Wade Barrett Reveals Why He Left WWE

“I was kind of burnt out on the road as [Jericho] said. I mean, when you start on the road, everything’s new and everything’s fresh. You don’t care that you’re not home 275 nights a year, and you’re constantly exhausted, and beat up, and even if you’ve got bad booking or something like that, it’s all fine because you’re living this amazing experience. After I had been up there for several years, I kind of got to the point where even the little things were irritating me, and the travel was really killing me, and I’d get to the arena, and it seemed that every RAW and every SmackDown, every Monday and Tuesday, I’d get to the arena and be so disappointed when the script for the show came out. And every week, there would just be something where I’m like, ‘man, I don’t want to do this.’ And I’d kind of plead my case with the people in the creative or in management about doing something different or tweaking it this way, ‘hey, how about moving the story this way?’ and just whatever I was doing, I was just banging my head against a brick wall. And it got to the point where it felt like Groundhog Day. And my contract was running up and I’d signed a pretty long contract after the Nexus deal and stuff like that. They got me on a pretty long contract and that was just coming to a head. So they had approached me a couple of times about re-signing, and extending, and coming up with a new deal, and stuff like that. And it hadn’t even got to the point of negotiating with them. I just explained to them, ‘look, I need to get out. This is just killing me and I need to go do something else for a while and get away from pro wrestling,’ which is essentially what I did.” Barrett added, “and there [were] other things. It wasn’t just in terms of the creative I wasn’t happy with. There was some stuff behind-the-scenes. I had fallen out with a couple of people kind of in the talent relations and management department. I’m not going to get into specifically what that was about, but it was, ‘okay, this is all coming together now to show that, with my contract coming up, I should just get away.’ And that’s really how it kind of all shook out.”

(Pro Wrestling & MMA World)