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PWINSIDER Q & A: VINCE'S FANTASY ABOUT BEING AT WAR WITH TED TURNER, LEAVING MONEY ON THE TABLE, WWE MAKING IT HARD ON EVERYONE,

I've noticed you've added a second column on your main site with links to content on your sister site, PWInsiderXtra.com, however nothing happens when you click on the links. Is it a case of, "That is a problem and we are working on it." (quote from the latest Verizon Wireless commercial).

I think it's a cache problem on your machine because the links work perfectly.  In Internet Explorer go to:

>Tools
>Internet Options

Then under Temporary Internet Files hit "Delete Files" and "Delete Cookies".  

The links should work for you after you do this.

WCW always had the stigma of being a smaller, distant #2 wrestling company.  I mean, seriously, with all of Ted Turner's money, resources, and influence, they should have eclipsed the WWF or at least be on an equal footing and be alive and well today. Alive, anyway. But, alas, it was not to be. Why do you suppose this was? Laziness? Complacency? Shortsightedness? When Turner bought WCW, why the heck didn't he put wrestling people in charge?

You have bought into Vince McMahon's misguided myth that he was "in a war with Ted Turner".  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Turner was a TV programmer, not a wrestling czar.  He was also one of the richest men in the world and the head of a huge corporation, but that is another matter altogether.  All WCW was to him was TV programming.  Turner always had an affinity for wrestling because it helped him take his local Atlanta station national and become the national TBS superstation.  Saturday night wrestling was a draw on WTBS (before it changed its name) and made it desirable to cable operators and helped get the new station carried on cable systems.  This led to CNN, TNT and the rest of his empire.  When Jim Crockett Promotions was going under, Turner bought it to keep the programming.  He was never in a war with WWE and certainly didn't care at all about Vince McMahon, who was so far down on his radar at the time that he was probably not even a blip.  Turner just wanted a product to put on the air.  McMahon, very shrewdly, acted as if they two were at war to make himself seem more important, and it worked.  But at that time, if Turner wanted to throw his money around he could have wiped McMahon out in a year because he was loaded and Vince wasn't (at the time).

At times, Turner did have wrestling people in charge.  At others, he had bean counters and suits.  The problem often was that since WCW was part of such a huge corporation, a lot of things slipped through the cracks that didn't in WWE, since McMahon watches everything, and that led to a lot of money being poorly spent and people looking out for themselves to get their piece of the pie.  At one point, WCW did spend a ton of money on talent and for about two years in the mid-nineties they beat the then-WWF in pretty much every aspect of the business.  Then, once they lost their creative way when they didn't know when to kill the nWo angle and had no follow up for it, they had a lot of guys on huge money deals and they couldn't hide the losses from the officers of the company.  With the AOL merger pending, the suits at Time Warner decided to sell WCW and get it off of their books.

I have always heard the saying "money to be made" with curtain feuds. I can understand how main events determines if money is being made of a feud in a main event position due to ratings and pay per view buys, but how can you determine feuds that are mid-card in the sense of "money can be made". I have heard the saying before The Edge-Matt Hardy feud, Kane-Taker feud, and so on. So how can you determine if money is really being made with mid-card feuds?

It's not an exact science, for sure, but there are things WWE does to follow how things are working.  They check the quarter hour and minute by minute TV ratings.  They listen to the pops and the heat that workers/angles get at shows.  And they monitor how the houses do, especially with walk up business.  If a crowd has a big walk up after a hot mid card angle on TV, there's a solid chance the two are related.

How hard is it to perform your job everyday, in particular the mental aspect of it? I don't see how you guys could possibly have many days off throughout the year. Is burnout a real issue? 

While WWE doesn't make our jobs as easy as it was when the product was sizzling, I have no complaints at all.  I worked for Coca Cola in sales for 16 years so I have been on the other side of the table.  With a job like that, I got five weeks vacation a year and another 18 days off for personals and holidays, plus most weekends, but I never loved what I did.  I love what I do now and when you love what you do, it doesn't seem like work most of the time (some episodes of Raw notwithstanding).  Yes, I work almost every day of the year and most weeks I put in a bare minimum of sixty hours but I don't mind a bit because I love what I am doing.  If I were ever going to burn out, it would have been from 1996 to1998 when I was working at least 40 hours a week on this, as well as full time at Coca Cola.  Those were hundred hour weeks.  Compared to those days, today is a piece of cake.

How close do you guys get with wrestlers? Do you count some as friends, or do you try and maintain a professional distance from the people and industry you cover? 

I absolutely have friends in the business, 100%.  The reason that they are friends is because they understand that sometimes I will have to report things about them that they won't want to read, but they respect that it's my job to do so.  Those are the kind of people that become your friends whether that is your intention or not.  As for how we get close, it just kind of happens.

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