How A Hollywood Star Almost Got An Ex-WWE World Champion Fired
Former WWE World Champion Dolph Ziggler was almost fired for trying to take an angle with Hollywood star Hugh Jackman too far.
Back in September 2011, Zack Ryder was the name on every WWE fan’s lips despite the company not getting entirely behind the Long Island Broski. However, he did feature in a memorable match on Raw against Dolph Ziggler that saw Hugh Jackman get involved and crack Ziggler in the mouth with a wicked punch.
To keep the momentum and publicity going, Ziggler claimed to have suffered a broken jaw at the hands of Jackman but that almost went very wrong for him.
Speaking on the Going Postl podcast, Dolph Ziggler – now better known as Nic Nemeth – revealed that he was threatened with being fired if he didn’t set the record straight:
The next day (after moment with Hugh Jackman on Raw), I said, ‘I have to go for x-rays. I may have a slight fractured jaw’ and by the time the next morning came around, I was being threatened with being fired from WWE because I had lied and TMZ was calling them to check on it and I go, ‘I’m just trying to protect the storyline.’
I said, ‘I didn’t say Hugh Jackman put me in a hospital or I’m having a heart attack. I was like, oh, there’s a chance there’s a hairline fracture and I’m gonna get x-rays to keep it vague’, because it’s wrestling… Because it was such a good punch and everybody was talking about it that night and the next day, I was so excited.
It all worked out and Broski was on a tear, I was so excited about it, I go, ‘Let me add a little extra to it’ and then the second-in-command was like, ‘I don’t wanna have to fire you but you’re gonna have to recant and take this down…’
WWE Would Be Begging For The Publicity
Nemeth claimed that if this incident had happened at another time then WWE as a company would have had a very different reaction to the attention it received:
Meanwhile, cut to two years later or the rest of WWE’s existence, they’d be begging for that kind of publicity but whatever and I said it in a nice way but I took it down but, for the next couple of weeks, I wore mouthguards and did Miz’s punch in the face gimmick that he did for a month or whatever… and it was really, really fun. I think I had matches with Miz anyway or Broski and it was like, the whole thing was not to not punch me in the face because my jaw might be broken and it was the best. That stuff makes it so much fun on the weekends.
Nic Nemeth recently revealed he had a unique idea for Money In The Bank when he thought there was no way WWE would ever make him a world champion.