During a recent appearance on the “Something To Wrestle” podcast, JBL discussed how the stress of being the WWE Champion affected Eddie Guerrero, Vince McMahon’s perspective on RAW compared to SmackDown, and other topics.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
On the pressure of being WWE Champion getting to Eddie Guerrero: “Yeah, Eddie felt it tough. And I wish he’d got the title again, because I think he’d been fine with it. When he got it the first time it was — you know, and I’ve seen this happen a lot with champions. Some people grow with the title, some people shrink with this title. Some people become overwhelmed with the title. Eddie became a little bit overwhelmed with it. And I don’t mean that from the ring work, but Eddie was always looking at ratings and crowd size, and it was really — ‘Okay, well the rating was down here. Is that my fault?’ And I would say, ‘Eddie, you weren’t even in the segment. So no, it wasn’t your fault.’
“It really weighed on him, being champion. He knew the pressure of it. He took that pressure really tough. And I wish he had become champion again, because he would have been completely different. Now that being said, none of it showed in his work. Absolutely zero of it ever showed in his work that he was cracking or anything else. But there was a lot of pressure you could tell that Eddie felt. And by what he talked about. I said, ‘Hey, let’s just do quality. Let’s not worry about ratings. Let’s not worry about crowds.’ And he said, ‘Well, we gotta do this. We gotta do that.’ You know, it really weighed on him.”
On how Vince McMahon viewed RAW vs. SmackDown: “Raw was his flagship show. He started Raw, that was his baby. And there is no doubt about it. We felt that way the whole time. When we were at SmackDown, it was kind of a cool thing because we felt like we were the underdog. We feel like we were the underdog to the Raw team. Now again, there’s no animosity between the Raw boys and SmackDown boys. We’re all doing the same thing. But we really felt like we were the underdogs. We would check how big the crowds were where we were in spot shows. We would check ratings of how they were, and we would check out live events. So there were so many things that we would check, because we felt the same way. We felt like we were the little red-headed stepchild.”
