Former WWE star Dolph Ziggler (Nic Nemeth) was on Busted Open Radio this morning. Nemeth is working with New Japan Pro Wrestling and he will be wrestling for WWC in Puerto Rico this month.
Nemeth on leaving WWE:
He said, “I’ve had a very fortunate career, I was very lucky, almost 20 straight years in one company and now it’s a chance just to see what else is out there and try a few other things out. So I hate sitting at home. I cannot stand it. Even in between WWE loops, two or three days, I start getting antsy. I want to get out of here. So the last three, six, eight, 10 months, I have been training twice a day making all these different adjustments just getting ready to go, ‘Okay, at some point, you go back to full on proving yourself all over again and you better be ready to go and not just sitting at home sipping Mai Tais in the backyard’, which I did for a little while, but still, it was be ready to go no matter what so there’s no issues. There’s no people, ‘Oh, he’s protected or he sat around loafing around.’ Nope. I did everything I can to be ready to go and I’m still in the middle of it right now. I feel that I’m in the best shape of my life.”
Nemeth also revealed that he asked to be released by WWE:
“It wasn’t out of the blue. I had sent emails to the boss over the last few months saying, ‘I have to move on to somewhere else, can you let me do this?’ Eventually, without exact back and forth, that’s how it worked out. It wasn’t weird because it was so six, eight, ten months in place going, ‘Here it comes.’ Now, I have 90 days sitting around, which broke my heart, but I just got extra workouts”
If working Japan was a dream of his:
“I was thinking about that for a long time, going different places for the last few years, especially focusing on, ‘Hey, what do I want to do for the next move here?’ That’s been for a few years, working on a plan. I go, first and foremost, I’ve heard so many different things from Ambrose and all these different guys about how you need to see what this locker room is like. You need to see what it feels like to be there. I go, man, can I adapt to this? I feel like I can adapt to anything. So you do a little homework and you bounce around and you go, man, this would be something really special. One, I’ve made a career out of famously saying, ‘I don’t watch wrestling, I hate it’, all these different things. It’s usually a joke, but I just hated what I was doing there. They couldn’t really critique it at home. So I go, ‘I hate wrestling’, blah, blah, but then you get a moment where you go, I can, one, be a part of something special, but two, be in a completely different environment, not just go to a different state and wrestle, go to a different company in the United States to expand and go, I feel like I can do everything here. Now I’m going to start over in other places. Can I start from the bottom or the middle and recreate it, almost like a Twilight Zone where the guy wants to go back in time and go, can I remake my fortune? Can I remake my career on a different level on a 2.0 scale?”
“I really thought after laying into, ‘I don’t watch wrestling, I don’t care, I’m really retired, that I feel like I’m going above and beyond to secretly get to Japan and put this all in place and just getting there and walking into the locker room, and knowing two or three faces, which really helped because I was really going somewhere. I brought my brother with me. I didn’t know people. I didn’t know, like, ‘Am I welcome in this locker room? Am I a scumbag to these guys? Am I someone who’s, Okay, can I earn my way into this locker room? What’s the situation?’ It was so weird, but fun, because you see a couple of faces and you go, ‘Oh, okay’, and you feel like, ‘I’m kind of at home. I’m not accepted yet. How can I get accepted? What can I do to prove that I want to be here, not for myself, but to help to make the show better, to make the company better, to make more eyes come on. Can I help out?’ and you really start to think that you can.”
“I really got to watch closely, a lot of that entire card, and some of it from the front row which was really fun and just watching it in person. I go, ‘Okay, this is different. This is special. I can go with this. I can do something with this guy. This guy here, I can really see this aspect of me going here and maybe making things happen. Since I was a surprise, I didn’t get a chance to walk around in the arena a couple hours before and go, ‘Whoa, this is a big F’ing deal. I was hidden in the back and when my brother and I walked out, I went, ‘Oh my God. This is not just another level. This is big. This is huge. I got little shivers down the back of my neck and I went, ‘Man, this can be something so special. I’m gonna do what I can to make that happen.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article please credit Busted Open Radio with a h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription. Quotes were transcribed by Jim for WrestlingNews.co.
