D-Von Dudley said the Dudley Boyz left WWE in 2005 after refusing to take a pay cut and that a meeting with Vince McMahon to discuss their future was abruptly canceled days before John Laurinaitis called to inform them they were being let go, speaking in an interview with DJ Vlad.
D-Von said WWE wanted the Dudleys to renegotiate their contracts at a lower number as the company was phasing out the large Attitude Era contracts. “All of those big contracts during the WCW-WWE feud was basically disappearing, and me and Bubba was like the select few that was still there. We forgot to get the memo on that,” D-Von said.
He said they went back and forth with Laurinaitis for weeks but held firm on their number. At ECW One Night Stand, McMahon approached them directly and agreed to a face-to-face meeting at WWE headquarters. A date was set through McMahon’s secretary.
“A week before the meeting, we get a phone call from the secretary. ‘I’m sorry to inform you, but we have to cancel the meeting.’ Three days later, we got a call from Laurinaitis saying, ‘We’re gonna have to let you go. We don’t have anything for you. We’re gonna let the contract run out in August,'” D-Von said.
D-Von said they finished out their contracts professionally and then went to TNA, New Japan, and All Japan.
In the same interview, D-Von spoke emotionally about the deaths of Eddie Guerrero and Chris Benoit, both of whom he was close with.
D-Von said Guerrero had become a born-again Christian and was helping steer D-Von in the right direction at a time when he was partying and losing focus. “He was steering me the right direction. It broke my heart when I found out he passed away. I was in the shower. My wife came to me and said somebody’s on the phone. A friend said, ‘Eddie’s dead.’ I dropped the phone and just started sobbing like a baby. I lost it. Absolutely lost it,” D-Von said.
On Benoit, D-Von said he was one of the toughest men he had ever been in the ring with and that Benoit would ask wrestlers to hit him hard to wake him up because caffeine and energy drinks were not enough. “He was like, ‘I need you guys to hit me.’ At first we thought he was crazy, and then we understood why,” D-Von said.
D-Von said the murder-suicide was extremely difficult to accept, especially because of how Benoit interacted with his son Daniel. “When you saw him interact with his son, it was very hard for me to believe that he did that. I felt he didn’t do it. Somebody had to have set him up. I thought that for a long time, but no other evidence came out that pointed otherwise. So I had to grow to accept it,” D-Von said.
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