Nic Nemeth, formerly known as Dolph Ziggler, opens up about his WWE release.
Nemeth signed with WWE in 2004, and he had a decorated career with the company. WWE released the former World Heavyweight Champion in a wave of cuts on September 21.
Speaking on Busted Open Radio, Nic Nemeth was asked to describe how it felt to be free from WWE.
“It’s weird because I was preparing for the last six, eight, ten months, going, ‘At some point, I have to make a change here,’” he said. “So as you get ready to go and you see that you don’t have a chance to be in a pay-per-view match and steal the show, you don’t have a chance to have a six-minute match and steal the show, you have a match where at this point, it’s three minutes, and you don’t get an entrance on the show, and everybody knows who’s winning the match on the show, you go, ‘Can I find a way to have that work?’
“Once that started happening, even a couple years ago, when Roode and I were tagging, I was starting to think, ‘Hey man, at some point, I need to be ready to go. Will my shape and stamina still be there?’”
Nic Nemeth Says He Was Preparing For WWE Release
Nic Nemeth went on to describe how he was preparing for his WWE release, and he was getting ready. He noted that by the time it happened, the outcome had been on his mind for half of his last contract with WWE.
“I’d been preparing for this so long and getting things ready to go that I wasn’t like, ‘What? What do I do now?’” Nic Nemeth said. “It was, I was planning this along, half of this entire last contract with WWE, going, ‘I know at some point, I am being paid way too much money to sit at home, so I’m gonna have to get out of here.’
“So I just wanted to always be ready to go, just in case they said, ‘Hey, I know you’ve been doing 90-second matches. Can you do 35 minutes on TV with The Undertaker?’ You’re damn right I can. So I was ready to go anyway. I just wanted to have every option available.”
Nic Nemeth Emailed ‘The Boss’ Asking To Move On
Nic Nemeth then stated that he had sent a few emails to “the boss” for the last few months of his time in WWE, asking to move on. He noted that, eventually, it worked out that way.
“”It wasn’t out of the blue, and I had sent a few emails to the boss for the last six months, definitively saying, ‘I have to move on somewhere else. Can you let me do this?’ Eventually, without exact back and forth, that’s how it worked out,” Nic Nemeth said. “So it wasn’t weird because it was so, six, eight, ten months in place for me, going, ‘Here it comes, here it comes, here it comes.
“Okay great. Now I have 90 days of sitting around, which is gonna break my heart, but I got to do it. So I’ll just take the extra workouts and everything like that.
Nic Nemeth appeared at NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 18 and brawled with David Finlay at the post-show press conference.
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