That Time Vince Russo’s Ideas Were TOO GOOD For WWE
Per a report from Wade Keller of Pro Wrestling Torch, Russo pitched another invasion angle, in which Goldberg, Bret Hart, Mick Foley, Eric Bischoff and Shawn Michaels were to take over one of the two programmes as a united, disrupting force. The famously forgiving Bret Hart and the man who retired him. The famously forgiving Bret Hart just up and going back to WWE, years and years before tensions had eased.
Anyway.
Russo, for his part, claims that this one-year plan was so groundbreaking, so meticulous, so guaranteed to be brilliant that his new colleagues were reduced to a reverent, awed silence. “Their jaws hit the ground,” Russo said on his Truth With Consequences podcast earlier this year. “It became pretty evident to everybody in that room, “‘Well, if Vince McMahon hires this guy, there’s no need for us’.”
Man, that sounds like an awesome idea!
The idea was so good that Heyman et al. just had to sabotage Russo. And they did, by all accounts; per the July 1, 2002 Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Russo was either buried by Stephanie, or his ideas were so bad that he buried himself. In any event, he was repackaged more quickly than Mike Awesome was two years prior: he walked into that room as a writer, and left it a “consultant”.
But if this idea was so out-of-this-world, why was Vince Russo’s subsequent TNA run a risible parody of WCW’s own astonishingly stupid and unpopular parody of sports entertainment?
Vince Russo is so obsessed with the swerve that it’s a wonder has hasn’t yet said “sis”, instead of “bro”. Gauging by that TNA run, Evolution wouldn’t have worked quite as well as it did. An excellent premise for a faction that spawned Batista’s mega-run with a perfect baked-in narrative, this wasn’t the way Russo did things. He’d have booked Ric Flair and Triple H as the gatekeeping main event stars, only to reinforce that perception by booking the up-and-coming Batista and Randy Orton as secondary to Rhyno, which isn’t satire, because that is precisely what became of AJ Styles’ and Samoa Joe’s Frontline.
Is Vince Russo telling the truth?
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