Dolph Ziggler on the world heavyweight championship: It has gone down in value

In an interview conducted before the Payback pay-per-view (PPV) event this past weekend, the one that saw him lose the world heavyweight championship to Alberto Del Rio, Dolph Ziggler gave an interview to Channel 24 in South Africadiscussing the devaluing of that very title.

His comments (via PWTorch.com):

"Here's the deal. As a titleholder of a championship, you are the representatives of the company. You are the champion, you are the face of either Raw or SmackDown, and for some reason in the past couple of years the world title has gone down in value from the fans's standpoint and perhaps from an administrative standpoint. To me, the world title is one of the biggest prizes in the game of all time, because I grew up as a huge fan of it. So now, my goal is to have this become the premiere title in sports entertainment. Whether that can happen, I don't know, but I am just getting started. I'm a couple weeks into it, and I promise if it has anything to do with me, then it will become the prize that it was."

There will always be a hierarchy when there are multiple title belts on a single show or within a single company. That applies to anything. Monday Night Raw will always be the "A" show on the schedule while Friday Night SmackDown will always be the "B" show. That will remain true until Raw no longer exists.

The same can be said about the WWE championship and the way it is viewed in contrast to the world heavyweight championship.

That being said, there's no doubt WWE could be doing more to make the Big Gold Belt a more marquee attraction. After all, when Triple H had it during his run of terror from 2002-2005, the strap was a very big deal.

If it's going to get there again, it won't be because of Ziggler, though, at least not right now. How ironic is it that he gave this interview and right after it, he dropped it to Del Rio?