Shane Douglas Describes Vince McMahon's Attitude Towards Competition
Shane Douglas was a staple of pro wrestling in the 90s with multiple stints in WWE, WCW and ECW where he achieved his most notoriety. Douglas was a part of the Monday Night Wars on WCW's side so he has a unique perspective to weigh in on what could be the Wednesday Night Wars this fall with AEW going up against NXT.
Douglas talked about WWE putting NXT on the USA Network to compete with AEW on TNT when he spoke to Wrestling Inc. on our WINCLY podcast.
"It will be interesting to watch and see?AEW has an incredible opportunity, the first one since WCW went out of business, to provide real competition to WWE. The old saying is that you only get one introduction, and once they launch on TNT, they will have a tall order," said Douglas.
He then talked about how Vince is executing a more edgy WWE product in response to AEW but he doesn't know if Vince will keep that route or not.
"My experience in competing with WWF – and this is the exact mea culpa I gave to Dixie Carter ? in no way shape or form should you directly confront Vince. There's something in that guys psyche where when you try to compete against him, even if he's crushing you it doesn't matter. He's gonna pulverize you into dust and then spit and piss on your grave after that. Does that Vince still exist? I haven't seen evidence of it recently but I'm sure it's still there," stated Douglas who then added how hard it is to compete with WWE on a week to week basis.
"Are [AEW] gonna have somebody to write that weekly TV, to create the characters that will draw fans back to the table, get those characters over and then execute those storylines? That's a tall order and they've got some great guys. But let's see if they can pull it all together and get it done."
Many people don't know that before Shane Douglas became "Shane Douglas," his wrestling name was Troy Orndorff. Douglas' co-host for his new podcast, Brian, talked about why Douglas adopted that ring name.
"Troy Orndorff was Shane Douglas breaking into the business as Paul's nephew. No one's ever heard that story and we're gonna go through that and talk about his relationship with Paul Orndorff and things like that," Brian said of their podcast.
"There's a lot of different places that I'm gonna go with Shane Douglas. And believe me, I'm going to dig every single memory and story directly out of The Franchise's brain."
Douglas himself then talked about portraying Paul Orndorff's nephew.
"The funny thing about it is that, to this day, fans will come up to me and say, 'Hey, how's your Uncle Paul doing?' I do have a real Uncle Paul so for a split-second I'll think it's him," Douglas said. How that came about, the promoter in Detroit gave that to me as I was going to the ring. He goes, 'What's your name?' and I told him my real name and he goes, 'Ah, that's the sh*ts. I'll think of something. Go to the ring.'
"I was terrified that Paul Orndorff would hear about it and rip my head off. But years later he laughed about it but there's an awful lot to tell about that story too.
Shane Douglas can be heard every Tuesday on his new podcast "Franchised with Shane Douglas". For more information about Shane's new podcast please visit https://shanedouglas.com/.
Shane's full interview with Wrestling Inc aired as part of a recent episode of our WINCLY podcast. It can be heard via the embedded audio player at the bottom of this post. In it Shane discusses his new Franchised with Shane Douglas podcast, recalling ECW memories that he'd forgotten, WWE launching their own podcast network, if Vince McMahon would ever do a podcast, NXT vs AEW and more
You can check out past episodes of the WINCLY here. Subscribe to Wrestling Inc. Audio on iTunes or Google Play. Listen to the show via Spotify here or through TuneIn here.