WWE News: Former Superstar Stu Bennett Addresses His WWE Departure In 2016

Since his departure from the WWE back in 2016, former Superstar Stu Bennett (formerly known as Wade Barrett, Bad News Barrett and King Barrett) has not been overly involved in the wrestling business. While there was a time when many fans believed Bennett had all the tools to become a top player in the WWE, through ill-timed injuries and other extenuating circumstances, it never happened.

Bennett recently appeared on Chris Jericho’s Talk Is Jericho podcast and has some interesting comments regarding leaving the company:

“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 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.”

Bennett also described how he felt in his final months with the WWE:

“I felt like not only and despite working harder in attempting to improve my promo, improve my character, improve my physique, whatever I could do to try to get up a little higher, it felt like not only was I not getting any higher, I was actually going backwards in terms of my position on the card to a point where for a large period of 2015 and 2016, I was really used as what I felt was an enhancement guy.

I’d be sent out in almost the meaningless segments, like the filler segments in the show like segment nine and segment four, where, if people understand how TV stuff works, it’s the crossover segments are the most important ones, the opening and closing, stuff like that. So I thought that I was being shoved out in those segments to go out and lose in two or three minutes with no storyline, or no buildup, or stuff like that. So that felt in terms of my position on the hierarchy that I dropped lower than ever and that was certainly one of the things that I was frustrated with.”

Quotes c/o WrestlingInc

For the full interview you can go here

EA’s Take: I honestly can’t blame the guy for feeling that way because we all saw it playing out on television. Unfortunately, there were a couple of occasions I can remember when he was set to get a big push, but was derailed by an injury. Especially when the Bad News Barrett character was red hot, I remember he was reportedly scheduled to win the Money In The Bank. What surprises me is that as far as I know, he’s not wrestling at all and has gotten more into acting. It’s too bad because I think he could have been a guy like Cody, Drew McIntyre or any of the others who took advantage of this current height of independent wrestling.

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