Vince McMahon Was Begged To Help Failing Faction Says Ex-WWE Star
A former WWE star recalls trying to get Vince McMahon to assist a faction that was failing, but the boss refused to do it.
Dijak revealed on social media that his WWE contract expired yesterday, June 28th. The former WWE star was a regular on the NXT brand for several years and then he was drafted to Raw earlier this year, but never actually used.
The Retribution stable was a group of wrestlers that mostly wore masks while doing random attacks on other wrestlers in the company. Their run in WWE was during the Pandemic Era when shows were first run out of the empty WWE Performance Center and then out of the WWE Thunderdome, which was a full arena with screens in the background. Their run lasted from August 2020 until March 2021 when the plug was pulled on the gimmick.
It was at a time when former WWE Chairman Vince McMahon was running the company and trying to find new stars to put in the spotlight. The group consisted of Dijak as T-Bar, Mace, Slapjack (Shane Thorne), Reckoning (Michin/Mia Yim) and briefly Retaliation, who was Mercedes Martinez, who was only part of it for a few weeks. Mustafa Ali was the leader of the group.
In an interview with Fightful, Dijak spoke about how the group tried to make Retribution work by pitching ideas to Vince McMahon all the time as if they were begging their former boss to do something.
“Everybody who was involved in Retribution, with the exception of Mercedes (Martinez) because she was only there for two weeks because she was like, ‘F**k this. I don’t want any part of this.’ Everybody else involved put their heart and soul into making it presentable because what they would give us every week was the most atrocious thing you’d ever see in your life.”
“What you saw on TV was so much better than what we were given. That’s not me pretending it was good. It was not good. It was very bad. We took it from inexplicably horrible to just bad, and we worked our asses off to make that happen.”
“Ali would go endlessly into Vince’s office and pitch, ‘Please don’t do this. It’s going to get us canceled. It’s going to get us fired. We’re going to look horrible. We’ll still lose, but don’t let us lose this way.’ Every week was a f**king battle.”
“It was a fight for our lives because we knew we were one step away from being obliterated off the face of the earth, and everyone is a f**king excellent wrestler. ‘Please, just let us be ourselves. Let us wrestle. Give us time. Let us create this. Let use fix what you screwed up.’ They just would not.”
Vince McMahon’s Refusal To Help Retribution Made Work “Treacherous”
Dijak continued by talking about being in a dark place mentally while doing his best to portray T-Bar in Revolution while Vince McMahon refused to try to make the group better.
“There was a problem with everyone. It was fun because I was around my friends, we were on the main roster and people were talking about us, but it was super negative because going to work was treacherous. There’s no fans, so our only feedback is Twitter, and Twitter is f**king eviscerating us.”
“Every time we’re on TV, we’re trending number one but it’s for all the wrong reasons. People endlessly shitting on me. I was in a dark place, mentally. I think we all were. We’re all in this dark hole. The world doesn’t exist. I’m living on Twitter because it’s the only feedback I’m getting from my job.”
“My name is T-BAR. I’m trying to make it interesting so I’m shooting on everyone and saying nonsense. There is plenty of regrettable things I said in character, but sort of not. It’s a complete mess. Decent amount of regrets from that, overall. It was a lot of fun to be around my friends and be in the ThunderDome, which was a unique experience, but it was a wild experience.”