Since leaving WWE and starting his own podcast, Ryback Reeves has used the podcast to air all kinds of grievances about the company.
One of the latest topics was when WWE banned the use of the curb stomp. Seth Rollins had been using the maneuver as his finisher throughout his WWE tenure up until the summer of 2015, when he began using the Pedigree instead.
Speaking on a recent episode of his aforementioned podcast, Conversations With The Big Guy, Ryback disagreed strongly with the decision to ban the curb stomp.
"I feel bad for Seth on that, because that was a great finishing move," Ryback noted.
In August of 2015, Rollins explained during a Rolling Stone interview that the change was made for PR reasons, and because it would be too easy for kids to mimic the move:
"Obviously, it was a move that I was partial to, but it didn't make or break me as a performer. I want to make it clear that it wasn't banned because of a risk of injury – I've never hurt anybody with the move ever. We mislabeled the move to begin with – we gave it a lousy name – and then once I got to this level, we started to notice that I was going to be making a lot of media appearances, and moms were going to be seeing the representative of WWE doing this kind of maneuver, and kids were going to try it and it could go wrong very easily. That's stuff I don't think about, but that's why we have people like Vince McMahon, who have done this for their entire lives – they think about stuff like that, and they keep us alive and not in court settling lawsuits all the time. So we decided to make a switch and change over, and I'm fortunate enough to be in a position to be handed down a move like the Pedigree, that no one else has been able to use as a finish in the past 20 years. So I don't mind it one bit, and it kind of adds to the character. People say what they will, but at the end of they day, they're not happy about it, so I'm doing my job."
Ryback gave a rebuttal to that line of logic on his podcast, noting that "every move in wrestling is to try to harm your opponent" and that he failed to understand why the curb stomp was singled out.
"Every move, the psychology is to knock out your opponent. You can say the knockout punch is a punch to the face. ... Every move, The RKO is a move driving your face to the mat. ... that's the p---y society we live in today. They adhere to it because of that?"
After walking out of TV the night after Payback last year, Ryback finally was released by WWE last August. His podcast debuted soon after.
