Whole Ted DiBiase Jr.-WWE Story!

Ted DiBiase Jr., 30, announced on 8/26 that he was leaving the company. He will be entering a religious-based private business in the Jackson, MS, area, where he and his family live. He cut a video praising the company for its charity work, saying that he had some amazing life experiences there, traveling the world and even starring in a movie (“The Marine 2"). He said he’s not saying he wouldn’t come back, but there were other dreams and passions he would like to pursue, one of which was being a Dad. We’d heard for quite some time he was considering leaving, and the timing is that his contract just expired. He hadn’t been used well and it didn’t appear there were any plans to do anything with him, so he wanted to move on to whatever was next in his life. DiBiase Jr. is a unique situation because the company hand-picked him to be a top star years ago. Cena at one point had openly in the press talked about DiBiase as a guy he would headline WrestleMania with and as one of the next superstars of the company. But it never happened. Some of it was timing and some of it was bad luck. He was tall, good looking, great physique and a solid worker, all things they like. He could have made it but he was missing something that stands out, and he was a guy totally given up on after injuries. DiBiase Jr. was originally trained by Chris Romero and Harley Race, and worked as a tag team with older brother Mike DiBiase, who is now out of the business. A third brother, Brett DiBiase, was in WWE developmental and at one time scheduled to be brought in with a push, but the idea fell apart and Brett DiBiase’s career ended early, in 2011, due to having undergone four knee operations already by the age of 22. 

He started with Pro Wrestling NOAH and got raves for being smooth in the ring while having so little experience, and then was signed by WWE in July 2007, and was brought in with a push on May 26, 2008, immediately winning the tag team titles with Cody Rhodes. For the next three years he was in the position of the young guy being groomed, with Orton, Rhodes and DiBiase as Legacy. He also, very quickly, was given the lead role in “Marine 2,” and things were looking bright for him. The original idea was for him to turn face at around the time the movie came out and get a big singles push. They started teasing dissension between Orton and DiBiase, and the crowd was behind DiBiase, but they went nowhere with it and I don’t think he ever recovered. When they split up the group, Orton was the one who went face and destroyed both of them in the feud, winning a WrestleMania match and then DiBiase was moved to Smackdown. He was given the Million Dollar Man gimmick of his father, and that flopped for a number of reasons. His father’s role was iconic and while DiBiase was a solid ring technician, he was not the personality of his father. The story was that his father left him huge money in a trust fund that he would get as soon as he appeared in a WrestleMania. They even brought in Virgil, his father’s bodyguard, to work with him as his servant. That didn’t work. Aside from the fact it wasn’t going to work anyway because he lacked the personality to play the role that his father had, and the natural comparison made him come across secondary, they never put the gimmick over. With his father, he bought everyone for months until he couldn’t buy the top babyfaces. 

With DiBiase, the money didn’t buy anything of note, and in his first PPV match with the gimmick, lost to R-Truth. Eventually they linked him with Maryse as his hot girlfriend, but the two had embarrassingly bad chemistry together. Even before they started the tension, their on-screen demeanor made it clear there was no romance or chemistry. Then they gave him the Million Dollar belt that his father used as a gimmick. He went nowhere with the gimmick, and once the gimmick was dropped, he and Maryse were broken up, and he went face, they really had nothing for him. On his own, he came up with the idea of the DiBiase Posse, where he’d tailgate with fans before the Smackdown tapings. Vince McMahon loved the idea, but they never got behind it. He did get an undercard push at the end of 2011, but was used to put newcomer Jinder Mahal over clean, and then was in an undercard feud with Hunico. Even before this we’d heard he was thinking about leaving wrestling if his career didn’t turn around. In early 2012, he suffered a broken ankle, and since he had to be out of action anyway, he opted to get long-needed shoulder surgery. He appeared only sparingly on TV and house shows after his return last July. He also suffered a broken wrist and a finger injury in December and didn’t return until this past May, but had been rarely used since. We’ve been told that for now, he’s just looking at taking time off. Even though he was rarely used, he was at TV all the time. Long-term, he’s been interested in pursuing acting for years and when we had first heard he was looking at leaving, that was what he was interested in. There is also thoughts of doing some pro wrestling, perhaps in Japan, where he started, but the Japanese scene, and in particular Pro Wrestling NOAH, is very different now than it was when he was there at the start of his career.