During his recent appearance on the Talk is Jericho podcast, Batista revealed that he advised WWE superstar Titus O’Neil to leave WWE following a seemingly innocuous incident during a 2016 Raw. For those that do not recall, O’Neil playfully grabbed Vince McMahon as he was walking to the backstage following Daniel Bryan’s retirement announcement – a video of the incident is below:
https://youtu.be/nHIEdvwgE8w
The following day, WWE announced that O’Neil had been suspended for 60-days for unprofessional conduct, ruling him out of that year’s WrestleMania. Here is what Batista had to say about the matter and the advice he gave to his friend:
“I’ve given him advice over the years, some of it he’s taken, some of it he hasn’t. I told him he should have left the WWE. After he got suspended, I was just like, dude, I would’ve been out of there. I thought that was a conversation, Vince should’ve pulled him aside and said, ‘Don’t ever do that again and then it would have never happened again. It should have been a man-to-man type thing. If he had such an issue with it. I could see the point where he may, just bad timing.”
“The guy doesn’t have any bad intentions in his heart, man. He’s just such a good guy and so I hated it. I felt like it was such a slap in the face. I really feel like they spit right in his face. They also suspended him right through WrestleMania, you don’t do that. That guy busts his ass all year and then you take that away from him? Not only did he (Vince McMahon) not talk to him and tell him, ‘You shouldn’t have done that, man’, you suspend him, but he didn’t even do it personally. He had somebody else do it and then he fined him. Man up. That’s when you man up. He’s just so loyal to the company. You give him that respect.”
A year has passed by and the incident likely forgotten, but Titus O’Neil is still in the headlines after being sued by a WWE cameraman.
