Dolph Ziggler is a former World Champion but he hasn’t been booked like one over the past year. Ziggler hasn’t won a match on pay-per-view since No Mercy back in 2016 and with rumors that his contract with WWE is set to come to an end soon, it seemed likely that WWE was using “The Showoff” to put over new talent in his final few months.
Dolph has been around the business for a long time, so even he’s aware that he’s currently on a downward spiral in WWE. He recently spoke to NBC Sports, where he was asked if he knew when the current run of bad booking actually began.
He said: “It was very gradual. It went from ‘Wow, we have something special here with Dolph. The crowd is feeding off of him whether he’s a good guy or a bad guy.’ But after a while, a really good match here and there or a special moment here and there is not enough to create a star. So after a big match and then just going back to being Dolph, it’s hard to not be Dolph.”
Dolph was also asked about his new character and the things he would change about him if he could and it seems that Ziggler had a light-hearted response.
“Yeah I’d be about three inches taller, so I could be a 10-time world champion (laughs). I’m a big 80s hair metal guy, like a David Lee Roth or someone like Nikki Sixx or Vince Neil to where I could put on a big show and be awesome at wrestling, but in this character right now where I focus on throwing that all away because I see the transparency in characters and my character hates on them.
“It’s a special place that I get to go and I walk to the ring with disdain for the fans knowing that they sit there and bury everything that we do, but then they cheer for who they’re supposed to because they’re such hypocrites, it’s so great.”
Ziggler has been inserted into the triple threat match for the United States Championship at Clash of Champions this weekend alongside Baron Corbin and Bobby Roode, so it will be interesting to see if he can finally bring his lengthy pay-per-view losing streak to an end.
