During a recent appearance on Talk Is Jericho, “The Big Show” Paul Wight talked about a business opportunity he wanted to pursue during his time in WWE – “Big Show Burger”.
Here’s what The World’s Largest Athlete said:
“That was the stack of the cards, the stack of the pieces to get to the talent that they really want to market, they really want to use and they really want to depend on for everything, so it’s really weird when you try to sit and look at the dynamic of it, and I’m not bitter. That’s my main thing I want people to understand. I’m not bitter, but it’s one of those kind of things that I feel a little bit sad that I didn’t get to do as much as I could have done for them.
And finally, just after a while, when the opportunity came up, I got tired of trying to prove to them what I could do for them. I can walk down the street. I can’t walk down the street without being recognized. I can’t go to the grocery store without, I’m a constant billboard of everything that I’ve done, and I never felt like WWE really took advantage. They kind of half-a$$ed it on some things, and it was like, oh, maybe that’s too much. Let’s pull back. That’s too much. Let’s pull back because this is not the direction we want to go.
There was a couple of business deals that I tried to do with WWE using my own brand and it was incredible to me, after 20 years of building a brand, because they own the intellectual property, I wanted to do a ‘Big Show Burger’, it would have been a half-pound patty, no antibiotics, no hormones, anywhere in the US, in 36 hours, you can order it online. It’s a great, humane, everything done properly.
So I went to them and said, ‘Hey, this is what I want to do. I reached out to Wolfgang Puck, and we’re going to do a meatloaf together to promote it on an infomercial and stuff like that.’ Talk about Big Show Burgers and you would have thought that I was some guy that walked in off the street with the numbers that they hit me that they wanted me to use a brand that I helped build.
We’re talking seven figures up front. 18 months later, another installment of seven figures. 30 something percent of profit. They wanted me to cough up seven figures right off the bat, then 18 months later, another seven figures. It just killed the whole deal for me.
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