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Dijak on WWE Exit, AEW, Retribution, T-Bar, Cody Rhodes, Vince McMahon
Donovan Dijak (@dijakfye) is a professional wrestler previously signed to WWE. He sits down with Chris Van Vliet in Toronto, Ontario to talk about his WWE departure and the letter he posted to social media, being backstage at AEW Forbidden Door, RETRIBUTION and the original pitch for the group, returning to NXT and his relationship with Shawn Michaels, being on the receiving end of a brutal Cody Rhodes chair shot, what next for him and more!
Quote I'm thinking about: Let’s go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday. - Steve Jobs
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"Excited. Yeah, it took a little bit of time to get over the initial waves of emotions, mostly disappointment, frustration and fear. But now I'm in a really good spot because I've had a good solid week of let's call it return on investment, right? Because there was there was a window of time there where I didn't know what was in my future. I had a general idea of what might happen and people were telling me and my agents that I work with were telling me, and that's Paragon talent group, Steve K and Mojo Rawley, who have been outstanding throughout this process. I've said this a number of times and I hand to God, I genuinely do not know where I would be right now without them. Just confused and a 1000-yard stare. Them, my wife and my family. Because that's the group of people who knew, right? And my close close friends who I told just because I needed somewhere to vent and like coping mechanisms and stuff. But this past week has been outstanding for me because it's validating in a lot of ways to receive such a response. Not just a response online, because that's one level of the pie, but really more of a tangible response. Like you're booked here, you're booked here, you're booked here, you have seminars here, you're a trainer here now. There's just this outpouring of like, Hey, you still have a lot of value in this business at a point where, by definition, I didn't feel like I had a lot of value, because I was told by the company that I loved and to a certain extent trusted, and wanted to be with that we don't value you at all. It was heartbreaking, it was scary. Because I've been in this business for 12 years now and seven of it has been with WWE. So the majority of my pro wrestling career has been with WWE. A lot of people don't know that, because there's been years where I just kind of sat in developmental at the Performance Center, there were years where I was on Main Event as T-BAR, and just sections of my WWE career that people weren't watching, right, because you either couldn't or there just wasn't a lot of access to it, or whatever the reasons be. Or just people who only watch the main roster, right? If you only watch the main roster, which is a huge section of the WWE audience, then you only know me as T-BAR, and that's not even me. So there's a section of fans out there that don't even know I exist in this form, other than the guy who looks like this but was named T-BAR and lost twice on Raw to Omos in a battle royale. And that's if you watch religiously, right? So you might have missed those episodes."
"It’s a double-edged sword. So on the one hand the 90 days is like you mentioned a cool-off period, but it's also a good time to get your ducks in a row while you're getting paid. So that's obviously a key factor. Three months out is about how most booking on the indie and meet and greet scene kind of works. So you can fill your schedule relatively easy. My November and December are looking pretty good right now, my July is not. There's some favors in there, there's some guys who I'm very close with, there are companies that had to rearrange their schedule entirely just to try to sneak me in because they think it'll be a worthwhile investment. So it's good that I'm fortunate in that capacity. But there's some vacant spots in there because it's just difficult to rearrange your booking and your whole show and they have budgets two weeks out, right. It's like, we can't afford this, we need to shift that, are you free in August? And then it's like, no, I'm not free in August, my whole August got booked out in like, three minutes. So it's kind of this double-edged sword. But the good part of it is the buzz, obviously, I timed the tweet with the letter very specifically to be at a time where I was hoping it would kind of be the only pro wrestling story of that day."
"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."
"Well, I mean, I was on WWE Speed and that aired I think 10 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 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. 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."
"I did not talk to Tony [Khan]. So what happened was I was having these conversations about what's going to happen with this letter, how's it going to be received? I feel strongly about it, I'm gonna present it this way. I feel like this is genuinely authentically me, this is how I would do this, I want it to look like this, etc. And once we came to that conclusion, it's like okay, well, pardon the pun, but let's go all in on this. So some phone calls were made, we saw where we could go and Steve [from Paragon] has enough connections at AEW where it was, I don't know who's in charge of green lighting who goes backstage, but in some capacity, I was approved to be backstage. I was welcomed with open arms. Tons of my old friends were there, I got to have a great long conversation with Swerve. Just all sorts of guys, Tommy End. Because what happens in WWE is you don't see these guys. The way they leave is a slow, slow process, right? It's just like one guy has gone one week and one guy's got another week. And then two guys are gone the next week. I'm not saying it’s week by week, but we're talking about releases now. Most of these guys were released, unfortunately, because they didn't start the real process of letting contracts expire. And quite frankly, most of the people whose contracts they let expire don't pop up on AEW, because it's just those wrestlers [who have been released] tend to be more in demand in that style. So these are guys that I haven't seen in a long time. But on the other end of the coin, I'm now realizing that the last time I was at Raw was the last time I'm ever going to be in a WWE locker room. And that hits in a personal aspect because a lot of those guys are my friends. There's there's a ton of crossover now from NXT. All the guys I was with for the past two years, there's a bunch of them now in that locker room. There's guys that I was in the locker room with as T-BAR in Retribution and afterwards for a long time. So I'm familiar with all these guys. And lots of them are my friends. So I'm dealing with that aspect of it as well, because it becomes this thing and I was talking about this with Ricochet. Because he knew he wasn't coming back at that point. Bron destroyed him on the car. So we all said our goodbyes, he assumed that that was his last Raw. So we're saying goodbye to each other and he and I have had conversations about our contracts and what they look like and the days and stuff like that. So I said goodbye to him not knowing whether I'll see him in five years or two weeks. We had a laugh about that. I'm like, Hey, man, I'll see you maybe in five years, maybe next month and we laughed about it. And it's good that I'm sure I'll run into him shortly. But on the other end of the coin, I said goodbye that day to a bunch of guys and in the back of my head, I thought this might be the last time I see these guys. But once it happened, now I know it's the last time I'm going to see those guys in a professional capacity. Maybe I'll see them in the street right now or something. But in terms of a locker room, sharing a locker room with them, it's gonna be a while, if I ever share a locker room with these guys ever again, that's disappointing. So going to AEW was the other side of that, which is I get to see all of these guys all at once and it's amazing. Not only do I get to see the wrestlers, but I get to learn. Because I've never been backstage, I get to learn about all the production staff at AEW, which is a ton of old Ring of Honor guys where I used to work. So I'm seeing these guys for the first time in seven years. And I'm like this is this is amazing. I'm seeing so many faces, so many friendly faces. And I get to meet a bunch of new people as well that I've never met before. So it was a really positive experience for me on a personal level."
"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. Right? 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. But 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."
"That's not up to me. I'll put it this way. If that letter burned a bridge with WWE, then they need to take a long hard look at themselves because everything in that letter is true and it's what they did. So if me telling the truth about their actions, burns a bridge, then maybe they should consider changing their actions because that doesn't reflect well on them. All I did was say what you did to me. I didn't scorn anyone, I didn't throw anyone under the bus. I didn't call anyone names or throw out thoughts or allegations or anything like that. All I said was these are the facts of exactly what happened to me. A little bit of opinion mixed in there with I exceeded everybody's [expectations] but honestly, in a sense, it's not. Because I was told from people, I was told from Shawn Michaels, from Triple H that you're knocking it out of the park, you're doing a great job. You did it again, another match, these are the things that they would communicate to me. So it's not like I'm making these things up in my own head. And I have this grandiose picture of myself. No, I was told these things by the people in charge. So ultimately, at the end of the day, I have no idea who sat in the room and made these decisions. It used to be a lot easier because he could just say it's probably Vince. Because he owned the company. He did all the booking he had the final say on literally everything. So if you got released or if you got something else, you pretty much knew who made the call back then. Now Endeavor owns the company, they got their own set of rules. There's different levels of creative and how it relates to the board of directors and whatever. I don't know how any of that works. Somebody had to sit down at some point and say this contract isn't worth it. I'd love to have been given that explanation and I requested that explanation and it was not given to me and that's disappointing. I don't think they had a contractual obligation or a legal obligation to give me that explanation. That's probably the rules and the parameters that they live by, which is fine. On a business sense, I kind of respect that, because it's like, your business and the bottom line is all that matters and that's great. At the same time, there's there's a lot of talk about family and community in WWE, and we're all on the same team. I'd like to see a little bit more of that practice because that's how I felt like I was part of the family. I felt like I was part of the team and I wanted to, to work towards that. I still feel that way but now I feel it about my coworkers, the wrestlers in the locker room. Those guys will always be my family. They'll always be my team. But, you know, now I understand that this is a business, so we got to treat it like a business."
"So we knew we had the angle and I think I proposed most of it to him. Because as a wrestler, you never want to be like, Yeah, man and then I'll do this and I'll drill you in the head with the chair. That's not something that you pitch, it's something that the guy taking it usually wants to offer. So I knew we had to do some sort of angle because it was leading to maybe the main event of that show was him and an eight man tag or something like that. So we started with the singles match, and then he needed to get rid of me somehow to get there, whatever. So I was like, why don't we do a chair shot? He was like, okay, and then I came up with this plan, or one of us came up with a plan to sit the chair in the ring and put me in the chair. Then I told him and this is a direct quote and I'll remember it because he said it a lot of times after. I told him ‘I want you to be Barry Bonds just swing away.’ And he was like, Okay, if that's what you want. The angle that we got was really good, because you can't really see my hand sneak up into the frame last second. Because what ended up happening is I took 100% of it right on my wrist. So my wrist got destroyed, not broken. But it just hurt a lot. It was like a bad bone bruise for a couple of weeks, but didn't touch my head, didn't touch my face. I was completely fine, no [damage], nothing. It did look really good. When it happened. I didn't know how good it looked. And then I watched the video back I'm like, Oh, brother that looked like it ripped my head clean off. But especially because the most viral video of it was like a, like a fan holding a grainy cell phone camera. This was back in 2016 and the fan is like screaming like so it just looked like death. But yeah, it wasn't it wasn't that bad."
"The original pitch that I got for Retribution was no pitch. Yeah, there was no pitch given to me. I made the pitch. Because Retribution existed before the members of it were selected in any capacity. The original group of Retribution that you saw on Monday Night Raw was a bunch of writers and extras all wearing those head-to-toe blacks and throwing Molotov cocktails at a generator. That's the first time you saw Retribution. And when that happened. I was in this weird middle ground of sort of called up sort and sort of in NXT just kind of floating around the PC because it's in the middle of COVID. Right. So sometime along that storyline as it begins to progress, I say, All right, I'm gonna go make my pitch to Vince because I have some names in mind. I have a concept in mind. Because right now on TV, this is kind of getting laughed at right? The whole general feeling of it, and the only feedback that we have at this point is Twitter, right? That's the only that's our only source of feedback because there's literally no fans. We don't even have video screens at this point. It's just wrestlers standing around being told to cheer now, you know, so who knows what the reception of this is other than Twitter, which is destroying it right there. It looks like a bunch of school kids jumping around, playing at recess. That's that's the general thought process. So I'm like, okay, but they're clearly invested in this project. It's a mainstay of Raw and SmackDown they're destroying the ring on SmackDown. There's sawing the thing, the commentators are running away. They're running angles where Randy Orton's punt kicking Ric Flair, and the lights turn out because of Retribution. So I'm saying, okay, they're invested in this angle, let me give them more of a reason to invest in this angle. I have the perfect set of people to execute this. I have a good vision as to why I can tie it all in, I can keep continuity. Let me pitch all this directly to Vince, he's easily accessible because he's at the Performance Center where we are every day. So as I was telling you earlier, I like to film vignettes in my basement and stuff. So I filmed this little vignette in my basement. I bring it on an iPad, I type up a thing with a list of names, a lot of the names that ended up being in Retribution, some that were some that weren't, a whole synopsis of why we're doing what we're doing, what we look like what our motivation is, and I gave it to him and I showed him the video. We had not a conversation, but I presented all of it to him straight there. He watched all of it, he absorbed all of it. And then he gave me a five-minute talk about professionalism. Which is an interesting conversation in hindsight. But it's a conversation that happened. I think that's based on the fact that the first time I ever met him, so this is the second time I've ever met him. The first time I ever met him was about a month earlier and I was told through the grapevine that I made a very bad first impression. I don't necessarily know why. But I think it was because I was a fan in the PC, not even the Thunderdome yet, but the PC, because they had NXT wrestlers and I was sort of called up. But they told us to dress like fans basically. So I walked in to just introduce myself because I had been told I had been called up to Raw and I'm kind of dressed like a fan basically at that point. I just introduced myself and maybe he didn't like all that, maybe he thought that I should be more professional about how I should have been in a suit and tie in something. Because that was basically the talk he gave me after I made the pitch about Retribution. He was like you need he's like you need to have more respect you know for these board members, these CEOs, then he goes not me, like he's one of the boys. And it's just a very confusing message and I'm like yes sir. Sounds good. Yeah, I'll be more professional next time. And then I left and nothing happened for another two or three weeks and I'm like whatever it did, I shot my shot and it missed is what it is."
"I never heard that in an official capacity. I never saw a report that said that. But yes, that is the rumor I heard that Fox did not like Retribution, which for the record they had every right. At that time, it was okay, it was trending in a better direction, right, we did the whole angle, we're standing at the edge of the apron to close Monday Night Raw, it felt cool, it looked cool. Then the day came for the big reveal. And the big reveal was these masks, which was part of what I pitched, I pitched masks, but I had pitched entrance masks where we rip them off, and we reveal who we are. And this is why we're angry and all these other things. We were not going that route. We were going a different route. And we were told that our names were T-Bar, Slapjack and Mace and Reckoning and Retaliation and we were like uh oh."
"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 what? 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 the same music and everything. But even still, we're 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."
"In terms of WWE, my overall tenure at WWE, Shawn Michaels is probably the most important figurehead for me simply because it felt like that was the first time where I was really, really heard. When I was moved down to NXT, I came into a meeting with Shawn and Johnny Russo, who I mentioned earlier and Matt Bloom. We sat in a room and I very hesitantly pitched to them my idea because this was not my first pitch in WWE, I told you about the Retribution pitch I've made. Probably throughout my course of T-Bar, I probably pitched directly to Vince, probably five or six things and just in general to like my writers, or to Bruce, or to whoever else in the creative process, probably upwards of like 20 things. That sounds like a lot and it sounds like I'm bombarding them. They were well-spaced out. I was on the main roster for a long time doing nothing, or doing Main Event, two years is a long time, especially when there's clearly no creative plan for you and you're just trying to go can I do this on Raw? Can I try this? Oh, this just happened I'd fit in here. And the more you pitch, the more they're like shut up. They didn't say shut up but it's like, hey, we'll use you when we need you. So just stay out on the bench a little bit."
"My family, my wife, my support system around me and the ability to get to do what I love."
