8 Sharpest Hustlers In Wrestling
7. Vince Russo
Vince Russo, one of the most loathed men in pro-wrestling history, is a journalism graduate who first inched his way into the professional wrestling business by writing Linda McMahon a letter which got him a job working on the WWF Magazine as a writer in 1992 - he wrote to Linda rather than Vince because he decided that she probably rarely received the company fan mail, and so his letter had a better chance of being read.
A year or so later, he was editor of the magazine, and by 1996 hed inveigled his way onto the creative team proper. By early 1997, he was the WWFs head writer, one step removed from Vince McMahon himself.
It's still unclear how many ideas that made it onto Monday Night RAW were his, or how much McMahon had to censor or filter his ideas to make them work. That means it's still unclear how much credit Russo can really take for the Attitude Era and the turnaround in the WWF's ratings that saw them begin to crush WCW in the Monday Night Wars. Regardless, Russo managed to parlay his time in the WWF into a job at WCW when he left the WWF in October 1999, taking over from a fired Eric Bischoff in the driver's seat of the company.
This time, there was no murkiness as to what his contribution was: the buck stopped with him, and rarely if ever has a booker in pro-wrestling been ridiculed and condemned more than Vince Russo. By the time WCW collapsed and died due to backroom politics, it had been run into the ground as a promotion. Somehow, he leaped from that position to working in a major creative role behind the scenes for upstart NWA promotion TNA from 2002 to 2004, and again from 2006 to 2012. Reviews for the results of his efforts wereunfavourable.
Today, his reputation is such that it's unlikely he could get a job writing for wrestling if he paid his own wages, and the broad consensus is that Russo has a fundamental lack of knowledge of the basics needed to book a wrestling show. Despite this supposed deficiency, Vince Russo managed to land a major creative role at the three biggest wrestling promotions in the USA, over a period spanning sixteen years. The jury's out on whether Russo can write but, for a while, he could talk his way into anything.