When WWE announced that they were releasing Nic Nemeth, aka the Superstar formerly known as Dolph Ziggler, it came as a major surprise.

Now granted, it's not like Nemeth was being used on television regularly, as he'd only worked nine matches on television in 2023 for WWE, but still, with his 20th anniversary with the promotion mere months away, the timing of the release felt unfortunate, to say the least.

… or was it?

Discussing the end of his WWE career in an interview with New Japan Pro Wrestling, Nemeth revealed that he'd actually been asking for his release for quite some time.

“I started realizing, ‘OK I’m a mainstay here, I’m needed.' But I got to a point where I was ready to go,” Nic Nemeth told New Japan. “I’d asked the company a few different times whether I was ready to go, and they told me I was signed, and they weren’t letting me go. So I started asking them, ‘Hey, can I start doing this, can I start something else?’ So I was prepared to be done and to start exploring other avenues.”

Asked what it's like to start over 19 years into his professional wrestling career outside of the WWE system, Nemeth ran through his current place on the indie landscape, noting that he's ready to take what comes his way and fight for what he wants.

“I don’t know the independent scene. I didn’t wrestle on the independents, I don’t have a dad or a mom in the business, didn’t have a legacy in the business, didn’t have a friend in it. Nobody was there to vouch for me. I was a collegiate amateur wrestler before WWE, and I was a fan. So I didn’t know the world outside (WWE) and if there was no Internet, things would be very different, but thankfully we’re all connected now. My friend Matt Cardona has been all over the world these last two years and he was telling me ‘Oh, I went here and did this, and here’s what’s happening there,’ giving me a lay of the land on different countries and different promotions,” Nemeth noted.

“I spent the last six, eight months, a year, saying ‘I’m going to be in the best shape of my life when all this goes down,’ and when it finally got to the point where I asked (WWE) enough, and they gave me my release, then it became ‘OK, well you asked for this for the last five years, you’d better deliver.' So, OK, I’ve got this, I’m doing this, I have insurance ready, I’ve been training in the ring, watching different things, and I’m ready to go. So let’s go.”

On paper, it sort of makes sense that Ziggler asked for his release from WWE multiple times over the past few years, as his booking has taken a severe nosedive since the glory days of the “Showoff.” Fortunately, with a spot in NJPW and in TNA alongside matches on the indies, Ziggler now gets to showcase his abilities however he sees fit, which simply wasn't available to him in WWE.

Steve Maclin is excited to see what Nic Nemeth can do in TNA.

Speaking of Nic Nemeth's future in TNA, former Impact World Champion Steve Maclin reflected on signing in an interview with Fightful and let it be known that he's excited to see what he brings to the table.

“But I think he’s out to prove something now as Nic Nemeth and not Dolph Ziggler. He’s getting away with that, and that’s also a thing I went through myself, getting away from being Steve Cutler to what Steve Maclin is now,” Steve Maclin told Fightful. “To me, I said it at Hard to Kill, ‘Whoever comes in, I don’t care who it is, TNA’s my home. This is my sandbox.’ People joke about it. The sandbox is what we’d call it in Afghanistan and in Iraq. That’s our sandbox. Going into the theater, that’s our sandbox. That’s what I consider TNA to be. So, those that need clarification about what that means, that’s what I mean. This is my area of operation. I am TNA, and what TNA is bringing, where we’re going right now, I am ecstatic about.”

Will Nemeth overcome the odds and join an impressive line of ex-WWE guys who earned gold in the Impact Zone? Only time will tell, but considering where his career was at in WWE, the possibility of strong booking is far more exciting than his bleak future on RAW.