In the world of professional wrestling a good name can take you a long way, and even though Dolph Ziggler has accomplished a lot in his career most people would agree that he doesn’t have the best name.
During a recent appearance on Insight with Chris Van Vliet former WWE writer Freddie Prinze Jr. explained that WWE originally wanted to use the name Dirk Diggler for Dolph Ziggler, but Freddie pointed out that was a character’s name from Boogie Nights. Freddie then went on to say that he actively fought against the name Dolph Ziggler when it was pitched. However, Freddie pointed out that Dolph Ziggler just went with it when he found out about his new name.
“Dolph’s the man, dude. I had to direct the very first Dolph Ziggler segment ever, the first three actually when he was just coming up… [When he’s like] ‘Hi I am Dolph Ziggler’ and Jamie Noble’s like, ‘I know your name,’ We were just trying to do anything we could to make this not suck because I’ve fought against this idea so much that Vince made me do it. They were like, ‘What are we going to name him?’ So they said, ‘Dirk Diggler’ and Vince was like, ‘That’s great’ and I stood up and I’m looking at the guy who pitched it. I’m like, ‘Dude, we’re gonna get sued. It’s from Boogie Nights, you can’t do that. Why can’t we just give him a normal name? Why does it have to be goofy?’
Then they were throwing all these names out there, [Somone said] ‘Well he looks like Dolph Lundgren,’ and he’s like, ‘What about Dolph Ziggler?’ I literally was like, ‘We’re NOT doing Dolph Ziggler.’ I think this guy DJ had my back too and was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t love that.’ I fought so hard and Vince was like, ‘All right, it’s Dolph Ziggler.’ He goes, ‘Freddie, you’re gonna handle that segment,’ and I looked at him, I was like, ‘What kind of middle finger is that? Just tell me to f**k off. Why would you do this?’ So I went to him [Dolph], and I think it was either me or Freebird [Michael Hayes] that broke the name to him, and he was just like, ‘huh…okay.’ He just went for it man, the same way he goes for it in the ring. He committed right away. He knew it was crap and people hated it, till they loved it. It was very reminiscent of The New Day. People hated The New Day and the same chant that was, ‘you suck’ became ‘oh my God, we love you guys’ and they became… and it was the work on the mic and the work in the ring that got those guys over.
“In Dolph’s case, it was his work in the ring and then his mic work, which developed about a decade into his career where all of a sudden you were like, here we go, here we go, career vs. Miz, let’s do this. Those promos were top-shelf. I remember that storyline, and I shouldn’t, but I do, you know what I mean? That’s how good those guys were in that. I genuinely thought he was going to lose and that was going to be it, and he was going to retire from wrestling. I mean that’s how well he made me believe it, but I was there when they conceived the name, fought against it and was punished for my efforts.”
H/T SEScoops.com
