Nic Nemeth wants to make a difference.
As a 20-year veteran of the professional wrestling business, Nic Nemeth has fulfilled a laundry list of accomplishments. What is his ultimate goal, though? During a recent interview with WrestleZone Managing Editor Bill Pritchard, Nemeth provided an answer.
“TNA has been an absolute blast. And I love that I accidentally get to time me being there with them taking off just a little bit more than they already were. It just makes you feel good going, ‘I feel like I’m doing something positive.’ A bunch of people say they wanna… ‘I wanna win this title, I want to win this thing.’ My goal was, when I leave the business, I want the locker room to go, ‘That’s the guy I always wanted to have. Thank you for that.’ I don’t need the fans to do it; I live off the fans out there, but the locker room do it.
“I want to leave the business at some point and saying, ‘It was better for me being in it.’ Not that I took, and took, and took,” Nemeth continued. “But it was better for me because I was there and I am a name that comes up when you talk about what was good about wrestling. There’s a million [names], whatever. But I don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, I wanted to win this title. I wanted to travel…’ No. I want the business to be better because I existed. And in a 100 years when I retire, hopefully that’s what I will say.”
Creating Memories
For most of his in-ring career, Nemeth wrestled under the banner of WWE as Dolph Ziggler. There, he notably captured two world title reigns, six reigns as Intercontinental Champion, two as United States Champion, and four with various tag titles. As Nemeth previously noted, though, title wins aren’t his main priority. Instead, Nemeth also wants to continue creating memories for the fans and with his in-ring peers.
“When anyone says, ‘I have a memory of this thing where you threw me your shirt,’ or something, I’m like, ‘That’s awesome.’ And it’s like, ‘My kid, he still has it, and it’s hanging on his wall and it’s 15 years later.’ That’s freaking awesome. That’s one of the coolest things ever,” Nemeth said. “Getting to get my mom involved in a match versus me and Kofi that she didn’t know she was going to be involved in, and it was great. Those kind of things are the coolest things ever.
“… There’s this little girl, a long time ago, maybe 12 years ago. I had wrestled somewhere and we came back a year later. We were doing a live event match. She had a sign that says, a little eight-year-old girl, ‘Dolph Ziggler steals the show with soft hands.’ And I was like, ‘What? What are you talking about? I got two calluses right here.’ But the year before I had hi-fived her and it was a soft hi-five because she was an extra-little kid. Hearing about that, that’s funny. She didn’t forget it a year later and made a sign. Those are the cool things that you remember that I can still talk about at the moment before I put them in the book before it gets way crazy. The fan interactions and my co-workers going, ‘Thanks for doing that.’ That’s what matters to me.”
The Cash-In Moment
One of Nemeth’s frequently referenced in-ring moments revolves around his thunderous Money in the Bank cash-in, just one night removed from WrestleMania 29. As Nemeth points out, fans also often bring up the match in which he lost the WWE World Heavyweight Championship — one that marked a rare double turn in WWE.
“Winning the world title and not being at the main event of the show and not being one of the main guys of the show at the time and coming back through the curtain and seeing everybody I know at work, people that I like a lot and people that I don’t even talk to that much. Not that’s forced ‘Hey this old timer did this show, everybody get to Gorilla,’ just people organically saying, ‘That was awesome.’ ‘Oh! Thank you.’ That’s the [cool] stuff, the behind-the-scenes stuff,” he said.
“… If someone says, ‘Hey this match that you lost the world title in, I loved it so much.’ Which by the way, one of my favorite matches is losing that world title to Del Rio. We did a double-switch and again, we were… Del Rio was up there. I was never presented as a top guy. And it gets talked about so much, us switching roles in it, that I think Del Rio gets extra mean comments online because it looked like he was genuinely murdering me in this match, beating the hell out of me. His demeanor mixed with my hopefully selling of everything made it gross and different and everyone talks about it.
“I hope that they remember the artwork and the art form that this is, because that doesn’t always work out with everybody. If you don’t have the best two pieces, if you don’t have the mindset ‘it could be good.’ When those moments stick with people, those are the ones that stick with me. My music hitting for the cash-in and I was like, ‘Okay here we go.’ And I walked out through the curtains, I got goosebumps up my arms because I wasn’t ready for it. I was like, ‘Who cares? This will be cool. Finally.’ And then I was like, ‘Whoa! Everybody cares. Oh my God. Okay.’ Those things. Everybody has a different one.”
Watch our full interview with Nic Nemeth below:
