys and more all at the same time.

Bubba and Devon have been good friends for a long time and I have the utmost respect and love for them, if I had made the mistake on someone else - I would just chalk it up to live TV and not worry about it. But, these guys are good friends and with the Twitter police loving to correct me I thought I would just make it public and explain how it happened.

What I hate more than anything is this becoming an issue and taking away from the great work in the ring, as my job is to do my best to tell stories about talent in an attempt to help them get over.

Believe me, it won't be the last time I make a mistake, I fire stuff out rapidly sometimes with references I don't plan on making as a way to try and be entertaining and react to the events in front of me.

However, the Dudleys first day with the APA Bubba hit me so hard with a 2x4 that I owed him a receipt anyway!!!"

One wonders why this couldn't have been cleaned up in post production; if anyone is to blame it's the person responsible who decided that the error didn't need to be fixed.

I hope incidents like this doesn't make JBL shy away from saying what he thinks. His commentary is a breath of fresh air when most of his announcing colleagues are too scared to say anything controversial or out of the box for fear of pissing off their boss, Vince McMahon. So please don't ever change, especially over such a trivial slip of the tongue!

Of course, Bully Ray didn't care about such a minor verbal hiccup, as he told JBL via Twitter:

"Nothing but RESPECT for my friend @JCLayfield. No apology necessary, but thanks. Great memories of APA/Dudleys. JBL made me [the] Bully I am LOL"

If only everyone in the wrestling business could accept an honest mistake with such grace, though it might make the news here more boring.