Dolph Ziggler Discusses The Brand Extension, His Summerslam Match With Dean Ambrose, More

– Dolph Ziggler recently spoke with Pwinsider.com, here are the highlights…

On WWE Giving Back to Kids: It’s huge because personally, it’s great to give back to the kids you see in the crowd and get a few minutes of one on one time, get some time to see them and put a smile on their face. Usually, when WWE has an event, we are in that city and we are gone that night and onto the next. When it comes to Summerslam or Wrestlemania, we’re actually in the city for a couple of days and that allows us to give back to the community and see a couple of kids every chance we possibly can. I have four more appearances over the next few days but it’s all about giving back to these guys who treat us so well all year round. They come to our shows and we like to give back and have some personal interaction.

On The Brand Split: For years, we have said that if there was some kind of split or an extension or a draft that it would open the doors of opportunities for so many different people and different Superstars on different brands. We’ve done that before but we also had Smackdown as still a taped show that would air a few days later in the Internet age where we go, ‘I read all the results. I may not need to see that in person.’ We went live, live on Monday, live on Tuesday and now both rosters are competing with each other and obviously, on the very first day of Smackdown Live, I won a huge match for myself, so already if this is the end of it, huge opportunity for me and several other Superstars.

On Facing Dean Ambrose at Summerslam: It’s crazy. It wasn’t even in my head that day, or that week or even the last few weeks. I had been focused on several other different things and when I found out it was Ambrose, I said, “Wow, this is going to be a very different, interesting match. It went from, and I’ll base this on my Twitter feed, from ‘no one cares. You weren’t doing anything big a few weeks ago or months ago so we don’t care about you’ – this is coming in on my Twitter feed – to, all of a sudden, the last couple of weeks to ‘Whoa, this is really fun to watch you bring the best out of each other. We’re really excited about this match’ and that’s the snarky Internet giving a compliment. So, hopefully we’ve done our job. [Tuesday] night we used real heartstrings to tug at and used every raw emotion we could, not just to top Raw and say we are going for the bigger championship here, but because we want to be the two. The two of us, who don’t really know each other that well, have been feeding off the real energy of each other and it’s going to be amazing.