Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It was fun and something I could do together with my wife and kids. We were all hand-washing bottles, cleaning and bottling together. It was like families that cook together - we just happened to brew together.
It's really gratifying to see, after all these years, and I've been in the business for 30 years, and after all of these years, to see fans wearing nWo shirts and fans of WCW who still remember make me feel good.
One of the reasons wrestling works is because it allows people to suspend their disbelief. They may know it's not real, but if it's done well enough, they get sucked into it emotionally. And that's why they watch.
Had Fusient been successful in buying WCW, ultimately there would have been no one on that side of the equation, including me, that would have had the commitment to the business that Vince McMahon has had throughout the years.
You no longer have to have a big record label behind you and have to kowtow to the politics that enabled you to get there. You can be a phenomenal artist and put your stuff out there on YouTube and find yourself becoming a star.
This isn't a competitive sport. Wrestling is not the NFL or the NHL. It's not really sports. It's entertainment. And in order to be entertaining, you have to create emotion. And you can't create emotion by simply having a wrestling match.
Hulk will always be a part of sports entertainment/professional wrestling history, and there's nothing that's gonna change that. His relationship with the WWE, whether it's official or unofficial, is something that can't really be erased.
I really like Braun Strowman. I would turn the volume down on him just a little bit. I think he is a little bit overly animated, and he doesn't have to be. He is already a larger than life character when he wakes up and has a cup of coffee.
Anybody who comes along and wants to sell a wrestling show, guess who you are not gonna sell it to? You are not going to sell it to FOX and any of its affiliates, and,oh, by the way, you are not going to sell it to NBC Universal or any of its affiliates.
When I hired the first group of cruiserweights - which consisted of Dean Malenko, Chris Jericho, and Eddie Guerrero - I sat them down in my office, and I was very clear to them. I said to them, almost verbatim, 'You need to be my human car crashes at 9 P.M.'
I don't regret how I built the Cruiserweight division. Could I have done better? Sure. Absolutely. I'm sure I could have, especially with 20/20 hindsight. I just don't know of anybody that I talk to that looks back at that division and says, 'Oh, man, that sucked.'
The WWE also embraced more of a reality-based approach to wrestling a year or two after I established it. I knew, deep down inside, were it came from. The WWE did it better than I did, and they're still here, and I'm not, but nonetheless - I knew where it came from.
By the time my attempt to acquire WCW fell apart and Time Warner decided they didn't want anything remotely associated with wrestling near their networks, once that happened and really cut the cord, it was in my rear view mirror and didn't care or think about it too much.
Typically, in a live-action format, when you watch a wrestling show, you've got wrestlers in a ring in front of a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand people, and they're playing to large crowd, so you never really get that intimate, close and personal dialogue with them.
I never got close to the creative in AWA; not only was I not close to it, I wasn't allowed to be in a room close to it when they were talking about creative. That is how tightly held Verne Gagne believed in kayfabing people who he didn't believe needed to be in the process.
People always said during the Monday Night Wars that the only way we were able to compete was due to a large checkbook and deep pockets. That's not very true at all. That is a false narrative designed to shape history. WWE had significant advantages over WCW and vice versa.
You have to make a choice, and you have to commit to a character. You're either a babyface or a character that the fans relate to, support, love and aspire to be, or you're not. And if you're not, you're a heel: you're despicable, and they need to learn to love to hate you.
A character like mine, there is only so much you can do from a storyline perspective. You can be that heel authority figure, which I was for a few years in WWE and WCW, and it's interesting, and it's fun, but after a while, you've kind of done everything you can do creatively.
There's not as many passive wrestling fans as people would think. There are a lot of fans who just can't get enough, and they're almost more interested in what's going on behind the scenes and the business of wrestling then they are, necessarily, of what's going on inside of the ring.
The reason we didn't acquire WCW is an incoming, rotating door, new head of Turner at that time, took prime time television literally out of the deal that we had already negotiated. Once that happened, there was no way to make any sense of it. It was really just a video library and some ring mats.
There are very few voices that can speak with any kind of authority or credibility on what happened back during the time when WCW and WWF were going head to head, and I think the audience is interested in that period of time, clearly. And like I said, nobody could speak to it quite the way I could.
Professional wrestling... is no different than a Broadway play except that in a Broadway play, actors are using dialogue to tell a story and establish their characters, while in WWE, they're using a physical dialogue to tell their story and build their characters. That's a very unique art; it really is.
I brought Muhammad Ali to North Korea in 1995. I tried that once. It didn't work out quite that well for me as it did for Dennis Rodman, but I brought Muhammad Ali to Pyongyang, North Korea, as part of a big wrestling event called the World Peace Festival. It was a two-day event that drew over 350,000 people.
When I created the Cruiserweight division in WCW, nobody called them cruiserweights in the industry at that point. That was a boxing term, not a wrestling term, but I did not want to call them junior heavyweights, light heavyweights, or anything that made them sound diminutive. I wanted it to sound special and cool.
The only reason TNA hired me was because they had no choice. Dixie Carter wanted Hulk Hogan - that was obvious - but Hulk Hogan didn't trust anybody in TNA. When I say trust, I don't mean to be devious or malicious or anything like that, but he didn't trust their judgment or their ability, nor did he trust Vince Russo in any way, shape, or form.