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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
Bumps often require giving yourself completely to the talent you're in the ring with, and that's what makes wrestling such a performance art that is different from every other.
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.
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.
Turner Broadcasting went from a very entrepreneurial, risk-taking company where I had a tremendous amount of freedom and autonomy to a corporate, bureaucratic nightmare.
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.
WWE had years to develop and train their staff. WWE makes sure the production team got exactly what Vince McMahon was looking for and how he wanted it.
AOL-Time Warner didn't want a WCW property on their platforms - being TNT or TBS or anything else - in any way, shape, or form, and that was the death nail.
The television business, by virtue of what's happened to streaming, it's really turned the traditional television business upside down.
To many generations of fans, Hulk Hogan really represents the beginning of what became this amazing industry that we have.