Wade Barrett Says WWE Dropping Bad News Gimmick Helped His Decision To Depart

Wade Barrett recently appeared on Talk is Jericho (transcript via wrestlinginc.com). Here are the highlights.

League of Nations:

“They were doing something with Sheamus at that point.” Barrett recalled, “I think he had the Money In The Bank briefcase and he was pretty cold coming into where he needed to get to the point where he’s cashing it in. Time was kind of running out, I think, so I think the theory was, ‘let’s put steam behind Sheamus by having this legit faction of guys around him who became a more credible threat than he was seen as at the time. Like I said, he wasn’t doing too much on the show and he didn’t have a ton of steam for a cash in or anything like that, so they put us around him, I think, to help him and build a bit of credibility behind him before he had this feud with Roman. And then, ultimately, to make Roman look like he’s conquering these four badasses or whatever it is.”

WWE dropping Bad News Barrett gimmick:

“It’s another one of those moments that kind of led me to make the decision to move on because I felt there was a time where I had some momentum there and it wasn’t my decision to stop doing that character. It was somebody else’s decision. And, first of all, I was Bad News Barrett saying the catchphrase and then, I wasn’t allowed to say the catchphrase anymore,” Barrett continued, “so I was still Bad News Barrett coming out there with a Bad News Barrett t-shirt, but I wasn’t allowed to say the catchphrase anymore, so I was like, ‘okay, it doesn’t really work if I can’t say the catchphrase anymore and people are cheering it and you want me to be a heel, then I’m not really Bad News Barrett. I’m just a guy in a t-shirt that says Bad News Barrett and not giving out the bad news.’ The next thing you know, I was King Of The Ring, which was, ‘oh, we’re going to drop Bad News Barrett,’ which was over for this and this could be a great vehicle now to kind of push me towards that main event as a heel,’ right?” Barrett explained, “but within two weeks, I was losing to, I think Sin Cara, I lost to within two weeks of winning the King Of The Ring. And I was losing to R-Truth and I was like, ‘this isn’t the direction that this should be using.’ No disrespect to those two guys, they are both really talented guys, but at that moment in time, neither of them were high enough on the card for me to be kind of use this to be climbing up in any way and certainly not when I’m losing to them. And it was, for me, that was, they trashed something that was over and gave me something that is not going to get over. And even down to Vince insisting that I had to wear the cape and the crown every night, which, for me, may have worked in the 80s, but it didn’t work in this era. And I was trying to slowly walk out and forget the crown and I’d be called up to gorilla [position] afterwards and ‘Vince wants you to wear the crown every night’ and stuff like that. So that was another thing. It was just disappointment. Like, I got myself to a position where we could springboard forward and again it was, ‘no, we’re going to go in a different direction.’ So I guess it got to the point where I felt in my head anyway at that time that it doesn’t matter what I’d come up with or what I’d do. I’m destined to be put back down in this position that I’m not enjoy or not wanting to be in, so yeah, disappointment for sure and it just added weight to the idea that I need to move on and do something else.”