Former WCW Champion, and TNA, WWF and WCW writer Vince Russo recently appeared on the Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling Podcast. You can see the full podcast at this link, and submitted highlights below.
Challenging Vince on booking decisions:
"I will never forget there was a Summer Slam at Madison Square Garden with AC/DC Highway to Hell and I'll never forget the main event was Taker vs. Austin. Taker and Austin were really good friends and they wanted to go into that match at Madison Square Garden and they wanted to make it a babyface match because as a shoot they were very close. I remember getting in a yelling match with Vince McMahon and lets face it Taker and Austin were the top guys and they earned that spot so Vince wanted to make them happy and I couldn't understand that."
"I remember saying to Vince and especially in New York at Madison Square Garden that people do not want to see a babyface match between Austin and Taker, they want to see these guys freaking kill each other. It's freaking New York City bro this isn't Wisconsin and I remember yelling at him in his freaking car. The end of that story is they had their babyface match and there was no response and both guys knew why but that doesn't matter. My point is that I got away with that stuff because at the end of the day Vince knew my passion and he knew that Vince Russo wasn't about power and ego and money and all that crap but he was about wanting the show being the best it could absolutely be. Vince knew that and if he didn't know that do you know how many times he would have fired me? He knew what my agenda was and he knew where my heart was and it was always in the show being the best it could be. Today it is all about protecting your spot and making sure you are safe, write something that Vince will like and OH MY GOD bro it is freaking horrible."
What is the biggest misconception of Vince Russo:
"You know what part of the misconception is about me and listen I'm not saying this to be braggadocios because I swear to you I do not have an ego and I don't give a crap. But I wrote for characters long enough to know what gets a character over and at the end of the day here is what gets a character over."
"Basically you've got to find something in them that is very real so when they go out and portray that (character) you magnify it a million times over and people believe it. They are not acting because it is real to them. That is the key to getting a character over. With that said, when they started putting so much freaking pressure on me to get rating at WCW, bro I never wanted to be a character on TV and I never had any intentions of being a character on TV."
"To this day, I promise you that is 90% of the reason why so many people disdain me. They disdain me because in their minds I am still that character and I'm not. That is not me, I don't carry myself that way and I swear to God that I buried myself at WCW and later on in TNA buried myself because I never put on a power play, I never wanted power, never wanted more money I just wanted to write the television show. That is all I cared about and those around me who were political animals buried me and were burying me because they were afraid of me and because they knew my talent. The only way they were going to bring me down was to continue to bury me over and over again until they convinced that person that I was the person that they wanted me to be. Bro, I didn't fight back because my whole theory was if you want to buy into that and want to believe them than no problem just get rid of me and let them do the job and lets see what happens. With TNA, you can look at TNA and you can look at the numbers and you can pinpoint exactly where Russo left the company. You can look at those numbers and see that Vince wrote up to this point and than Vince left because you look at that number month after month and they started losing more and more audience. So that is the misconception, people don't know me, they have no idea of who I am and they don't know about Vince Russo the son, the husband, the father, they know of me as being a fictional character that they saw on TV."
For this and every other episode of The Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling and The Triple Threat Podcast featuring "The Franchise" Shane Douglas please subscribe to them on iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Podomatic, and Player FM. Also follow us on Twitter @TwoManPowerTrip
