By Jason Powell, ProWrestling.net Editor (@prowrestlingnet)
Insight With Chris Van Vliet with guest Dijak
Host: Chris Van Vliet
Podcast available via Podcasts.Apple.com
On the letter uploaded to social media informing fans about his exit: “So I wanted, just in terms of my mental approach to it, I gave a lot of thought to what I wanted to do and how I wanted to approach this. Because I was in a very unique situation, I can’t think of anyone else who was in a situation like that, because it’s only recently that they really started letting contracts expire. From what I can tell everyone who had that situation was notified decently well in advance, like maybe a month or two out. So I don’t know that there’s a lot of situations where it was such a short window of time before the notification happened.”
On how much notice was he given: “Well, I mean, I was on WWE Speed and that aired I think ten days after we taped it. By the time that aired, I had already been notified. So I was on WWE programming knowing that I was not going to be with this company anymore, or at least having been told that. It wasn’t set in stone, there was the possibility that it was a negotiation tactic, there was a lot of things on the table. But that tweet, because I assume they have some sort of deal with Twitter in some capacity, or some sort of payment and Hunter tweets about it every week and mentions it. So he’s tweeting about me, the tweet is on there, it’s posted to the top of @WWE on Twitter, and it stays there until the next week. So I was the pinned tweet on Twitter under WWE one day before I posted that. It’s Speed, but at the same time, I think 2.5 million people saw that post, so that’s a relevant match in the WWE umbrella. Then almost immediately you’re getting this information from me that’s like, they’re not interested in me anymore. They didn’t even make an offer.
“So I knew that I had those options and frankly, lots of people were telling me to take a different approach mentally. It was suggested to me that I take a more classical approach, people have done this before and who knows what the situation is. But the standard approach is thank you for everything I had a great time at WWE. I’m appreciative of everyone, we just couldn’t agree on a new deal and I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna make a name for myself and I’m excited for what’s next. You keep it vague, you say we couldn’t come to terms, it makes you seem like they offered you, but you feel like you’re worth more, and you’re gonna go prove yourself, whatever.
“So I had that option on the table, and that maybe there’s a chance that another company sees that and they go, oh he’s worth X amount of dollars or whatever, it becomes a negotiating thing. My opinion was there was more value, maybe not monetary value, but there was more intrinsic value with the fans and with trust and just how I felt personally about everything in telling the complete and entire truth. Because I don’t feel like the people who support me support me just for no reason. I feel like there’s a large group of my fan base that loves how blunt and honest I am, and maybe that’s what gets me in trouble.
“Maybe the blunt honesty is what rubbed the right people the wrong way. [But it got you over on Twitter] Yeah, and I’ve talked before about the conversation that I had with CM Punk and it was influential to me. I could see my support trending in a better direction after that, once people started to see the real me and started to feel my honesty and feel my upfrontness and things like that. Maybe my career suffered? I don’t know, it’s hard to say, because I don’t have an explanation. I was not told what happened in any capacity. So I can’t say, oh, I should have done that, I shouldn’t have done that. Because I just don’t know.”
On why another return to NXT was not possible: “I can give you my hypothesis. I don’t know this to be fact. It’s a complete guess and no one has told me otherwise. I don’t know when this decision was made. But at some point, there was likely a decision made that Dijak or T-BAR is on a main roster contract and under that main roster contract, it concludes on June 28 2024. So I’m in NXT on a main roster contract. So at some point, whether it was before I went to NXT, or during NXT, or whether it’s right before the draft, I think at some point a decision was made that he’s on a main roster contract on NXT and that doesn’t work in whatever capacity. I’m not sure, but my guess would be they don’t want to renew a contract for someone who’s on NXT. My guess would also be, not my guess, but I know that they didn’t have a creative plan for me on Raw.
“So at that point, what do you do? You can leave me on NXT. But if you leave me on NXT and the plan is to just let my contract expire, then that doesn’t look good. Because if the plan was, I wasn’t directly told, but it was alluded to me that the plan was for me to, or there was at least a pitch for me to feud with Trick Williams for the NXT Championship. So if that happens and it plays out at Battleground and we have a match, my contract is up maybe a week later or something like that, I don’t know the exact timing of it. So if you’re WWE, do you want someone having a feud for the main championship and then not being employed the next week? That’s probably not a great scenario. So I think, my guess is they looked at all the possible scenarios and said, Okay, best case scenario right now for us and what we want to do with his contract is just kind of quietly bring him up to Raw and just kind of hope he fades away.”
On if Retribution could have worked on the main roster: “That’s a great question. I think better, because there would have been more production, there would have been more interaction, it would have been clearer that we were bad guys trying to make people angry rather than just what you saw, which was crazy people just kind of screaming at nothing, right? It’s like we’re going to take over these screens. It doesn’t translate very well. I know that they broke off me and Mace and put us in a tag team and had us take our masks off. And that seemingly was well received by the audience even though I was still named T-Bar and he was still named Mace, which by the way, we pitched to not have those names anymore because we didn’t want the stink attached to us. But it was still there, we still had the same music and everything. But even still, we were getting good reactions from the crowd. It just apparently wasn’t Vince’s cup of tea the tag team so that got split apart too for whatever reason.”
>>Yeah, and I’ve talked before about the conversation that I had with CM Punk and it was influential to me. <<
Yep, that's VERY obvious.