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PWINSIDER Q & A: HOW WWE BLEW THE WCW INVASION, FLAIR AND HOGAN IN ROLE REVERSAL, IRON SHEIK FOLLIES, ROH ON PPV AND MORE

I have watched wrestling for a good 10 years now, if not longer, so I am familiar with the whole Invasion angle. I have read many questions in regard to it and yet, I hear people refer to how WWE handled it as it being a major flop, and people believing that they could have taken it further than what they did. Now, maybe since I was a bit younger, I didn't think about wrestling like I do now and I enjoyed the buildup to the end of the WWE vs. WCWECW Alliance.  So why do many consider the Invasion angle to be a flop, and what do you think the WWE should have done in order to capitalize on that entire storyline?

In my view, there are two ways that they really blew the angle.  The first one is that they went on the cheap.  They got WCW for less than 5 million dollars (the tape library was worth far more than that on its own) and yet they only picked up the contracts of the lower paid talent.  No Goldberg.  No Scott Steiner.  No Sting.  Etc.  It was hard to push a WCW product when they didn't have any of the company's top guys.  It made them seem like a watered down version of the brand and people saw it right away.

Then, ego took over and the McMahons booked WCW to be totally inferior to WWE.  WWE basically destroyed WCW in the storylines, in my opinion, to "show that WWE was better all along".  What would have made sense was to let WCW get the upper hand and then book it for WWE to come back and even the score, just like you would book two wrestlers.  If the sides were presented as being even, the angle would have had a lot of life and could have led to them breaking off WCW as its "own company" and WWE would have had two viable brands instead of one.  Instead, they booked it so poorly that they had to rush ECW into the feud after a few months because they had taken all the heat off of the WCW guys.  It was really bad booking and it was made even worse when they had to do the brand extension after they could have had a legitimate second brand.

Assuming everything else was the same, what would the wrestling world look like today had Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan's roles been reversed?  

I don't think either man would have come close to reaching the popularity that they did if they had been in the other company.  I don't think that the NWA/WCW would have been affected anywhere near as badly as the WWF would have been since they were traditional wrestling and Hogan was the poster boy that took wrestling from being an athletic, pseudo-real sport to pure entertainment.  If Hogan had never gone to WWE, I think Vince McMahon would have still tried to change the business the way that he did.  I just don't think he would have been as successful, at least not early one.  Hogan was a larger than life persona and he fit perfectly with Vince's vision of what the business should be.

When WCW ended, the last recorded match was with Flair and Sting. I thought that was a very fitting match since no one meant more to WCW than those 2 over the company's history. If flair never wrestled again, that would have been a great way to end his career. But who do you think would be best suited for Flair's retirement match?

Flair's best feuds, to me, were with Ricky Steamboat, Terry Funk and Dusty Rhodes.  Any of those three would be perfectly fitting for me.

What is the Iron Sheik and been doing as of late?

He has been doing a lot of appearances at conventions and indy shows and doing some rather crazy promos.  Some of them are up on YouTube.com, or at least were.  He especially has it in for B. Brian Blair, though I have no idea why.  He's older now and walks with a cane a lot of the time and isn't in the best of shape physically.

I completely understand that ROH is very comfortable selling their product on DVD only. And I even remember they had a failed attempt of getting TV exposure. Yet do you think they could ever one day make a PPV that mass audiences could purchase? Early on, TNA made their name doing weekly PPVs, and they are going strong now, so why can't ROH use a similar approach to introduce their product to more people?

Their TV show on channel 48 in Philadelphia wasn't really a failed attempt.  What they found out was that it didn't really increase their DVD/tape sales so it wasn't worth doing.  There's a difference.

It's interesting that you mention TNA.  They may have made their name doing the weekly shows, but they weren't profitable.  Not even close.  In fact, they cost the company a lot of money because it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a quality live show.  If ROH did that, let's say they had to lay out $300,000 for a live show that they charged 30 dollars for.  Their cut of the price tag would be 14 dollars buy in the US and they could wait up to a year to get the money from the PPV distributor.  They would have to do over 21,000 buys to break even on the outlay, plus wait to be paid.  Without TV to promote the show, that's a very high number to hit.  Even if they cut the outlay in half, they still need 10,000 buys to just break even whereas if they sell 10,000 DVDs, they make a lot of money.  They could do a taped show, with less expenses, but then the question is would they get more revenue from than they would by just selling their product in-house and keeping all the profit.  The answer is most probably not.  I think they are making the right call by doing business the way that they are. 

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