Dijak spent two years trying to get Vince McMahon to care about what was happening with T-Bar, and it apparently never got much easier. The former WWE star says McMahon wasn’t rude to him, but their conversations often left him feeling like his character was pretty damn low on the boss’ priority list.
Speaking to PWMania’s Lee Tarrier, Dijak opened up about trying to establish a working relationship with McMahon during his main-roster run between the summer of 2020 and 2022. Despite being around for two years, Dijak estimates they only had about six or seven actual conversations beyond quick interactions at Gorilla position.
“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.”
Dijak made it clear that McMahon was never openly angry or disrespectful when he approached him. The problem was more about the feeling he got while trying to pitch ideas as T-Bar — like Vince had about a hundred more important things waiting for him.
“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.”
And Dijak had a pretty good idea of what might have been going through McMahon’s head at the time. While Dijak was desperately trying to figure out how to get T-Bar moving in the right direction, Vince was running RAW and dealing with WWE’s biggest storylines.
“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 wasn’t sitting around waiting for somebody to magically hand him a push either. He repeatedly asked what he could do and tried submitting his own creative ideas, but McMahon’s advice generally amounted to writing those ideas down and sending them in.
“And me, you know, I’m like, ‘What can I do? How can I help? What can I do?’ And he’s like, ‘Just keep, you know, write your ideas down, submit that.’”
Eventually, that wasn’t enough for Dijak. He wanted something concrete from McMahon — some kind of roadmap telling him what he needed to improve or accomplish to actually move up the card.
“And at a point, eventually you’re like, ‘I want something more definitive, right? I want you to tell me, like, if you do this, this, this, I will give you a push,’ or something like that. Something like that. But it never really got to that point.”
Dijak even started approaching McMahon without being invited because he could see his WWE situation wasn’t exactly heading somewhere promising. Rather than wait around and hope creative suddenly found something for him, he tried to force open that door himself.
“For me, I sort of started to see things not trending in my direction. I said, ‘You know what? I’m just going to pitch and talk and, as much as I possibly can, try to create a relationship.’ It was hard. I’m not going to lie. It was hard.”
So Dijak isn’t accusing McMahon of screaming him out of the office or treating him badly. If anything, his frustration sounds much simpler — he kept trying to make T-Bar matter, but never felt like he could get enough of McMahon’s attention to find out what would actually change his position.
Do you think Dijak could have gotten more out of his T-Bar run if Vince McMahon had taken a greater interest in his ideas and character direction? Let us know what you think in the comments.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
