When Dolph Ziggler was released from WWE in 2023, it was a shock to no one.
Though the 44-year-old was an accomplished wrestler who's won the World Heavyweight Championship on two separate occasions, Ziggler’s time with the company became less prominent before his September release. The TNA World Champion has been making a huge splash since he joined the promotion in 2024. Nemeth's run reminds fans of his glory days back in WWE. Nemeth spoke to The Daily Star and reflected on his WWE release, noting that he encouraged the company to simply let him go:
“WWE was so great. I still had a year and a half left on my contract, and I said, ‘Please.’ I told them, ‘I’m not doing anything here. I’m just hanging out and doing cold five-minute matches.’ I said, ‘I don’t know how much longer I’m a believable world champion for any other company. I might have five more years, I might have two, I might have ten, I don’t know. But sitting here collecting a paycheck and working for five minutes a week is not helping WWE, and it sure as hell isn’t helping me.' Luckily, they gave me the chance to get out of there because I still had time left on my contract. Being able to get out of that bubble was such a relief.”
Nemeth has spoken in the past about waiting to be let go from WWE. After his brief run as NXT Champion where he put over Bron Breakker, the company didn’t seem to have much use for him since his tag team partner, Bobby Roode, was out of action due to injury.
Nemeth went into deeper detail surrounding his final year during his first interview with Busted Open and the TNA star highlighted how he had to mentally prepare for a world beyond the WWE:
“It’s weird, because I was preparing for the last six, eight, 10 months going, ‘At some point, they have to make a change here.’
“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. Can I find a way to have that work? And then once that started happening, you know, a couple of a years ago when [Robert] Roode and I were tagging, we’d have three, four or five minute matches so, I was starting to think about, ‘Hey man, at some point I need to be back ready to go. Will my shape and stamina still be there?’
“So, I’ve been preparing for this so long and getting things ready to go that I wasn’t like, ‘What!? What did I do now!? I’m free!’ Or whatever. It was, I was planning this for the 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 always wanted to be ready to go, just in case they said, hey, by the way, I know you’ve been doing 90-second matches. Can you do 35 minutes on TV with The Undertaker? You damn right I can. So I was ready to go anyway. I just wanted to have every option available and so, it wasn’t out of the blue and I 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?’
“And eventually, without exact back and forth, that’s how it worked out so, it wasn’t weird, because it was those six-to-eight, 10 months in place for me going, ‘Here it comes, here it comes. Okay, great.’ Now I have 90 days of sitting around which is gonna break my heart but I gotta do it and I’ll just take up the extra workouts and everything like that.”