WWE News

Possible Reason Behind RAW Star’s Recent Push, Wade Barrett Comments On WWE Not Having Enough Top Spots For Young Talent

Dolph Ziggler Spirit Squat Nick Nemeth

• Wade Barrett Comments On Being ‘Burnt Out’ In WWE, Not Enough Top Spots In WWE

During a recent appearance on Talk Is Jericho, former WWE Superstar Wade Barrett talked about being ‘burnt out’ on the road in WWE, not enough top spots for him to reach that level & more.

Below are the highlights:

Being “burnt out” on the road:

“I was kind of burnt out on the road as [Jericho] said. I mean, when you start on the road, everything’s new and everything’s fresh. You don’t care that you’re not home 275 nights a year, and you’re constantly exhausted, and beat up, and even if you’ve got bad booking or something like that, it’s all fine because you’re living this amazing experience.

After I had been up there for several years, I kind of got to the point where even the little things were irritating me, and the travel was really killing me, and I’d get to the arena, and it seemed that every RAW and every SmackDown, every Monday and Tuesday, I’d get to the arena and be so disappointed when the script for the show came out. And every week, there would just be something where I’m like, ‘man, I don’t want to do this.’ And I’d kind of plead my case with the people in the creative or in management about doing something different or tweaking it this way, ‘hey, how about moving the story this way?’ and just whatever I was doing, I was just banging my head against a brick wall.

And it got to the point where it felt like Groundhog Day. And my contract was running up and I’d signed a pretty long contract after the Nexus deal and stuff like that. They got me on a pretty long contract and that was just coming to a head. So they had approached me a couple of times about re-signing, and extending, and coming up with a new deal, and stuff like that. And it hadn’t even got to the point of negotiating with them. I just explained to them, ‘look, I need to get out.

This is just killing me and I need to go do something else for a while and get away from pro wrestling,’ which is essentially what I did. And there [were] other things. It wasn’t just in terms of the creative I wasn’t happy with. There was some stuff behind-the-scenes. I had fallen out with a couple of people kind of in the talent relations and management department. I’m not going to get into specifically what that was about, but it was, ‘okay, this is all coming together now to show that, with my contract coming up, I should just get away.’ And that’s really how it kind of all shook out.”

No place for him in the top spots:

“I felt a lot of times, especially when around the Nexus times, and for the next couple of years, I always felt like I was there or thereabouts as a guy they wanted to do something with, but I always felt like I was in an unfortunate position of where there are limited spots to be in those top roles.

You’ve got your regular guys who are always going to be there. You’ve got your John Cena, Randy Orton, Chris Jericho, and guys like that who are always filling up a lot of those top spots. And then, you have the younger guys coming through. We had Sheamus who they were really pushing hard at that point, [Alberto] Del Rio who had come in as a heel, [The] Miz, and these were the guys that, ‘okay, if those guys or one of those guys weren’t there, then perhaps I would be the guy that they could slot up there.’

But the fact that they were going with guys like Del Rio and Miz in the top heel spots at that point, it really left no place for me to go, so I thought that, like, at that point, I was one of the next in line, certainly, and they were keeping me on the back burner with Intercontinental titles and things like that, but when that didn’t pan out or the guys they were going with were working out so well, I was kind of in this holding pattern for a long time, which felt like it was up until 2014, I would say, in that kind of holding pattern.”

• Possible Reason Behind RAW Star’s Recent Push

As seen on last week’s episode of RAW, Dolph Ziggler defeated Seth Rollins to win the Intercontinental Championship.

PWInsider is reporting that one of the reasons behind Ziggler’s recent push could be that Ziggler’s WWE contract expires later this Summer and this could be a way to have Ziggler sign a new deal and have him stick around longer.


        
To Top