Dolph Ziggler Talks His Reaction To WWE Picking Bobby Lashley Over Him At Their Tryout
As noted, Dolph Ziggler was interviewed by Lilian Garcia on the latest episode of "Chasing Glory with Lilian Garcia." You can listen to the full interview by clicking here, here are some more highlights that they sent to us:
Working with Drew McIntyre:
"In the last couple years, I've been doing a lot of things with people who've been getting called up from NXT. I was teaching them on the weekends and making them better to shove them off to bigger greener pastures. In this way, he has the experience here, he has the experience out of here and he's back and focused. So now I can fill him in on what we've been doing the last five years. He's s focused, its awesome. Hopefully somewhere in a year, he punches me in the face and the arena erupts. Hopefully that will be the case, we'll see. You never know around here. We're not just a tag team with matching outfits, we're just two dudes who want to be the champ and we're watching each other's back, so it's a little bit of a nice twist on just tag teams."
His first OVW tryout with Bobby Lashley and making it on the second tryout:
"My first tryout was with Bobby Lashley. I didn't know him at all, but he was also an amateur wrestler, a much better one than I am. We met at the rental car place and I go, 'Hey, are you Bobby?' and he goes, 'Yeah, are you Nick?' So we had a tryout together and it's the damnedest thing, they decided to hire him and not me. The whole time I'm sitting there looking at him and I go, 'I mean if we're picking here, I'd pick to hire you also!' I just finished wrestling 165 at Kent State and he looks like he's carved out of granite like an action figure!
"That second tryout, I wasn't next to and being compared to a body builder the entire time. I was taking the drills and getting up first and picking up them much quicker. That's where I can kind of focus when you're a guy that's barely 6 foot tall, barely 200 pounds, you go, 'Okay, I can make up for every single aspect of this business.' So I was practicing promos, I was doing the drills, I wanted to look like I've been doing this for years."
Where his love for comedy originated:
"When I was a young kid, Saturday Night Live I would watch and not know exactly what was going on, but also my Dad had this second shift job when I was 4 or 5 and I would wake up when he was going to work and watch Johnny Carson and not know what was going, but I was like, 'Oh, people are laughing'. Like I said, my brother and I would screw with my mom. We would put on not a fake show, but we would do like a fake interview and do things like that. Someone who wants to be an entertainer fits into all these facets, it just worked out that I wanted to be a wrestler. My brother wrote books, he and I do videos all the time, he's writing a movie, and we do improv shows and stand up comedy because that rush is the same as getting the applause out there."