Controversy. Praising anything about Vince Russo is almost a sin in today's IWC, but that's precisely why Russo remains an unsung hero to this day. When you look at Russo's body of work, you see two different "eras", almost coming across as night and day. With the WWF, he created what would become known as "Crash TV", with the edgy storylines that would fuel the Attitude Era. His storylines would help to save the company from possibly going out of business, as they were getting dominated on a weekly basis by WCW Monday Nitro, with Raw seeing all-time low ratings before Russo's promotion to head writer. Russo was the man behind Degeneration X and their antics, the Steve Austin VS Vince McMahon feud, Rocky Maivia becoming The Rock, The Undertaker VS Kane feud, and so on. Russo in WCW was a different story, with everything just being a jumbled mess, and with him trying too hard to recapture his WWF magic, delivering similar storylines and similar characters. By that point, fans had grown tired of the "Crash TV" style, with wrestlers turning seemingly on a monthly basis for little to no reason, and with every promo being filled with curse words just for the sake of cursing. Russo's time in TNA (which some feel is still going on today) was no better, with the same things being written into shows that got stale a decade prior. The key difference between Russo in the WWF VS Russo in WCW and TNA? Vince McMahon being a "filter", of sorts, taking Russo's storylines and streamlining them a bit before they reach television. Because of that, many people give Vince almost all of the credit for everything Russo did. That isn't fair at all. By every non-biased (looking at you, Jim Cornette) account I've seen or heard, Russo did the yeoman's work in putting together what we saw during the Attitude Era, but because people have come to view him in a negative light more recently, his positives are overlooked. Credit where credit is due, and Vince Russo deserves a lot of it for helping to save the World Wrestling Federation.
Columnist/Podcaster/Director at LordsOfPain.net for nearly seven years, with nearly 2000 total columns written. Interviewed and/or involved in interviewing the likes of Tyler Black/Seth Rollins (twice), Diamond Dallas Page, Jimmy Jacobs, Christopher Daniels, Uhaa Nation and more.
