During a recent edition of his “83 Weeks” podcast, Eric Bischoff discussed how Vince Russo, who was a booker for both WWE and WCW, approached wrestling without the perspective of a fan, which resulted in storylines and angles that lacked coherence.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On who pushed for WCW rebranding in 1999: “Jay Hassman, yeah. Nick Lambros, who was originally assigned to us as an attorney through Turner Broadcasting, ended up coming to work for me at WCW. He was my vice president, but he was an attorney who wanted to do more than just being an attorney. Which I understand. You know, being a kind of administrative entertainment attorney, not always the most exciting job. But he came over to WCW — left Turner legal, came to WCW as vice president, and really wanted to expand into other divisions of the company. He wanted to be in charge of different divisions, and one of them was marketing. Hence, the decision to rebrand WCW in terms of its logos and sets. And it was really Nick Lambros who hired Jay Hassman to come in and rebrand WCW.”
On Vince Russo not looking at wrestling as a wrestling fan in WCW: “Because Russo doesn’t like wrestling. He just doesn’t relate to it the way the audience relates to it. He never related to the product the way the vast majority of the audience did. Vince Russo was writing for Vince Russo. See, what Vince Russo had — I’m guessing I wasn’t there. But WCW is kicking WWE’s a** for a long time, you know. Like a couple weeks for Vince McMahon would have been a long time. Two years is a really long time. And that provided an opening for Russo. Russo was able to look at the things that were working in WCW, on Nitro, particularly with the NWO. And because of the position he was in, [he] convinced Vince McMahon to give some of these ideas a try. Vince probably would have never given those ideas an opportunity — those ideas that are basically derivatives from the nWo — would probably not have opened the door for those opportunities if things were going well for WWE. But things weren’t, so Vince had nothing to lose. So he let Russo play a little bit. That s**t starts working.
“But all of it was a version or — I wouldn’t say rip-off. Everything’s a derivative of something, we all know that. But it was inspired greatly by some of the things that Vince Russo was seeing on Nitro. Now Vince Russo’s in that chair on Nitro, and he’s got nothing to look back upon and get ideas from other than what’s going on in WWE, which would be pretty obvious. Now he’s left to his own creative devices, and he’s a vapid muckerfuther when it comes to ideas. He’s not that good under the hood. That’s where it becomes evident to me, that’s why you’re seeing some of the things that just don’t make any sense. Because Russo doesn’t look at the product the way you as a fan did, or do.”
