Matt Cardona spent years trying to make it in WWE, but when the company finally showed him the door, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to him. Cardona says getting fired from his dream job wasn’t the disaster people might think — it was the moment that finally forced him to stop being Zack Ryder and figure out who the hell Matt Cardona actually was.
Cardona dropped the admission while speaking to Katie Nolan alongside Chelsea Green, with the full interview available on Nolan’s YouTube channel. The former Intercontinental Champion was asked about the five years he spent rebuilding himself after WWE released him in 2020, and he made it clear that he knew right away he needed the kick out the door.
Cardona had spent almost his entire adult life in WWE, signing with the company when he was just 20 years old and staying there until he was 35. When that run finally ended, Cardona said he didn’t look at it like his career was dead.
“Yeah, I mean, I hate to say it was the greatest day of my life getting fired from my dream job, but it was. And I knew in that moment it was too, cuz I needed a change. I got signed to WWE when I was 20 years old and I got fired when I was 35.”
That release left Cardona with a pretty brutal question to answer: was there actually a wrestler underneath Zack Ryder, or was he going to spend the rest of his career playing the same guy with a new name? Cardona said he knew immediately that simply changing the name on the poster wasn’t going to cut it. He hit the independent scene, traveled the world and started tearing down the version of himself fans had known for more than a decade.
“I was there for a long time. But I needed to find myself outside of WWE, and that’s what I did. I reinvented myself, was doing shows all over the world and found out, like, who is Matt Cardona. I didn’t want to just be Zack Ryder with a different name. I found Matt Cardona.”
That transformation became the backbone of Cardona’s entire post-WWE career. He has even talked before about why Zack Ryder had to essentially die for Matt Cardona to truly work, because he wasn’t interested in spending his freedom doing a watered-down version of what fans had already seen.
Chelsea Green eventually wound up on the same ride after her own WWE release, and Cardona said the couple became a hated act while working shows around the world together.
“And then a year later Chelsea gets released and then she’s with me all over the world. So, like, we were like this hated couple all over the world.”
Things changed again when WWE brought Green back. Cardona was thrilled for his wife, but her return also meant he had to keep proving that his reinvention wasn’t dependent on them working as a package.
“Then when she went back to WWE, of course, I was so happy for her. But I was like, ‘Okay, now I got to keep doing it on my own.’ And I just kept continuing to reinvent and reinvent until essentially getting back to WWE.”
Cardona’s firing could have buried him. Instead, it ripped Zack Ryder away from him and forced him to build a completely different wrestler from scratch. Five years later, Cardona isn’t mourning the day WWE cut him loose — he’s calling it one of the best things that ever happened to him.
Do you think Matt Cardona would have ever become the version of himself fans know today if WWE never released him? Let us know what you think and leave your feedback in the comments.
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