Dolph Ziggler on WWE changes

[Liz]

WWE star Dolph Ziggler appeared on the "In The Kliq" podcast to talk about his career and some of the recent changes in WWE.

Ziggler was asked if he's noticed a lot of changes now that Triple H has taken over:

"You know, I haven't really noticed anything different. Everyone's like, 'Oh, cool. We have someone else who's calling the shots', but it's still all this group team effort where everyone's pitching an idea. There's so many awesome minds behind the scenes that help us out with things. There's a reason that some of us, even myself after 18 years, come out and look good every night and make something happen or have some story advance or make some match awesome. It's not just because we're great. We have these minds behind the scenes. So we're all like, we're all waiting, like, 'Hey, is this gonna be different or are things going to change?, and what's happened is, I haven't noticed anything personally. I just think we've had a really fun time and it stayed a group effort and I really think when you have this team put together like you do behind the scenes and in front of the camera that we can do anything."

On his recent run in NXT as NXT Champion:

"It's something that was in a cool way, since I've been around for a while, sometimes they're like, 'Hey, we need you to do this today. It happens in two minutes. Get it done', because I can. In this situation, it was something that for a month or two before like, 'What do you think about this? Do you think this could work? Could you help this guy? Could you make this fun?' We thought about it and pitched for it back and forth behind the scenes. Several of us said, 'You know what? This could be really fun. I can sink my teeth into something different, go at it from a different angle, try something, the guys busted into someone else's show to talk trash on the champ, and then have him come out looking better at the end.' When you see it that way and go, here's the long term thing we can go in a month or two. Even then, it ended up being so fun and working out so well that we extended it a little bit longer."

"So that's the cool thing about this business, nothing is set in stone. If they say 'Hey, we need you for three weeks in NXT', you're like, Okay, what am I doing? 'I'm working on my days off, whatever.' Then it becomes, 'Oh, this really clicked. Let's double the time. Let's make this special. Let's get a title on the line and see if we can get everybody talking about it just a little bit more.' Then you get extra excited about it. I'm on the treadmill on my day off going, 'Okay, we can go here, we can try this', and it just gets your creative juices flowing even more so. That ended up being, it was supposed to be, I don't know, three, four weeks and it ended up being six or seven because it went so well and there were all these ideas floating around."

"It's nice to mix it up because for the longest time I was a singles competitor by myself, 10 straight years doing what I do, and I got to tag with big Bob, Robert Roode, who's awesome. Then he and I just got on the same page so much that you get so used to it that you're in this cycle of like, 'Okay, we're gonna have this tag match. We're gonna make this work and do something awesome', and then it's boom, go to NXT fight for the title and see what the hell happens, and you go, alright, let's mix it up again."

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7koHKELUDbwo9kNL1XuxnZ?go=1&sp_cid=9654d66d087bfb4f95e1407736612e4d&utm_source=embed_player_v&utm_medium=desktop&nd=1