Curtis Hussey spent nearly 15 years wrestling for WWE, where he was known as Fandango. The Standish-raised wrestler is now known as Dirty Dango on the independent circuit. He’s scheduled to face Scotty 2 Hotty, another Mainer and former WWE start, in a street fight Saturday at Limitless Wrestling’s Vacationland Cup show at The Colisee in Lewiston. Submitted photo

Curtis Hussey’s professional wrestling career is about to come full circle.

Hussey, who grew up in Standish and spent a decade-and-a-half with World Wrestling Entertainment, will be a headliner at Limitless Wrestling’s 2024 Vacationland Cup on Saturday at The Colisee — the building where he first witnessed pro wrestling in person.

“The first live show I ever saw was in 1998 at the Lewiston arena,” Hussey, who now lives in Portland, said. “It was for EWA Wrestling with James St. Jean and Tony Atlas.”

A year later, Hussey joined the Eastern Wrestling Alliance, and he’s been wrestling since, including about 15 years in the world’s largest professional wrestling promotion, WWE, where Hussey was known as Fandango.

He now wrestles as Dirty Dango. His opponent Saturday will be another Maine native who had a long run in WWE, Scotty 2 Hotty (Scott Garland, from Westbrook), in a a street fight that Limitless Wrestling is billing as a “Maine Dream Match.”

“So that’s where I first started, was Lewiston and Auburn for Eastern Wrestling Alliance in 1999,” Hussey said. “Scotty 2 Hotty had already started his journey into the (WWE, which was then known as WWF) at the time. This is in that era where he was really taking off with Too Cool, and you know him and Brian (Christopher) go on to be tag team champions around the year 2000 and 2001.

“So you could say Scotty kind of paved the way for guys like myself and Palmer Canon, who went onto manage in the WWE in 2005 and 2006.”

Canon, from Portland, whose real name is Brian Mailhot, played an on-screen authority figure on one of WWE’s weekly shows, Smackdown.

Scotty 2 Hotty and the late Brian Christopher, who went by Grand Master Sexy and is the son of the legendary wrestler and commentator Jerry Lawler, won the WWF Tag Team Championship in May 2000 as part of a group called Too Cool with future WWE Hall of Famer Rikishi.

Limitless Wrestling is Maine’s most prominent independent promotion, and Saturday’s Vacationland Cup, the biggest event of the year, will feature some of Maine pro wrestling’s biggest names.

Atlas, a WWE Hall of Famer who now lives in Auburn, will also appear at the show, and Auburn native Luke Robinson will face, Matt Cross, one of his foes from Season 5 of WWE competition show Tough Enough.

BREAKING IN

Hussey spent a lot of time early in his career traveling throughout the East Coast and beyond, wrestling independent shows, usually under the name Johnny Curtis.

Standish-raised Curtis Hussey, who wrestled in the WWE as Fandango and now goes by Dirty Dango, will face another former WWE star and Maine native, Scotty 2 Hotty, at Limitless Wrestling’s Vacationland Cup at The Colisee in Lewiston on Saturday. Submitted photo

“And those are the best times because, you know, you’re meeting all these new wrestlers, and you’re experiencing the country,” Hussey said. “You’re getting to see the world, see the country. Those are some of the best times of my career.”

Hussey said he got two beaks. First was getting noticed when he worked for the National Wrestling Alliance’s Wildside promotion in Georgia. It was a notable independent promotion that served as a development territory for World Championship Wrestling, the second-largest wrestling promotion in the United States — until it was purchased by WWE in early 2001.

Later in 2001, a new promotion called NWA Total Nonstop Action was started in Nashville, Tennessee. Hussey began working there the following year, his second big break.

“It was a lot of guys from WCW that were going over,” Hussey said. “I wrestled a bunch of matches there throughout 2002, you know, wrestling Jerry Lynn, Road Dogg, Ron Killings, Konnan. But, you know, it was nerve-wracking as a young kid because you’ve only wrestled your buddies up in Maine. So getting in the ring with someone that you’ve watched on TV as a kid was very definitely, you know, definitely intimidating.”

Hussey’s work in TNA led to a developmental deal with WWE, which assigned him to Deep South Wrestling in McDonough, Georgia.

That was another an eye-opening experience for Hussey.

“You know, the best analogy I can come up with is the independents is kind of a community college, and you’re going through, you know, an Ivy League college down there in Deep South Wrestling,” Hussey said. “You get trained by, you know, Dr. Tom Pritchard, Brad Armstrong, Dave Taylor — William Regal is coming through. So, you’re getting trained by the best of the best.”

Wrestlers in Deep South with Hussey include current WWE stars Kofi Kingston, Luke Gallows and Natalya, the niece of Brett Hart and daughter of Jim Neidhart.

When Deep South closed, Hussey was reassigned to Florida Championship Wrestling before appearing on NXT Season 4 in 2010. FCW wrestlers were paired with a wrestler on WWE’s main roster, and Hussey was paired with Ron Killings, who’s known by R-Truth in WWE. After winning various matches and challenges, Hussey was declared the winner of NXT on March 1, 2011.

Hussey’s character, Johnny Curtis, had a brief run on Smackdown before returning to NXT for Season 5.

DEBUT OF FANDANGO

The names and characters of WWE wrestlers usually came from the mind of Vince McMahon, who ran WWE from the early 1980s until resigning from the company in 2022 and then again in 2023.

Sometimes, Hussey said, the characters are based on current events or things that irked Vince McMahon. That’s how Hussey became a ballroom dancer named Fandango.

Curtis Hussey, who grew up in Standish, will be wrestling Saturday at The Colisee, where he saw his first professional wrestling show in 1998. Submitted photo

“Eventually, in 2012, Vince came to me and had the idea, you know, the ballroom dancing character, and it was a play on Chris Jericho going on Dancing With The Stars,” Hussey said, referring to one of WWE’s biggest stars, who appeared on Dancing With The Stars in 2011

“So if you had a list of all 500 characters, I’m not sure that ballroom dancer would be at the top of that list,” Hussey said. “But it was an opportunity to make some good money and get a prominent role on TV. So I took it and ran with it.”

Following months of vignettes to promote the Fandango character, Hussey made his Smackdown debut in March 2013 and entered a feud with one of the wrestlers he idolized, Chris Jericho. Hussey’s first in-ring match as Fandango was a win over Jericho at Wrestlemania 29 at Metlife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

After four years as a singles wrestler, Hussey teamed up with Tyler Breeze to form the tag team called Breezango in 2016. Hussey said the two were put together because neither was doing much at the time.

The pair worked five years together on RAW, Smackdown, and NXT, which had transitioned to a development territory, until both were released by WWE in 2021.

Hussey said the highlight of the duo’s tag team run was facing Rikishi’s sons — Jimmy and Jay Uso — in a tag team championship match, which Breezango lost.

“We eventually got a tag team title shot in 2017 versus the Usos,” Hussey said. “That was probably the pinnacle of our tag team career.”

‘SOMETHING DIFFERENT’

Hussey had mixed feelings about his WWE release, but he recognizes that not many wrestlers have a continuous run in the company as long as the one he enjoyed.

“I think the average WWE career is three and a half years — I was there 14 to 15 years,” Hussey said. So, obviously, when I got the call that I was getting released, I was upset, but I was kind of excited to do something different.

“As they say in wrestling, you go out and learn new hold, because you do get stagnant, and as an artist, you eventually do want to try something else, especially when you’re playing kind of the same role for so long. It’s it’s been rejuvenating for me to get back out now with TNA wrestling, kind of playing a different character, getting to do something different.”

Hussey returned to TNA in 2022. He flies to its TV tapings twice a month and in between works on independent shows, such as Limitless.

Hussey goes by Johnny Dango Curtis in TNA and is in a group called The System with husband-wife duo Eddie, who Hussey has known since the early 2000s, and Alisha Edwards, Brian Myers, who was in Deep South the same time Hussey, Masha Slamovich and Moose.

“For me, I like doing promos, you know, portraying a character on TV, obviously,” Hussey said, “and just being in a group with the guys I started with, it’s kind of full circle for me, so it’s fun, and I enjoy going to TV every other week.”

The 41-year-old Hussey is enjoying the ride he’s on in wrestling and will keep working as long as promoters keep paying him.

“I’d like to go to Japan and do a couple of tours over there,” Hussey said. “I’d like to, maybe, get back with Tyler Breeze — we might have something cool coming up here next year or two, so I can’t really talk about that right now. I enjoy being in a group faction with some of my best friends in business.

“So, I’m having some of the best matches I’ve had in my career. I’m having some of the most fun times in my career right now.”