Wade Barrett was miserable in WWE

Wade Barrett recently appeared on Sam Roberts’ podcast (transcript via Wrestling Inc), and spoke about his decision to leave WWE and how miserable he was in his final years…

On His Last Few Years in WWE: “I was miserable for a long time for the last few years I was in WWE,” Barrett admitted. “I have no beef or hate for them, but it was just how I was feeling at the time. Once upon a time if you go back to the early 2000s all the way to 2014 all I cared about in life was being a wrestler, going on the road, performing in front of crowds, getting big, climbing the ladder. But then at some point around 2015 it took a giant U-turn and thought to myself, ‘wait a minute? What am I doing here? This isn’t the direction that I want.’”

On The Decision to Leave: “While I was working for the WWE in 2013 and 2014, TV deals had come to me, movie deals had come to me, sponsorship deals had come to me and they were all turned down by WWE because they would involve me being taken away from their shows,” Barrett said. “Their steam train is running all over the world and I would have to step out of that steam train and go film for four weeks, or go shoot a film for two weeks or even two days to go film a series of commercials or something like that. But they couldn’t afford to take me away from that time so I knew that if I wanted to go and do something else, the only way for me to do that is to first step away from WWE and figure out how I make contacts and how do I start speaking to people in the film world and finding agents and that sort of thing. So one had to come first, and that was to come first to get the curtain off of WWE.”

On The WWE Schedule: “It is a grind,” Bennett said about life on the road in WWE. “It is a grind lifestyle and it never ends until you get hurt and then you sit home rehabbing for three months or whatever it is until you get back straight on that train grinding again, which is how you make your money in the pro wrestling world.”