If you’re like most WWE fans, you think back on ‘King’ Wade ‘Bad News’ Barrett and think, “why in the hell wasn’t that guy a huge star?” He won the inaugural season of NXT, is a former King of the Ring winner and held the Intercontinental Championship five times, but it always felt like there was something missing. Especially during the Bad News Barrett days. Why wasn’t this 6-foot-7 guy who could work and talk not the Heavyweight Champion a few times?
On a recent episode of Talk Is Jericho, the former Nexus leader opened up about how ridiculous he would’ve felt resigning with a company that didn’t seem to know what to do with him or want him to be popular on his own merits, and his memories of a heated argument and a fateful middle finger on his last day.
“I’d already got to the point where I knew I was moving on and the thought of signing the new three-year deal that they had for me at that point, when I felt that way, nothing good would come out of it.” Barrett professed, “A) I was miserable being around wrestling, and being on the road, and stuff like that. And B) for me to not even have the fight in me to not even try to make the improvements I could try to make or try to make suggestions, that told me look, ‘if I did re-sign here and take whatever money they’re offering me, financially, it might make sense, but in terms of what I’m going to be putting out of it, it’s going to be bad and things are not going to improve around there at all,’ so that for me was like, ‘yeah, whatever happens to me, I have to leave and reground. And we’ll see where the future takes me.”
That set up his final day of yelling at creative, trying to have a personal moment of growth, and getting the bird from his former NXT coach. Transcription h/t to Wrestling Incorporated:
“I went into the building that day and I knew I was kind of tying up loose ends at this point and there was this one big issue that I’d kind of been banging heads with talent relations about for a long time and it kind of came to a head there that day. So we get there at 2 o’clock or whatever it is, and around about three or four o’clock I’m having this big kind of blow up with talent relations there, which looking back it was all really silly, but we have this blow up, I get really angry, they get really angry. I’m not on the show anyway, so at that point, I’m like, ‘do you know what? I’m just going to grab my bags and go home. I’m done.’ So this is me basically leaving WWE, so it was obviously a really stressful moment. I was angry, I was mad, this, that, and the other. I grabbed my bags, I went straight to my car, slammed my bags in the car, started the engine up, and started driving up the ramp, and in my head, I’m still angry about the blowup we’d just had. All I’m thinking about is, ‘wow, that’s me done with WWE! I’m finished! That’s it! Here today.’ And it was pretty crazy considering I spent the majority of my life thinking about working there, and how great it was, and stuff.
So as I’m heading up the ramp, all I see is the top of the tunnel to the outside and I’m thinking, ‘as soon as I’m over there, that’s freedom!’ And there [are] a bunch of fans there and stuff. So I get to the top of the ramp and just as I’m about to burst out into freedom, and light, and this whole new world that might be ahead of me, a car pulls across in front of me and stops me in my tracks. I’m like, ‘who the f–k is this?’ I look up and it’s [Jericho] and you’re turning up at the building at four. And I’ve got a face like thunder and I look at you, we lock eyes, you flip me the bird, and you kept driving down the tunnel … that was my big goodbye to the WWE, getting flipped off by the guy who brought me in storyline-wise and sent me off into the sunset. Looking back that actually makes me laugh.”
I’m afraid he got some bad views.
