Donovan Dijak Explains How BZW WaterMania Appearance Came About, Talks Wrestling In A Ring In A Swimming Pool

Donovan Dijak explains how his BZW WaterMania appearance came about and how it was to wrestle on a floating ring in a swimming pool.

At the end of last month, BZW would host their WaterMania event, showcasing an event where wrestlers would compete in a ring that was floating in a swimming pool. One talent that featured on the show was Donovan Dijak, who has now spoken about the experience.

While speaking to Jeremy Lambert and Kate in a recent interview with In The Weeds, Donovan Dijak spoke about wanting to be on the show since last year.

“This actually all started with the illustrious Sean Ross Sapp, last year he- I don’t know where he got it, but he sent out like a screen cap from a ring floating in a lake that’s tipping over. I’m scrolling my feed or whatever, and whenever you scroll your feed, you’re like, AI, AI, AI, AI, and I scrolled by his, and I was like, AI, and then I was like, wait, that was Sean, so I went back to it, and I was like, ‘what on earth is this?’ So I think I quote tweeted, I said for the love of God, please tell me this is not AI, and then a bunch of people in the comments, like, linked me to an actual video of it happening, and it appeared to not be AI generated which I was just flabbergasted about, and then eventually a company that is either associated with it or I don’t know what the exact connection is, but BZW basically hit me up and said, ‘hey, we’re doing a floating ring pool at some point. Would you like to be part of it?’ I said, ‘yes, absolutely I would,’ and that was like a year ago, and then finally, maybe a month ago, they hit me up again, and they were like, ‘hey, we have a date for our floating ring pool or our floating ring show,’ and I unfortunately already had a booking that date, and I was like, ‘oh no, I’m sorry, I can’t make it. I have a booking that date.’ Well, that booking ended up falling through. So I was like, wow, let me hit up that company and see if there’s any more availability because I happen to be traveling to London already the next day for Progress, my first Progress show I did last Monday,  in 10 years, it was my first, my return to Progress after 10 years. So that was exciting in and of itself. But yeah, I got to message the the promoter and they made room for me on the card, which I was very thankful for, and yeah, I was able to switch up all the flights and get all the arrangements made and get myself to Paris for BZW WaterMania and it was everything I expected it to be and more.”

“Oh, well, into the water yes, on the ring no. Maybe the worst bumps on the ring itself but yeah, like, I didn’t have high expectations going into this. So we walked through, it was out there for probably an hour or so before the doors open and everybody kind of got in and you can, you can feel it, you know, it’s wobbling and it’s teetering. If you go, if you get too many people on one side, it starts to kind of sink in that direction. Things that we take for granted in terms of the stability of the ring aren’t necessarily there, when you’re pushing off- There’s an action of like this (gestures), which you’re- you sink and you don’t get as much push or as much lift as you’re looking for. Ultimately, and the guy I was working with was great. He was excellent. He was very easy to work with, and he understood, you know, what was happening in terms of this particular situation. So we called a lot of stuff and basically… said put a big asterisk next to all of it and said if it’s safe and out of that list of things that we said we would do, we probably axed about like half of it because it was not safe.”

Dijak would later note that he was glad that there was no ‘catastrophic’ slips, especially after struggling to complete his entrance without doing so.

“Slippage was probably our number one concern. But thankfully, there was no catastrophic slips. So I’m very thankful about that.”

Dijak would also joke about not using spray tan in the match, noting that that would have been a mess.

You can check out more from Dijak in another recent interview here.