Dolph Ziggler recently spoke with Chris Van Vliet; you can read a few highlights (transcription credit to Bill Pritchard for Wrestlezone.com) and watch the full interview below:
Dolph Ziggler comments on the reports that he signed a new 2-year, $1.5 million deal with WWE:
What’s the deal? A couple of years I thought—and I love working here, I love everything that I do—I thought I reached everything I could reach goal wise here. I was looking towards some other options outside of WWE. I decided to stay because there were a couple of other people I wanted to work with. A lot of that happened in this last two, two-and-a-half years, but there’s—my father called me to congratulate me on my deal that I had signed. I said ‘what are you talking about?’ It’s fun to have internet rumors out there, that’s great, but even if and when I do re-sign, I won’t be like ‘hey everybody! Here’s the details of this contract!’ [Dolph imitates a fan] ‘It’s really nice to meet you, how much do you make?’ It’s so weird. There’s a short amount of time left on this contract, we’re negotiating, and we’ll see what happens.
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Dolph says he still has the passion for wrestling after all of these years:
Absolutely. My favorite thing to do Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Tuesday it’s not always the best for me, but on the weekends, especially the last six months, for three months with Bobby Roode, and six months ago with Shinsuke Nakamura on live events, we do 20-30 minutes, we beat the hell out of each other and no one can touch our matches. And all the little kids are like ‘You’re Dolph, you lose. We know the deal’ and we still get them at the end. That’s how good we are. Wrestling Shinsuke, he does the craziest, coolest, funniest stuff, and then he can choke you out and beat the hell out of you so it’s pretty cool. You really have to respect that. I love the guy.
Ziggler says AJ Styles is one guy he’d like to have a meaningful program with:
I’d love to do something meaningful and character driven with AJ [Styles] other than one time seeing him in the ring for two minutes and going back and forth, and then one time having a wrestling match. I think we wrestled twice, but I would really like for something meaningful to establish a reason why we are doing this, and then have it mean something. Miz and I have wrestled each other hundreds or thousands of times, and everyone’s always like ‘yea, yea, it’s always OK, that’s fine.’ We finally were fighting—I put my career on the line, he put a title on the line that he felt was his career—and we got to fight for a reason and talk to each other with a reason to be fighting in these matches. I haven’t heard anything like that in the crowd in years, probably since I cashed in the briefcase.
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Ziggler comments on the origins of his ‘Later, Marks’ catchphrase:
To be fair, it’s not a new thing—people forgot I hosted a show called WWE Download for 52 episodes. There was Zack Ryder’s show, which was kinda like ‘Pee-Wee’s Playhouse’ and my show, which was maybe more like Dennis Miller. Sometimes it goes over people’s heads, but I had such a blast; I got to write jokes, I got to write a monologue, watch generic videos from 20 years ago online, and cracks jokes about it. But my sign off to my fans and friends was ‘Later, Marks.’ So I love that people are like ‘oh you just came up with this new thing!’ and it’s like nah, I’m just saying goodbye to my friends. It’s kinda cool. Everything comes around full circle.
