What WWE WON'T Tell You About The Ruthless Aggression Era

Vince asked those four men and the rest of his roster to show ruthless aggression. This suggested an agency, a set of balls with which to grab the fabled brass ring. In reality, the opposite was true; by the time this initiative was announced, Stephanie McMahon had been promoted to Head of Creative. She explained this role to Business Insider in 2016:

"I grew the creative writing team from about three people to about 30 people and developed a bunch of different innovations within that team."

Innovations: lumbering handcuffed talent with lame, hackneyed, overly verbose scripts that ruined the effect of a larger-than-life performer connecting with fans.

So what happened here is thus: Jim Ross recruited, Jim Cornette developed, Vince and Stephanie McMahon ruined. If that reads as entirely reductive, consider what happened when a series of clashes between Cornette and Head of Talent Relations John Laurinaitis destroyed prime OVW. When Paul Heyman subsequently took it over, after Cornette slapped Santino Marella into termination - and Heyman then left outright after his fall-out with WWE management - the process of creating in-house stars fell apart entirely. OVW, rudderless, fell apart. WWE's secondary feeder system, Deep South Wrestling, would have been a universally hilarious disaster, were it not for head trainer Bill DeMott's deeply toxic behaviour. DSW was a glorified torture dungeon, that pretended to book house shows (!), in which the trainees were barely told to wrestle and instead ran into the ground via preposterously intense training exercises. It was the WCW Power Plant, only it never produced a Goldberg.

Consider who made it after Cornette departed.

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