Vince Russo Talks IWC Forcing Vince McMahon To Change Plans For Roman Reigns, IWC Hijacking WWE
On the latest episode of Vince Russo's Nuclear Heat, right here on WrestlingINC.com, Russo talked about whether the Internet Wrestling Community has hijacked WWE.
According to Russo, Vince McMahon started catering to the IWC following last year's WWE Royal Rumble.
"At that point in time, Vince McMahon had chosen in his mind, 'Roman Reigns is the guy. Roman Reigns is my next [John] Cena. Roman Reigns is the guy I'm going to push to the moon.'" Russo continued, "but they laid out the [Royal Rumble] match in such a way that almost Roman Reigns was guaranteed to get booed out of the building in Philadelphia and that's exactly what happened. They brought in The Rock. They brought in everything that they could possibly do. At the end of it, the Philly crowd booed the crap out of Roman Reigns. At that point, and I could see it as a guy that wrote for 20 years, I sat back and watched. You could see that the gameplan changed. Vince, at that point, let the internet wrestling community dictate creative to him. And you could immediately see in Vince's mind, 'Reigns is my guy. He's the babyface. That's not going to change. You're going to like him if this takes me the next two years to get him over.' That's what was going through the mind of Vince McMahon and you could tell, at that point in time, there was a change in the creative and they took a step back with Reigns in order to really, really rebuild him, get the people to like him, and get him over with the crowd. That was all determined by the crowd in Philadelphia that night."
Russo said that he agrees with McMahon's decision to make Reigns WWE's top guy, but has a problem with how the Royal Rumble match was booked, calling it possibly the worst booked match he has ever seen.
"Vince was in love with Roman Reigns and I'll be honest with you. I agree with that decision. I like Roman Reigns. I like the way he looks. I like his intensity. He's appealing to casual fans. He [has] got [professional] wrestling in his bloodlines. He knows and understands the [professional wrestling] business. So I thought that was a good choice. I never had an issue with that. The problem was they so badly booked the Royal Rumble." Russo added, "they gave the fans no other choice, but to boo for Roman Reigns by the time he won that match. First of all, they put Daniel Bryan in it and he got eliminated and he was the guy everybody wanted to win. They should have known beforehand, 'obviously, if we put Bryan in and he gets eliminated, people are going to be pissed off'. Then, the last four guys in the match, it was Kane and Big Show and [Rusev]. Whatever the case may be, with the four guys remaining in the match, you knew Reigns was going to win. It was the most horribly booked match perhaps I have ever seen in my life."
Russo commented that he never would have guessed that McMahon would have succumbed to the IWC. While Dixie Carter and John Gaburick in TNA relied on the IWC to form opinions, McMahon never looked to the IWC for direction and instructed staff to never cater to the IWC, as it was the core audience that watched WWE no matter what.
"I never in my wildest dreams, never, never, I would have put my livelihood on it, my reputation on it, my children on it. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that Vince McMahon and the WWE would start kowtowing to the internet wrestling community. Never in my wildest imagination did I think that the internet wrestling community would ever have any influence whatsoever on Vince McMahon and the decisions he was making, creatively, with his company. I never thought I'd see that because, quite frankly, when I was there, you didn't even bring it up. It didn't even matter. It was all about the millions and millions and millions of television viewers at home. Those were the people we wanted. The internet wrestling community was going to be there whether it was good or bad. They were going to watch the show every week."
In addition to these topics, Russo discussed how Howard Finkel would provide WWE brass writeups from the dirtsheets, the place dirtsheets had in his WCW booking meetings, and more. You can see the full episode above, or listen to it below. You can also download directly at this link. If you want to subscribe, you can do so through iTunes as well as our RSS feed, which you can use this to subscribe through any podcast app. If you're enjoying the show, please subscribe and rate on iTunes!