“I didn’t want to be a Sgt. Slaughter. No offence to Sarge” – Big Show On Why He Left WWE

By AG

Posted on March 28, 2021

Big Show The Giant Paul Wight Article Pic 1 WrestleFeed App

• “I didn’t want to be a Sgt. Slaughter. No offence to Sarge” – Big Show On Why He Left WWE

On an episode of Chris Jericho’s weekly podcast ‘Talk Is Jericho’, The Big Show, now going by his real name Paul Wight, discussed his recent decision to leave the WWE, a company he worked for since 1999, and join Tony Khan’s All Elite Wrestling.

During the special ‘Legends Night’ episode of Monday Night RAW in January, Big Show was portrayed like he was afraid of Randy Orton, which was obviously hard to believe for pretty much everyone.

Here’s what Paul Wight had to say on the podcast:

“After the last RAW that I did that was just absolutely horrendous because I was going through the contract negotiations then.

Sometimes, when you’re going through contract negotiations with them, they’ll try to, lack of better term, make things a little bit more awkward, difficult or to prove a point. It’s part of the psychology of the game, and so they wanted Randy Orton to ‘pieface’ me into a chair, basically, push me in the face and knock me down.

Then I was supposed to sit there in a chair and take it, and I’m like, ‘Well, he’s not going to shove me on my a$$.’ I mean, no disrespect to Randy, but Randy knows he couldn’t do it if I didn’t want him to.

To do something accordingly, yeah, Randy can put his hand on my chest, and I’ll sit down because I’m not going to fight Randy because he’s trying to get in my head. You can always do that story, even though it’s the wrong story to tell.

Randy can put his hands on me, and as a giant, I should have knocked him the hell out in the hallway. That would have been good business, but then to go to the ring and sit on the ramp on the stage with Hogan, and Flair and Booker was out there. A lot of Hall of Famers and Legends and it’s like, they’re trying to shove me down the road because yeah, they want to use my notoriety to do community work, to do overseas media, to do all this stuff.

They’re taking my passion away from me. They were taking wrestling away from me and then to just sit there on the ramp and then get called a has-been while I sit there and watch a match, it’s just you talk so much about legends, and respect for legends and respect for Hall of Famers but any time Hall of Famers are around, they get run into the ground. And that’s one of those kind of things where that machine is always moving forward.

It’s about moving forward and any blood that they can get out, they’re going to get that last drop, until there’s nothing left for anyone. The talent doesn’t have anything left. The fans don’t have anything left for them, and for me, that was just the icing on the cake where I’m like, you know, I need to restart. I need to rebrand myself.

The writing on the wall when I figured I couldn’t change anything in WWE was about 5 years ago. I got a speech that I was told I would never main event WrestleMania again. I would never main event another PPV again, and I would only be used to get over NXT talent because they got to think about the future of the business. I was told that to my face. Not by Vince but by somebody in the organization pretty high up.

Pretty matter-of-fact like, this is it, because at the time, 5 years ago, there weren’t any options. So they felt because I was very frustrated about positioning, and I felt a little bit handcuffed because I couldn’t help like I wanted to help. What’s going on? You guys are not letting me contribute like I can contribute. You’re kind of handcuffing me a little bit, and so then I had that meeting and I was told why. That was that.

So that was the start of me really realizing that okay, and believe it or not, I was still so company oriented and company driven that I thought, you know what, I’ll take this challenge, and I’ll work my way out of it. Cream always rises to the top kind of thing and then foolish me, the harder I worked, it didn’t matter. They thanked me for the hard work. They paid me, but there was nothing that I could do that would change their minds at that point.

It was brutal to actually leave because you do have friends, and you do have family because you’ve got people you spent over 20 plus years with, you have relationships. You have people you look forward to seeing, and then you have to know that look, yeah, I have to leave. There’s nothing here for me to do anymore except go in a direction that I’m not ready to go in.

I didn’t want to be a Sgt. Slaughter. No offence to Sarge, but I didn’t want to be a Sgt. Slaughter that comes around and did the golf tournament. At one time, Sgt. Slaughter was one of the biggest stars in the business. He sold more action figures that GI Joe. He sold more action figures than Barbie.”

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