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What's the story?
Dolph Ziggler recently re-signed a contract with WWE that will keep him on TV for the next two years.
But it seems that before he decided to resign, he asked the company to take him off TV and hoped that he would be able to sit on the sidelines for up to six months.
In case you didn't know...
Ziggler has been working for WWE now for almost 13 years after he debuted back in 2005 as part of The Spirit Squad.
He has been someone who has risen to the top of the company on a number of occasions as both a former Money in the Bank winner and World Champion.
The last few months haven't gone to plan for The Showoff who has been being used mostly as talent enhancement. This led to a number of rumours that the former Champion was unhappy and that he wouldn't go on to sign a new contract.
The heart of the matter
Ziggler recently appeared on All Things Radio Podcast where he talked about the fact that he begged WWE for a number of months to take him off TV because he was losing on a regular basis. (Transcript via StillRealToUs)
“I will say that I really begged and pleaded for a couple months off the television show, because no matter how good I am or what I’m up to, it seems that 99 times out of 100, I would lose. I didn’t think that I deserved to be on the TV show if I was someone that was losing every night, so I asked to be taken off. I was hoping for maybe six months or a year, and it ended up being four weeks.”
He did manage to get Christmas off and has since returned to have just one match before he was put into the WWE Championship match this weekend so it seems that his time away allowed WWE to remember the star that he once was.
What's next?
Ziggler is one of the men who are part of the six-way WWE Championship match this weekend at Fastlane.
Author's take
The Showoff wasn't doing very well last year and it seemed as though he was not going to come back after he relinquished the United States Championship.
Luckily it seems that the company knew what to offer him and now hopefully the former World Champion will be able to refind the form that led him to the top of the company last time around.
