Vince Russo failed big time, when he ran the TV-program for Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling on two occasions (October 1999 to January 2000, and April 2000 to October 2000).
While WCW didn’t win a single Monday night Nielsen TV-Rating in 1999 and were clearly the #2 promotion behind the World Wrestling Federation, they were still making money and were financially safe.
That did change in 2000, when they lost $60 million that year alone, which most likely made it easy for AOL Time Warner to sell them a few months later in March 2001.
Because of his horrible mismanagement while writing WCW’s TV program, many fans have speculated ever since, that he might have been sent by Vince McMahon to kill the WWF’s competition.
During a recent appearance on ‘Insight’, Russo commented on those wide spread rumors.
Here’s what he had to say:
“Here’s the insanity. Anybody, and obviously, I would not be saying this, if I were not telling the truth.
Anybody can look at WCW ratings, and they can look at the first three months before Vince Russo got there.
Then they can look at the first three months when Ed Ferrara and myself started tearing down the building and building a new foundation.
When you look at those first three months, bro, the ratings are going up. The ratings were working, our plan was going according to exactly what Ed and I discussed.
We gotta erase everything they’re doing. We’ve got to build new people, we got to build new stars. It was working perfectly.
Then of course, bro, politics played its ugly head. I went home, you know, they brought in different people.
In the three months that we had built, after three months, bro, they had brought it right back down to where it was before we got there.
Thus, they called me back. Vince, we need you to get back here. Honest to God. At that point, when I went back, I knew we lost the audience.
I knew there’s no way we’re gonna get the audience back. We had them, we were building for three months, then they went backwards three months to the same crap they were doing.
It’s done, it’s over. Obviously, I had to go back because I was contractually obligated. But I knew at that point, bro, we’re not going to get these people back again.”
It’s safe to say, that Vince Russo is never going to be inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame … at least not while he’s still alive.
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