It was rumored that he had been involved in several heated arguments backstage and this was where all of his bad luck came from. He had a very tumultuous career through the years, but the biggest turning point happened after he received his second World Heavyweight Championship.
Ziggler suffered an injury on the May 10 edition of SmackDown in 2013, forcing him to miss five weeks of action. When he returned, he was set to defend his title, but his opponent, Alberto Del Rio, took advantage of his situation. When the wrestler invoked a rematch at Money in the Bank, AJ Lee interfered and made sure Del Rio would take the win.
His string of bad luck happened one after the other, and it’s truly heartbreaking to see such a talent pushed down to the bottom of the card. He was so good at selling other wrestlers that he complained of not being able to steal the show for several months.
After almost two decades of working with WWE, he parted ways with the enterprise in 2023. He would have been a coach had he stayed, but he wanted to challenge himself more and has been working independently.
Dwayne Johnson and Dolph Ziggler are both great at selling, but they have different techniques to do it. Steve Austin once hilariously described The Rock’s style in a Chris Van Vliet interview: “When you give The Rock a Stunner, that guy he was so jacked and just so hard. When he’s bouncing around the ring, sometimes he’d flop off the ropes and end up landing back on me.”
I asked @steveaustinBSR who takes the best Stone Cold Stunner 🍻 pic.twitter.com/dU0bt5mmiR
— Chris Van Vliet (@ChrisVanVliet) November 15, 2023
Ziggler, on the other hand, amplifies the power of his opponent’s move on him, and a simple body slam would make the audience believe he’s totally destroyed and knocked out for days.
