WWE star Dolph Ziggler spoke with Sports Illustrated to hype his upcoming WWE championship match against Drew McIntyre at Extreme Rules: Horror show. Read below where Ziggler discusses working with Otis, Mandy Rose, and Sonya Deville, and Otis’ big moment at this year’s WrestleMania.
On the storyline coming together and moving on from it:
I didn’t pitch this, but I feel like [the program between] myself and Otis had kind of run its course. I really liked working with Otis, Mandy and Sonya. If this were the old days and we were going five days a week and doing live events, we would have had even more chemistry and a really special thing. In this day and age, where it’s just a TV show in a closed studio, as young superstars, they came along very quickly. But I don’t know where else we could go with that, so I completely understand the move to Raw.
Happy that Otis got his big moment at WrestleMania:
I mean this in the best possible way—I’m not a mark for the WrestleMania match. I am a mark for the time put into the story that allows you to get paid, WrestleMania-style. More importantly, I didn’t care what the match was as long as there was a real story to it. Not something like, “You’ve been here 15 years, let’s put you in a match.” Sometimes things are cold, sometimes you’re in a battle royal, but we had a really cool story. Even if that’s not WrestleMania, make it a SmackDown with a live crowd where Otis gets his comeuppance, I get punched in the balls by Mandy, they embrace, that would have blown the roof off. That was a really special thing and it and was paid off perfectly. The only thing missing were 85,000 people erupting when it happened. I really wish that could have happened, but if we keep up the hard work and keep busting our butts, we can reenact some other story or some different level of it next year.
