Nic Nemeth on Wanted to be Released from WWE Sooner, Free Agency Plans, & NJPW Wrestle Kingdom 18 Appearance

A recent episode of the Busted Open Radio podcast featured Nic Nemeth, former Dolph Ziggler, as the guest.

One of the topics discussed included Nemeth’s thoughts about his release from WWE this past September and revealed that he had requested for months to be released since he wanted to move on with his wrestling career.

“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.”

Nemeth also gave his thoughts about his current plans for his free agency.

“I don’t care what people other say, but I’m really looking forward to going — the things I do behind the scenes or in the ring that I have the last 20 years in WWE, bringing that to several different places and maybe even as a hired gun, bouncing around and just saying, here’s what I pitched to WWE 20 years ago: For me to be a modern-day Ric Flair who shows up in a territory and makes something happen and steals the show with their champ without even knowing who the hell he is and then moves on to the next town. So hopefully something like that which I’ve been really looking forward to for a long time.”

Nemeth also gave his thoughts about making his debut appearance for New Japan Pro Wrestling at their Wrestle Kingdom 18 event this past Thursday.

“So, two different ways, I was thinking about that for a long time, going different places for the last few years, especially focusing on, hey, what do I wanna do for the next move here? And 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 (Jon Moxley) 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’ and I go, ‘Man, I wonder if — can I adapt to this?’ I feel like I can adapt to anything. Can I? 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, that you couldn’t really critique it at home so I go, ‘Oh, I hate wrestling,’ blah, blah, blah. But then you get a moment where you go, I can, one, be a part of something special but two, see 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 gonna start over other places. Can I start from the bottom or the middle and recreate it? Almost like that Twilight Zone where the guy went, ‘Watch me 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? And I really thought after laying into, ‘Nah, I don’t watch wrestling, I don’t care, I’m retired’ that I feel like — and going above and beyond to secretly get to Japan and putting 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 (Ryan Nemeth) with me and where I didn’t know people. I didn’t know — it was like, well 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? And it was so weird but fun because you see a couple of faces. Like, oh! Okay and you think, 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 this. Can I help out? And you really start to think that you can and you watch and 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. Oh, I can do something with this guy.’ This guy here, I go, oh, I can really see this aspect of me going here and making things happen and walking — since I was a surprise, I didn’t get a chance to walk around in the arena a couple hours before and go, woah! This 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 of different. This is big, this is huge’ and I got little shivers down the back of my neck here and I went, ‘Man, this could be something so special. I’m gonna do what I can to make that happen.’”

Transcript ht/: PostWrestling.com