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I think the fact that Brock Lesnar is not on the road 52 weeks a year, is not on 'Monday Night Raw' every episode, is not performing 300 matches per year... I think that dictates to the public, 'Brock Lesnar is special.' That an appearance by Brock Lesnar in an of itself is newsworthy. It's not commonplace.
I never looked at ECW as wrestling. I always considered it more of a theology. I don't know whether I had or didn't have a messianic complex during that time. But I bought into the movement as much as, if not more than, anybody else. If I sold anyone on the religion of extreme, I was its number-one customer.
The whole concept of ECW was that the biggest star of the promotion was the promotion itself. It didn't matter if a persona was designed to elicit cheers or boos. It didn't matter if someone was an antagonist or protagonist. The whole concept was to fight for the honor of the cause. The cause was ECW itself.
The key to WWE's success and longevity is that they are, as modern and as relevant as the company may be in modern social media and platforms and contemporary distribution, the company is still built around old-school promotion. Who are these two fighters? Why are they wrestling? And why should I pay to see it?
Who cares if the locker room would embrace Conor McGregor. If Conor McGregor can be a revenue driver for WWE, if he can sell network subscriptions, or if he can sell thousands and tens of thousands of tickets, if he can move millions of T-shirts, who cares if anybody in the locker room likes it or doesn't like it.
We live in a society that has ever-changing values and ever-changing standards and ever-changing criteria to determine who is a superstar or not. If you want to be a superstar, if you want to main event, if you want to profit in the entertainment business, you have to go with those trends and spearhead new trends.
Roles constantly have to be redefined in any form of entertainment. Look back at the gangster pics of the 1930s and 1940s and the way James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart would play the part. These roles were redefined in the 1970s by Al Pacino and Rober DeNiro. And again in the 1990s by Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins.
Brock Lesnar and Roman Reigns are the main event of WrestleMania 34 because neither one is content, and both are ambitious enough to push the limits of what is now considered their greatest moment, and that's the point that neither one will ever accept. They will never accept the idea that they've peaked as individuals.
The audience wants something that entertains them, and whether that entertainment is in the form of a physical match or in the form of a skit or video or promo, it's our job to deliver it to them, to the point where the audience becomes the biggest champion of our brand. And if we can't match that, then we're falling short.
I approach my interviews with the mindset of, exactly what are we selling? How can I sell it the hardest and the most effectively in the fewest words possible? And how can I make each word that I say mean as much as it possibly can? And I bring that perspective to the table because I used to focus a lot on the character that I had to play.
If you look at who emerged on the horizon 12 to 18 months after ECW stopped running shows, I think it's very reasonable to believe that we would have picked up CM Punk and several of the other young stars that emerged in the independent scene in the early part of that decade. Punk obviously is the one that I would hope I would have noticed.
You cannot achieve success without the risk of failure. And I learned a long time ago, you cannot achieve success, if you fear failure. If you're not afraid to fail, man, you have a chance to succeed. But you're never gonna get there unless you risk it, all the way. I'll risk failure. Sometimes, half the fun is failing. Learning from your mistakes, waking up the next morning, and saying 'Okay. Watch out. Here I come again. A little bit smarter, licking my wounds, and really not looking forward to getting my ass kicked the way I just did yesterday.' So now, I'm just a little more dangerous.