Nic Nemeth Almost Left WWE Over Layout Of Goldberg Match At SummerSlam 2019

Nic Nemeth (Dolph Ziggler in WWE) took on Goldberg at SummerSlam 2019 in a quick squash remembered for the amount of spears Nemeth took.

Speaking to Chris Van Vliet on Insight, Nemeth reflected on the match, and almost leaving the company over how it was laid out.

“So I assumed it would be two minutes of heat, but like me moving out of the way, him taking himself out to a turnbuckle, and then a couple of moves from him, and we go to his finish or something. And I was told no, ding, ding, ding, spear, jackhammer. I said ‘Vince, why am I in this match when anybody could take a spear and a jackhammer?’ We built this up. We pretended it was gonna be Miz, then we pretend it was gonna be Shawn Michaels for one night. And we had this face-off, just so you could play the Goldberg music and make this. What’s the point of Ding, ding, ding spear Jachammer? I go, a local could do it, anybody could do it. And he was like, ‘Well, I don’t know what he can do with you.’ I go, ‘If I can’t be in this match doing something, then I have to leave this company right now.’ And I’m not kidding, if this is purely for someone a scarecrow, to take a spear and a jackhammer, I don’t want to work here. And also, it was supposed to be my second to last night. Anyway, we’ll get to that in a minute. I’m fighting with him all day, and luckily, I’m at a point at in 2019 where it’s like, I’m not just gonna go, Okay, you’re right. I should just take the moves. I’m fighting. I’m like, it should be something. I should kick him. I should hit him with my finish. I should do something where he has to come up out of it, and we were just going to his finisher anyway. But there should be something other than a bell, because then there’s no little ride, there’s no anything. There’s just a finisher. And if the crowd’s hot on his entrance, they don’t get hotter. We don’t take them down. We don’t bring them up. I pitched a million different ways to do something, and finally it was a super kick on the bell, get a false out of it. Super kick him again, and then get broken in half. And I go, Yeah, okay, that’s something, at least. There’s some up and down that we can go with,” he recalled.

Nemeth continued, discussing Renee Young’s call of the match.

“I love Renee, happens to be on the call there, and I love making fun of her, because she’s so good at so many things in our business. It really pisses me off. She’s so good at like, 57 out of 58 things in our business. She’s not great at calling action, which I get to bust her balls for, which is great, but she’s so good at everything. But I love she didn’t know what we were doing, and it’s just ding, ding, ding, and we both stand there, and I hit him under the chin with my super kick try and kind of put him down, and she just goes, ‘Oh my God!’ I really go now we got them for a second. That’s all we needed was something, if we get them on a close kick out here, at the time, super kick was my finish. If we get them, if he’s just, like, not kicking out at zero, he’s a hero, like, let’s get 1, 2, oh! We got two moments out of one move, and he’s just gonna spear me anyway, and of course, he kicked out at one or something, because he’s really good at wrestling,” he said.

He continued, “Then we got to the second one, and I spaced it out. I go, break me in half, and he did, and we got to get a couple more out of it, and it genuinely hurt like hell every time. But that’s part of the business, that’s the deal. At the beginning of the day, it was pretty easy to go around a few different things, but the spears really hurt. And I was just like, man, getting out of that last one before he was leaving. I was like, Man, I got one more, just get up and take it. It’s gonna be all right. But that’s how it should be for crazy spears. For someone who works once a year, or is in the match once a year or something, it should be like a badass spear, and it should be real, and I might have a cracked rib or something. I didn’t, but I would have been fine with things. That’s part of the deal. But I was pitched the idea to go with Goldberg because I was going to leave the company. It was going to be, I’ll leave the names out of it who pitched the idea to me who said, ‘Everything that you do when you put over so many people. Other people put over someone when they leave. You’re the only person who’s going to put over two people on the way out, because we know you can.’ And I went, Oh! I was drinking the Kool-Aid. They didn’t believe in it. But I was like, Oh yeah, you know what? Damn it. Goldberg on Sunday, and that Monday, I wrestle Miz with my career on the line, and he beats me. I wanted to make sure he tapped me out with his version of the figure four, but some version of that to like I’m helping my friend on the way out. I’m giving his figure four the best sell that he’ll ever have. So that gets passed on to him, and I lost on Sunday to Goldberg, I’ll lose there to Mike, and then I was out of the company and on a handshake deal, I was out, and that day I was told that I would not be allowed to be out.”

Nemeth did not leave in 2019, returning to TV a week after losing to The Miz.

He was eventually released by WWE in September 2023.