Dolph Ziggler is happy things worked out in his favor.
Speaking on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, Dolph Ziggler looked back on the early days of his career as a singles wrestler in WWE. After the Spirit Squad was disbanded, Ziggler worked for a brief time as Nick Nemeth, his legal name. A short time later, ‘Dolph Ziggler’ made his televised debut in a match against Batista on the December 1, 2008 episode of WWE RAW.
Ziggler spoke about how some remember it as a traditional debut, but he had in fact been working on the character for several months at that point. Ziggler also said he thought he was getting fired, but changed his viewpoint after the match.
“So a lot of people think that’s a debut. That’s when I come back. I want to say I wrestled R-Truth as Dolph Ziggler, I shake a bunch of hands… and then I think I have a double countout or roll in and beat Truth, and then I’m not on TV for a month, month and a half, and then I come back, and it’s against Batista. I go, ‘Oh, this is my last day at work.’ If you’re a new young guy, you don’t know what’s going on, not a legacy, I don’t have friends in the meeting. You’re like, ‘Man, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ They gave me this weird name that I’ve tried to fight them on, and my debut was a countout win against R-Truth, who is beloved, especially by me.
“But I go, if you’re debuting and you’re fighting Triple H and winning, they got plans for you. When you’re debuting against R-Truth, who wasn’t doing anything on TV at the time, and you’re barely scraping by, and then you go away for a month, and then they go, ‘It’s you and Batista and it’s one [segment],’ you go, ‘Okay, I got it.'”
“Luckily for me, Batista is not just a sweetheart, he’s great and wanted to have a good match. I’m like, ‘Oh, hell yeah.’ So I just saw that and I go, ‘Oh, this is it.’ Instead, we have a really fun match, and you never know, some established guys might just be like, ‘Here’s what we’re doing. But what do you think?’ You give some pointers. But he was like, ‘It’d be cool if we did this and this,’ and I’m like, ‘What about this?’ I go, this is great. I’m making this up, maybe it was two segs, but it’s like eight or ten minutes, and it’s kind of a good match, but he’s going on to a pay-per-view, like world title match. So he definitively beats me. Totally get that. But I go, oh, I don’t have to check the want adds next Monday. I go, ‘Okay, I’m still here.’ Then I come back, and I feel like it was very positive. I go, okay, he needed a match, and I was back. Okay, great. I feel a little bit better now.”
According to Cagematch.net, Dolph Ziggler worked several WWE live events in 2008 as Nick Nemeth, including several matches against R-Truth.
Ziggler’s first match of record is a dark match win over Rowdy Charlie Piper (Charlie Haas) in October 2008, followed by the Batista match on television. Ziggler then beat R-Truth by countout on the 2008 Slammy Awards episode of RAW on December 8. He closed out the year by beating Santa Claas (Charlie Haas) on December 15, then lost a ten-man tag match on the December 29, 2008 episode of RAW.
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