10 Times WWE Got Buyer's Remorse
3. Vince Russo
Vince McMahon knew how badly the decision to rehire Vince Russo in 2002 would go down with a creative team stewarded by his own daughter that he simply didn't bother telling them.
In something of a tizzy over the state of his product with the post-Attitude Era decline in full effect, The Chairman pushed the "DO NOT PUSH" button installed under his desk the day after Russo jumped to WCW three years earlier. Frazzled and fried from his time in Atlanta (and secret time within new startup NWA: TNA) 'Vinnie-Ru' pitched another go-around of the exhausted Invasion angle, triggering a chain of events that had him gone from Stamford less than a week after sneaking back in there.
A brilliant deep-dive by your writer's favourite Michael From WhatCulture.com picked apart this astonishing and insane bit of gamesmanship from both McMahon and Russo that's well worth a read. There's rarely a reminder needed on just how detached the New Yawka is from an industry he once seismically shifted, but this details yet another bizarre chapter of the bizarre writer's very bizarre career.