Former WWE Creative Team member Matt McCarthy, who was with the company from 2010 to 2011, recently joined the PWTorch Livecast with Wade Keller and discussed Vince McMahon's approach to booking, including the head-scratching policy of booking wrestlers to lose or even to get embarrassed in their hometowns. This used to happeno Jim Ross in Oklahoma City over the years, and more recently, Charlotte Flair lost to Sasha Banks in Charlotte two Raws ago, after having beaten Sasha in her hometown of Boston at the Hell in a Cell PPV.
"I mean, I don't know why (Vince) does that, but it's something that's always happened," said McCarthy. "I don't remember any specific examples of it, but there was always an awareness of, 'Well, what town are we in, oh so-and-so is from here, Vince is probably going to want him to lose.' I never, ever got an explanation for why that was. Even a general booking philosophy of why you'd do that. ... I don't know. I know Vince can get hung up on not wanting to just do the same old thing. That's kind of a problem when you're in your 70s and you've been doing this job your entire life and you've seen it all and done it all."
McCarthy, for his part, isn't sure this "do the job in your hometown" policy is the wisest course of action.
"I think (Vince) can under-appreciate how much turnover there is in the audience and how many new viewers you get. There are people who haven't seen that stuff before," McCarthy said, giving an example of something so old that it's new again. "When I watch Jack Gallagher, I am smitten because I never get to see that type of wrestling anymore and I never have. I want that type of stuff, I love that type of stuff. There's a whole century's worth of booking philosophies and tricks that we've never seen. Johnny Carson said it once. 'There's no new jokes. There's just an audience who hasn't heard them yet.' Not everything has to be - sometimes a wheel is what you need, you don't need to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to go against the grain just because you've been going with the grain so long."
If McCarthy had the book, he'd be doing things a bit differently: "I'm talking about applying what we know works, examining the situation we're in, and see what the most logical place we can go, and what's something really exciting we can do that we haven't done in a long time. There's only so many ideas in the bucket. I think I heard Kevin Nash say there's really only nine reasons for guys to have a match, and it's true. We're still tuning in and we still watch to see the good guy beat the bad guy. It doesn't need to be more complicated than that. It's pro wrestling. It should be simple. It should just be pro wrestling. It doesn't need to be anything more than that."
You can listen to the full podcast by clicking this link.
