Good brother moves from Dolph Ziggler, AJ Styles

As most people who’ve spent time in the 21st century workforce have experienced, there’s a sort of “survivor’s guilt” among those who still have a job after a company lays off a bunch of your co-workers.

One way to handle those emotions is to try to do something nice or helpful for the folks who lost their jobs (another way? Happy hours).

We had a couple examples from veterans on the WWE roster after the company announced the release of twenty people from the Raw and SmackDown rosters last Wednesday.

Dolph Ziggler was repping his friends Zack Ryder & Curt Hawkins on SmackDown last Friday night (April 17)...

WWE.com

In theory, it could lead to some merchandise sales for Curt Hawkins & Zack Ryder. I presume contracts would ensure they still get a cut of those, even though they’re no longer wrestling for WWE.

AJ Styles, who’s already talked about how hard the release of Karl Anderson & Luke Gallows hit him, is taking a similar approach. Although in AJ’s case, he’s got a more practical reason, too. He explained on his most recent Mixer session (h/t Fightful for transcription):

“I will wear my OC stuff, at least until after Money in the Bank. Couple reasons. One, I love the boys and it’s For Life. The other reason is that I don’t really have anything. I have gloves, a lot of them, with OC on them. They’re just gonna go to waste unless something crazy happens. I don’t know what to do with them.”

Back to Dolph, he’s also doing his part to help Ryder (now Matt Cardona... that’s gonna take some getting used to) sell his new gear. With good old-fashioned kayfabe-keeping heel psychology...

That’s some good brothering from a pair of good brothers.