Why Does Vince McMahon Hate Having WWE Matches Ranked?
Vince McMahon isn't into the art of "Meltzer thinking." Former WWE Magazine writer Brian Solomon, who currently has a book out on the legendary Shiek, recently sat in with "Cheap Heat Productions" podcast and talked about his interactions with McMahon.
"Everybody loves the story about when he told me to take my head out of Dave Meltzer's ass. That's kind of a favorite," Solomon said. "We were in a board meeting, and we used to have the opportunity — I don't know if you'd call it an opportunity, I'd call it the plight — of having to pitch magazine ideas to him. Why? I don't know, he's the chairman of the company, but I think Shane [McMahon] took sadistic glee in bringing us up there to pitch to him. And so there was an issue where I'm pitching for various kinds of ideas, and at one point he pretends like he's falling asleep in front of the board members."
Solomon recalls being shot down several times during these meetings, but one instance really stands out.
"We wanted to do an article on the greatest steel cage matches," Solomon said. "He sees that as 'Meltzer thinking' ... Like he cares about match quality, but for him, the storyline is paramount. He doesn't like the way that Meltzer will take a match and surgically remove it from the angle and just study it by itself, like this match without the context. For him, the context is everything ... He thought that Hulk Hogan and Andre The Giant, WrestleMania III, was the best match, it was better than Savage and Steamboat ... Hogan and Andre was the match everybody wanted to see, it was this angle that got everybody excited, it was the colossal confrontation of legends. That's the way he looks at things, so he hates this idea of studying matches like that.
"And so we wanted to do the greatest steel cage matches ever, and he goes, 'Boy you guys really need to take your heads out of Dave Meltzer's ass.'"
Solomon recalled being terrified by the exchange, though it wasn't necessarily characteristic of his interactions with McMahon overall.
"I'm just trying to feed my kids, and this crazy billionaire and his whims," he said. "But there would be other times where he'd be totally agreeable and nice and warm, talk to me about his family, his kids, his father, tell me these stories about when he was a kid and the things that he saw."
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit "Cheap Heat Productions" and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription