Raj Dhesi, the man the wrestling world knows as Jinder Mahal, spent time on Busted Open Radio this week reflecting on one of the more unusual chapters of his career. The Three Man Band, the rock-themed WWE stable he formed alongside Heath Slater and Drew McIntyre in September 2012, was not built to win championships or dominate television. It was built to lose, mostly, and to do it while playing air guitars. Dhesi has no problem admitting that. What he pushes back on is the idea that it was not special.
“I think we’re more over now, like in people’s memory, than we were at that time,” Dhesi told Busted Open Radio. “I think what really makes it special is what we did after 3MB.”
He is not wrong about that. McIntyre became a three-time WWE Champion and one of the best performers on the roster. Heath Slater won the SmackDown Tag Team Championship with Rhino in one of the more beloved babyface moments of the mid-2010s. And Dhesi himself became WWE Champion in May 2017, defeating Jinder’s previous character baggage in the process and becoming the first man of South Asian descent to hold the title.
The England Moment Nobody Saw Coming
The story Dhesi told on Busted Open Radio that best captures the 3MB experience came from a show in England. The stable had been told on the day that they would be repackaged as the Union Jacks, a British-themed version of themselves, and sent out to get squashed. Generic music hit in the gorilla position. The titantron read “Union Jacks.” The crowd was silent. Then the screen changed to “Three Man Band” and the real 3MB music played.
“We’ve never heard a pop like that, a reception like that anywhere,” Dhesi said.
What the Stable Actually Gave Him
Dhesi is clear about the debt he owes to that period. “Without that experience, going through 3MB, getting released, I wouldn’t have became WWE Champion,” he said. The release he references came in June 2014, when both he and McIntyre were let go on the same day. He spent time on the independent circuit rebuilding before WWE brought him back in April 2017.
He also pointed to why the group resonates so strongly today. Wrestling has become more serious, he said, and 3MB represented something genuinely fun. People who grew up watching it carry it with them. The losses did not matter, but the memories did.