On June 27, 2024—13 years to the day of CM Punk’s infamous Pipebomb—Dijak (real name Christopher Dijak) penned a pipebomb of his own when he wrote an emotional, frustrated and poignant letter announcing his WWE departure. Based on the tone of the letter, and our subsequent sit-down interview, the departure was not Dijak’s decision. WWE’s new regime has opted to allow contracts to expire, and stories from Cameron Grimes, former WWE broadcaster Matt Camp (both of whom were recently released) and Dijak himself suggest that attempts at communication from WWE are few and far between.
Especially when they have their mind made up.
Fortunately for Dijak, he is a veteran of this business. Dijak’s simple, but effective letter—which was posted to Twitter—has opened the door to an influx of booking opportunities. The legend of the independent wrestling circuit is now in the midst of what will be a successful comeback tour for as long as it lasts. Because while Dijak is filling up his calendar with indie dates, post-WWE, a possible forbidden door awaits.
Alfred Konuwa: I hear you were at AEW Forbidden Door on Sunday.
Donovan Dijak: I was. I got to see Mark (Briscoe) for the first time in—God—I guess seven years [at Forbidden Door]. So that was super exciting. He’s always wonderful to be around. I saw his kids were at the show, and the last time I saw them, they were literally babies. His wife had babies and now they’re walking around. I guess they’re older than my son. So yeah, it was fun to see him and catch up.
AK: Did you get to see him after the ladder match he had when he took that insane dive from the ladder?
DD: I saw him before. I saw Lio [Rush] after, and Lio looked like he had been in a trainwreck. So yeah, the match looked like hell, so I’m glad they’re all okay.
AK: Who invited you to Forbidden Door? Was there an invite situation? Did you reach out?
DD: Nobody. I showed up uninvited (laughs). No, Mojo [Rawley] and Steve [Kaye] both arranged that for me. They have great connections. Steve was there with me, so he brought me along, brought me in. I don’t know if anything needs to be approved by Tony specifically or if they just kind of have people going in and out. But I know that Tony has been made aware of my interest, and I know that there’s reciprocal respect if nothing else.
Dijak On WWE Release, Future Plans
AK: I’ve noticed that there’s a tipping point now, where both companies have loaded rosters. It’s probably harder to find a spot now more than ever. How much are you leaning toward going to the independent circuit and increasing your value on the indies before you make your next move?
DD: Yeah, so I’m investigating that and exploring it in real time. A lot of people saw the letter that I released, and that was all factually accurate. I didn’t find out very, very long before that all of this was going down. So in a sense, it’s on me. I should have been planning better. But the reality is I wasn’t really planning for this. I was planning on re-signing a new contract and negotiating a new contract. So once this got dumped on me, it became kind of a fire sale.
I needed to figure out what to do quickly because my last paycheck was coming up soon. So right now I’ve dove headfirst. My wife is helping me tremendously fill out my calendar. Like I said, my letter had my booking email on it and my phone just about exploded the second that I pushed that off.
So I’ve been trying to fill dates and pieced together everything. I’m starting with the guys that I’m familiar with. I’ve already shown up at Blitzkrieg Pro, which was an indie that treated me well back in the day. Just got announced for Beyond, Limitless, RevPro.
AK: You’re going to be wrestling Michael Oku pretty soon, right?
DD: Yeah, in RevPro. So these are all guys that I know. These are all guys that I’m familiar with, the promoters. So they gave me my breaks when I was in Ring of Honor, before I was in Ring of Honor and certainly before WWE. So they all get first crack in the return tour. Free agency is off and running. It’s going very, very well. So just to answer your question in a roundabout way, yeah, I’m interested in going wherever I can have the best chances and opportunities possible. So I’m not going to write off a company and say, ‘no, it’s not time for AEW for me.’ I’m not going to write off a company and say, ‘no, I don’t fit in with TNA right now.’
AK: I’ve heard you in interviews talk about how when you’re with a wrestling company, it’s like you’re on a team. So, being a team guy, given how it ended and how surprising it was, did that make it heartbreaking for you?
DD: Yes, yes. But I’m not upset at my teammates. It’s the ownership, right? That’s where the issue lies. The coaches, if you will. My teammates, I will always have love for them. I was talking in the AEW backstage area with so many people that I haven’t seen for such a long time, and I was telling anecdotes about how difficult it is, knowing that was the last time me and Ricochet were in the locker room together. And it was funny, we had a conversation. I thanked him for everything. I said goodbye to him and I said, ‘Hey man, I’ll see you either in two weeks or five years. I don’t know which one it’s going to be.’ And we laughed about it. At the time, we genuinely didn’t know. That’s just how professional wrestling works. Sometimes you say goodbye to your friends and you don’t see them for five years just because that’s the nature of the business.
I’m never going to be in that locker room. I thought I’d be back the next weekend. It turns out I was saying, ‘see you fellows.’ And now I’m not going to see a lot of those guys for a really long time. Maybe some of them, I might not ever see ever again if the cards don’t fall the right way. And that’s a really tough pill to swallow.
AK: You were a big star during the NXT Black and Gold Era, where Triple H was the booker. Given the fact that this happened in the Triple H era—when it maybe seems like he would’ve been your biggest proponent—do you at all feel betrayed by Triple H?
DD: I don’t know that I’d say betrayed is the word that I would use. And a lot of this has to be taken with a grain of salt, because the bottom line is, I don’t know. I never got an explanation, which for the record, that’s not cool. I wanted an explanation and I asked lots of people for an explanation. I did not get one.
Again, it’s a business. They don’t owe me anything. They’re not legally obligated to tell me anything. That being said, I felt like my tenure in WWE and my performance in WWE, at a bare minimum, I think that warranted some sort of explanation as to what was happening. I never got one. And that’s disappointing. The word I would use the most to describe how I feel about WWE, and the components of WWE and how this transpired, would be ‘disappointed,’ not disgusted, not angry, not none of that.
That being said, somebody had to be involved in the decision-making process. If it wasn’t him, fine. If Endeavor said, ‘Nope, you got to get rid of five guys…’ I don’t know the situation. I don’t know. So I can’t in all good conscious sit back and point the finger at any one person because I was given no explanation. And maybe that’s why I wasn’t given an explanation. So I can’t pinpoint what went wrong and who made what call and whatever it happens to be. Whatever the process was, whatever the decision making process was, it’s disappointing for sure, and I need to prove whoever was involved in that process wrong. I need to make sure that I prove them wrong.
Dijak On Controversial RETRIBUTION Angle
AK: This seems to match the tone of your letter announcing your departure from WWE. In your letter, you were talking about how you would pitch and you would pitch, and there’s a lot of talk about wrestling ideas. What was an idea you heard about RETRIBUTION that was pitched, but not even good enough to be on TV?
DD: The most memorable one was…I’ll just say it. This is a Vince idea. Vince wanted Mia Yim to pretend that she was having a seizure. He wanted her to pretend she was having an epileptic seizure. And we were presented this by, I don’t know, the writer or the producer, and we didn’t want to shoot the messenger. You could see, I don’t remember who it was, but you could see in their face that they’re like, ‘I’m sorry, but Vince wants you to have a seizure.’ And she’s like, we’re all like, ‘what are you talking about? We can’t do this.’ I was talking about this with Pat Buck last night. He was a producer, and maybe he was our producer, I don’t remember. But he was in the room when Vince came back and he pitched the seizure thing. But that’s the way the production meetings worked back then under Vince. He’d say something, and everyone would just have wide eyes because you can’t call him on it.
You can’t be like, ‘no, Vince, that’s f—king stupid because he’ll just fire you. You won’t have a job anymore in the middle of a pandemic. So everyone’s just going, ‘okay,’ and you have to take this weird approach. This was probably the worst thing just because it’s so offensive, but things like that would happen routinely. They would bring us nonsense. [Mustafa] Ali had the most tenure on Raw. He had the best relationship with Vince. So it would always be this, ‘alright guys, I’m going to go talk to Vince.’
Every week he would go into Vince’s office and be like, ‘Hey boss, can we change this? Can we adjust that?’ There’d be this discourse back-and-forth and Ali would come back like, ‘Hey, I got this changed. I got this changed. We still have to do this. We still look like complete a—holes doing this, but we don’t have to do this quite as much.’
So what we ended up doing to try to appease and trick Vince was she pretended that she was covered in spiders or something. So she started itching or something. There’s a segment that you can go watch. It’s probably on YouTube right now. I remember it, whatever her name was, Reckoning or something. Reckoning has itching skin or something, whatever thing happened. And these were the kinds of things that we were doing every week. It would generate millions of views on YouTube for all the wrong reasons. People are clicking, ‘what is this dog shit? What is this nonsense? These guys look ridiculous. They’re doing the most ridiculous stuff. And there was no real explanation for any of it other than I think that it was just walking, talking, clickbait at that point. Just like, ‘let’s see how bullish we can make these people look without completely compromising our program. And I guess that’s what they landed on.
Following this controversial angle, Mia Yim took to Twitter (h/t 411.com) to refer to the alleged seizure as a “possession.”
AK: Did Vince ever act out this seizure for you guys?
DD: No. No. I was talking about this with Scotty Too Hotty last night, actually. I was asking him, I was like, did you ever do stuff on the main roster with Vince? He said, with this version of Vince, two times when they were doing WWE Raw at the Performance Center, they had the coaches step in to help. And it was just such a nightmare. Then Scotty was like, ‘I don’t ever want to do this ever again.’ You heard similar stories about it all the time, but this is Scotty Too Hotty. So he knows Vince McMahon. He dealt with him from 1992, or whenever Scott Taylor started in the WWF, all the way to 2003-04. He had a good stretch. So this was a guy who was dealing with that late ‘90s, early ‘00s Vince all the time.
I asked, ‘was there a dramatic difference between those two Vinces?’ And he was like, ‘yes, yes. Huge difference.’ Because back when he was in promoter mode, he was kind of with the boys, he was one of the boys, obviously he’s always been this crazy eccentric character who’s acting things out and blah, blah, blah. But toward the end of it, it just became this—and I don’t want to assume it’s a dementia thing—but that’s kind of the parallel that everybody drew. He’s 74 years old and there’s some sort of legitimate issue with whatever’s going on his head, because he forgets stuff, but he remembers lots of specific things, but it’s clear that he’s losing his mind in some capacity. Obviously we saw tons of evidence of that. So that’s kind of where we land today.
Dijak On WWE Contracts And Wrestlers Unionizing
AK: Do you consider the way you were released (allowing his contract to expire vs. a 90-day non-compete clause) somewhat of a blessing in disguise? Where you could just show up at a Blitzkrieg a day later?
DD: It’s a double-edged sword. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s a double-edged sword. There are pros and cons to both approaches. I think there’s a better way to do this. I don’t support releasing people. I don’t think it’s a secret at this point that nobody’s a fan of the WWE contract. That isn’t a real contract, because they can just release you at any point for any reason. I think that’s silly nonsense. I don’t know why that’s allowed to be legal. It just feels illegal to me, and I feel like nobody’s taken the time and monetary effort to challenge the legality of it.
We’re so clearly not independent contractors. That’s the most made-up nonsense in the history of the world, and people have talked about this ad nauseum. Something needs to be done about it. It’s just silly. It’s silliness. That being said, if you’re going to allow people’s contracts to run out, I think there needs to be more communication, obviously. I’m a fantastic example of that. One of the strangest parts of this is that they started informing people like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to be renewing your contract.’
And it was usually about a month out, if not, a little bit more. I think they allowed Lacey Evans’ contract to run out. I think they allowed SCRYPTS’ contract to run out, but they informed these people with a pretty decent amount of time. For whatever reason, mine was a lot later. I don’t know if that was because they were trying to bleed every last spec of wrestling out of me, because I was on WWE Speed a week ago. Like 10 days ago. I was on WWE Speed, and it was the pinned Tweet on WWE last week. So I don’t know if the plan was to just get every last drop out of the sponge, and then break it off clean.
I don’t think that it’s the most ethical way to do this because I’ve been left kind of scrambling, and maybe that’s on me. Maybe I should have planned for the worst better. That’s easier said than done, because you can’t confirm bookings and stuff while you still think you’re going to work for WWE. That’s just not how it works. I can’t say, ‘yes, I’m going to be on your show in July, and then re-sign with WWE.’ That screws everybody over. So as soon as I could, I started scrambling, trying to book these dates, but that’s not easy. A couple weeks out, two or three weeks out from a show in July. So my dates are kind of thin right now, and I’m not getting paid by WWE. Not great. That’s not a great business practice. What do they care about my money? That doesn’t concern them.
But just in terms of the ethicalness of it, I think that there’s a better way to do it that doesn’t desecrate their bottom line, and I think would be just fine to do. I don’t think WWE needed me on a main event match or a speed match. I don’t think that made the company tons of money. I think that was just—I happened to be there. So this could have been a lot better of a process. What was relayed to me through the grapevine is that this was a decision that came down to the wire and it just went one way or the other instead of the other. Maybe that’s actually factually accurate. I don’t believe it is. I think that this decision was made a long time ago.
AK: What do you think a union would look like in pro wrestling? Ironically, WWE is run by TKO/Endeavor, and they work with SAG-AFTRA, so the actor’s union could be an option. What would you think would be some options in terms of a wrestling union?
DD: I don’t have the slightest idea. I really don’t. I know that it will be difficult without the support of the top guys in the company, and the top guys in the company are so well taken care of that that’s going to be difficult. I think that’s by design. I think that that’s very intentional on the part of WWE e and Endeavor and whoever’s making those decisions. I think they know that. I think that, and quite frankly for everybody else, wrestling is such a silly product that it might be fine with just those guys. It really might be. If everybody goes on strike or whatever, it’s probably still fine because it’s just silly made up nonsense.
Also, keep in mind that this isn’t a legitimate sport. This isn’t a professional sport, right? At the end of the day, if I’m a baseball player or a basketball player or a UFC fighter or whatever, if there’s a protest and terms are agreed to and everything happens, you are still going to be you. LeBron James isn’t going to get worse at basketball because he was on strike.
Peyton Manning isn’t going to become a worse football player throwing and catching a football. In professional wrestling, it is extremely, extremely easy to punish someone without explanation if I do something that my employer views as negative. There is nothing stopping them from being like, ‘oh, that’s great. We love him. He is our favorite employee. By the way, I’m booking the fake show and he gets killed in five seconds and we dump dog food all over him. Oh no, that’s not punishment, that’s the fun show that we do!’ You can justify literally anything because it’s fake made up nonsense.
Dijak On Finances Before, During And After WWE
AK: Were you also able to save enough money to where this is a situation that you could weather the storm easier?
DD: No. I mean, we have money saved. But here’s the thing about professional wrestling: I can’t do this forever. Not only can I not do it forever, I can’t do it for much longer. I’m 37. I started wrestling when I was 25. That’s a give-or-take. That’s about what a lot of people start around. Professional wrestling isn’t an easy business to get into unless you’re a lucky person and usually the son of someone famous. Most of us have to start at just some random school losing tons of money for a ton of time until we’re 30 years old. Then we finally get a job at Ring of Honor, now barely making ends meet with that money.
You get over enough to the point where it’s like, ‘wow, I’m a big star on the Indies. I’m actually making a profit off of professional for the first time. You get signed to WWE, they give you this low-ball contract. That’s okay, but you can live off of it. Great. And then finally you start making money and everybody sees these big contracts and they go, o’h, he is so rich. He’s so well taken care of.’ You’re not rich in professional wrestling. You have to make enough money to last the rest of your life. So my goal wasn’t to make the minimum main roster contract, which on paper sounds good. It sounds good on paper because when you think about it on paper, you’re thinking about, ‘oh, that’s my salary forever. I have that until I retire.’ That’s not what we have.
So, no, I don’t have a ton of money saved. We’re not rich. I was on a good contract for three years, but that wasn’t enough money to pay off my house. That wasn’t enough money to pay off all my cars and all my stuff and put my kids through college and all this stuff. We have a little bit of money saved, but no, it’s not enough to live off of for the rest of my life. I have to keep working and I have to get back to a spot where I can make enough money because eventually we’re going to hit that 45-year-old window and it’s going to need to go one way or the other.
I’m not trying to rely on that money once I hit 50 and I can’t wrestle, that’s not a good spot to be in. So the goal is to make as much money as we possibly can make in a short amount of time. And I think these contracts could be much better, especially since WWE is making money hand-over-fist and making more money than they ever have in their history. But then they’re nickel-and-diving the talent. So I’m sure that’s the correct business decision, but there needs to be some pushback in some capacity, whatever that looks like.
