Heath Slater Recalls Hanging Up On WWE After They Called Him To Return After They Released Him

Heath Slater on getting released by WWE:

“When you get released by WWE, there's 90 days of no-compete, so there's three months of you can't do nothing. Literally, maybe two and a half months after my release, I only have two more weeks before I can go and do whatever I want. That's when they called me and were like, 'Hey, man. We got an idea for you to come in with Drew' because he was feuding with Dolph Ziggler. He was like, 'We want you to do a segment with him and then we want you to go and do this other segment with Dolph and this other segment on a pay-per-view.' I said, 'No. You fired me. I don't want to do it, man. I have no interest', and I hung up. It was some writer. I didn't even even know his name and if he remembers me saying this, I apologize. Then I got another phone call and it was a buddy of mine that was a writer and he pitched the idea. I said, 'I have no interest and I have no interest at all.' Then that's when McIntyre called me. He said, 'Come on, mate. It can probably lead to you getting a contract again or at least, you can be on television with me. I'm the champ now and you can get a nice little rub before you go hit the Indies or whatever you want to do. I said, 'I don't want to do it', but then of course, we kept talking and he talked me into it. We did it. We go down there. They wanted me to do three things. I told them I was only gonna do one and that's what you saw was me coming out with Drew."

Heath Slater on getting injured in Impact Wrestling:

“Mentally, it rocked me. I’m not going to lie. When you physically hurt, you work out, you heal, you do rehab, and you know you’re going to get better, but when you're mentally hurt, it takes a lot to get that back. I went through some mental challenges in my years, but that injury was my very first injury to where a doctor was like, ‘I don’t know if you want to start wrestling anymore.' I had to get two hernias fixed on each side of my pubic bone. My abdomen wall right below my belly button was ripped seven inches to where they had to put three pieces of mesh in it just to hold it together. My groin muscle, in there is a thing called a rectus muscle that holds your groin to your lower abdomen, that got ripped where they had to cut it so I don’t even have that anymore. All of that happened with me sliding in the ring and hitting a neckbreaker and a leg lariat and I couldn’t move. Eleven months I was out before I got back into ring.”

This interview is exclusive to WrestlingNews.co. If you use these quotes, please include a link back to this page.