Former WWE star Dijak says his two years in WWE taught him one thing about Vince McMahon: it was possible to get a polite hearing and still leave feeling like the character wasn’t a priority.
Speaking with PWMania’s Lee Tarrier, the former T-Bar described trying to build a working relationship with McMahon during his main roster run between the summer of 2020 and 2022.
Beyond quick interactions at Gorilla position, he estimates they had only six or seven real conversations in those two years, some long and some short.
I had, like, a real conversation with Vince probably, like, I don’t know, six or seven times throughout the two years I was there. Sometimes they were lengthy conversations, sometimes they were shorter conversations.
He was clear that McMahon was never angry or rude. The difficulty was the feeling in the room. Dijak said he often sensed McMahon was “trying to get me out of the room,” and he guessed what was going through his boss’s mind: McMahon was running Raw and working on bigger storylines like The Bloodline, so a conversation about T-Bar’s direction came across as lower on the list.
“Was he easy to talk to? I guess, like, easy in the sense that he wasn’t angry or anything like that, but also difficult in the sense that, as T-Bar, I would get the feeling that he’s just kind of trying to get me out of the room.”
Dijak says he didn’t just wait for a push. He kept asking what he could do and how he could help. McMahon’s usual advice was to write his ideas down and submit them.
You know, sort of thing, like, ‘Yep, all right, I’m listening to you, but I got other stuff to do. I’m running Monday Night RAW. I’m trying to write the Bloodline segment. I’m trying to do stuff more important than talk to T-Bar about where his character direction is.’
You know, that was kind of the feeling that I got out of it.
Dijak Reveals WWE Backstage Stories, Talks PROGRESS Wrestling, Vince McMahon
Eventually he wanted more concrete direction, such as being told that if he did certain things he’d get a push. He said that never really came. As he saw things moving away from him, he started approaching McMahon on his own to pitch ideas and build the relationship, which he admitted was hard.
His frustration, as he describes it, isn’t mistreatment. It’s that he never felt he could get enough of McMahon’s attention to find out what would actually change his position.
