Does Vince Russo Deserve the Blame?

[The Crock]

On October 5th, 1999, in the midst of the Monday Night Wars, head writer Vince Russo jumped ship from the WWF to work for WCW. Less than a full two years later, in March of 2001, WCW closed its doors forever. Ever since his jump to WCW, Russo has been criticized and has shouldered a large part of the blame for the downfall of WCW. Many fault Russo for not being as good as he was cracked up to be, and that WCW believed in him too much. Some say that he tried to emulate what the WWF had already been doing, and it just wasn't working. Whatever the case, Russo seems to be footing the blame, however you look at it.

That being said, there is a lot more to it, than most fans know. For example, within the first three months of Russo's move, Nitro's ratings jumped 0.6 while RAW's ratings fell by 0.5. Certainly a success, no doubt about it. Not only that, but at the time of Russo's arrival, salaries, ratings, it was all already set in stone. He couldn't turn around something that had been heading in the wrong direction for years, could he?

Now, does Vince Russo deserve the blame?

The way I look at it, he deserves a small fraction of the blame, maybe just because of his adamant need to stick to his guns, but he did not cause the downfall of WCW by himself. Blame it on the person who gave Russo all the power, not Russo. In the WWF, Vince Russo had a cap on his power. He had a buffer to work off of. He had quite a bit of creative control, but Vince McMahon was there to tell him what to do. Russo would have an idea, but if McMahon didn't like it, then it didn't go. Russo had one of the best minds in the business peering over his shoulder at all times, in the WWF. In WCW, he didn't have that. Free-roam, freedom to do whatever he wanted, it was a recipe for disaster. On top of that, he had enormous pressure on him, he tried to replicate the success he'd had in the WWF by basically using similar storylines and speeding them up. Constant twists and turns, it had worked before, so why not again? Russo ran wild, but so did Bischoff and all the others. Plus, Russo couldn't push the talent he wanted to, he had to push certain guys. The highest-paid guys were main eventers and so on, he couldn't elevate a guy like Ultimo Dragon, Jushin Liger, and so on to the main event, not because they couldn't work or didn't fit in the main event, but Turner and his executives wouldn't allow it. They weren't native to wrestling, they just wanted ratings. It just couldn't work, not all Russo's fault.

 

[blockanWo]

I liked Kevin Nash's analogy on a Shoot Interview I have of him.

"Giving Russo the blame is like blaming the Chelo player for the Titanic sinking, hey were almost done here, you wanna take the wheel, its the fucking chelo players fault!"

By that time the higher up's at Turner had already decided its fate. It was never going to last.

A lot of people place blame on Kevin Nash's booking, but if you're letting performers book you have to be pretty desperate to find someone trying to do it. Its clear they had no structure backstage.

Overall it was the company's structure, Bischoff's arrogance and Ted Turners non committal to the wrestling business that killed WCW.

 

[efeezell]

I really liked alot of Russo's ideas, the problem was to many wrestlers had creative control over there characters and the higher ups just nixed 2 many ideas that seemed like they were working. bischoff was to blame if any one person was or HOgan

 

[JJohns]

Does Russo deserve ANY of the blame? Yes. Does he deserve all of it? No.

There were a lot of factors that led into the demise of World Championship Wrestling. First of all, it was the guaranteed contracts that it gave to wrestlers like Hogan, Nash, Hall, and Hart. It's not that the guys didn't deserve any of the money that they got paid, but it ended up hurting the business due to the fact that it didn't give WCW any incentive to push newer names very often.

WCW missed on a LOT of talent, that if they would have stayed with WCW, probably would have helped to take them over the top in the Monday Night Wars for good. First, you had Jean-Paul Levesque who later on became Triple H. You had Stunning Steve Austin who was let go to become Stone Cold. Even going back to Mean Mark Callous, who was allowed to go and become a little known wrestler called The Undertaker.

The non-committal from WCW's parent company at the end did have something to do with the end of WCW as well. AOL-Time Warner didn't want Pro Wrestling. It was considered too "low brow". Once Turner lost control over Turner Broadcasting, it was only a matter of time before WCW went under.

Even ideas that Eric Bischoff had promotion wise helped to hurt WCW, including holding a PPV level match between Hogan and Goldberg not only on free TV, but on less than a week's notice.

These all had a hand in why WCW ultimately failed.

 

[JGlass]

There's no doubt that Russo sucks, but I sincerely doubt that it's his fault that WCW went down the drain.

Content is not the reason wrestling companies fold, especially bad content for approximately two years. Bad business is what sinks wrestling companies, and that's what did WCW in. Ridiculous contracts to some of its talent, squandering money on things they didn't need, and just overall poor money use.

To use the boat analogy, Russo was using a corkscrew to drill holes in the ship's hull. His bad stories surly discouraged the casual viewer from choosing WCW over WWF, but the company was already hemorrhaging money.

 

[PsychoBlack]

A lot of people seem to forget that WCW was never all that great. They had the nWo and the cruiserweights and that was all they had, but before that it was the alliance to end hulkamania or something like that. Sure Russo deserves some blame but most of it should go to the nWo. If it were not for WCW constantly reincarnating the New World Order and maybe coming up with some new ideas then they probably would have lasted a little longer.

 

[rondiesel2005]

I remember when i watch the Rise and Fall of WCW, they were saying when Russo was in WWE he had to run his ideas through Vince McMahon to see what ideas he like and what he didn't like. Russo had some ideas that were good for the attitude era and was responsible for some if it.

Now on to WCW, i watch wcw from the day they show on TNT till Vince McMahon took over. I remember when Russo got there all of the sudden everything started to change, you see weird gimmick wrestlers that looked like they came from saturday morning cartoon show or something. But i wouldn't say all the blame for WCW failure was on Russo. I said the blame was on everybody who was running the company. Nash is to blame for booking like he book to win the WCW title from Bill Goldberg and look what happen. Everybody who wanted creative control like Hogan is to blame for the failure of WCW. Anything that Russo thought about was a complete failure.

when working for two companies especially in WCW, suppose to learn from mistakes but obviously he didn't because the same mistakes he making now he doing in TNA, has no idea where the storyline is going to lead or how to make a story sounds good without all the confusing. I think he confuses the fans more now than he did with WCW. Right now we got heel and babyfaces switch back and forth for no reason at all

 

[bigbootydaddyV]

WCW could have stayed afloat had the merger with AOL-Time Warner not gone through. Ted had no problems keeping WCW on the air while it was just his network and even at it's worst WCW could still bring in ratings. It still had a great talent pool and resources. Once it lost its resources it was done. Vince Russo did not kill wcw, nor did he get close. Did he make it a big cluster fuck, sure, not solely, but he was a part of that mess. But a big reason for it closing was not the cluster fuck that was wcw at that point, it was plain and simple Aol-time warner not wanting wrestling on its network.

 

[Constipated Badger Bottom]

I think Russo deserves some portion of the blame for the downfall of WCW certainly I mean this was the man who thought it was a great idea to make Arquette the World Heavyweight Champion

But I think the large portion of the blame goes to the people who decided to give contracts to the big names that gave them Creative Control meaning that if they didn't agree with them loseing a match they could just say "No, i'm not loseing that match" and there would be nobody who could do anything about it because of that clause in that contract

In my veiw, Wrestlers should Wrestle, Writers should Write. As simple as that, if you going to have Wrestlers makeing Creative Decisions then you may aswell have your Talent Scouts doing the Medical work

 

[Psyclone]

I've read a lot of the wrestlers biographies detailing WCW during this time period, as well as read the book "the rise and fall of WCW" and watched the DVD of it as well... I was watching wrestling back in that day (well, watching long before that as well, but was the perfect age during the "golden age" of wrestling in terms of ratings at this time..)

Vince Russo gets the "Blame" for a lot of the freefalling that WCW did towards the end of its run, but I don't think it is entirely his fault... Yes he does deserve some of the blame as his reliance on "shoot" style interviews and results did ultimately cause 75% of the audience to not know what the hell people were talking about, as well as his booking decisions to change titles/storylines repeatedly without any coherence did undermine whatever was going on (Not to mention putting the belt on david arquette...) Regardless of that though, the main problem was that too many of the wrestlers were guaranteed to large an amount of money, and had creative control in their contract and there were too many people that had the ability to change whatever they wanted changed since they knew the right people...

Ultimately the downfall began long before Russo jumped ship when WCW stagnated because they were doing so well, instead of continually trying to change things up, and keep things fresh.... When the NWO was hot, they needed to find someone or a group of people from WCW to get a few wins, instead they were consistently buried to the point where WCW itself was devalued... From there you had the numerous infighting between NWO factions, before reforming again (fingerpoke of doom ) All of these elements (including using the cruiserweights as just filler/curtain jerkers and basically ostracizing them) ultimately led to its downfall..

So while Russo didn't exactly help out, hes not 100% to blame for what ultimately happened

 

[LegendKiller716]

WCW was already dead and buried.

He was so good in WWE because Vince McMahon filtered all of his bad ideas. In TNA He doesn't have that, so all of his bad ideas get on the show. Thats why TNA has stretches of gold and stretches of WTF!

 

[czar76]

people love to blame russo for everything. yes the guy is stale when it come to ideas but hell who isn't? wrestling is and has always been in the business of beating a dead horse. there is little to nothing "new" that can be done.
what killed wcw was a collection of bad business choices and lack of clear leadership. from the time crockett sold the company to it's eventual end they had a revolving door of bookers and excs. the longest run of power was bisch and he had to contend with upper managment changes that at times were rolling over by the week.
to place all the blame on russo is pointless. he was an easy target. same with tna. for most of russo's secend run with tna he was not head of creative, dutch mantel was and of course jarrett had final say.

 

[Chicago1989]

While there are more worse things to blame Vince Russo on (Owen Hart's death, etc..), I don't think he deserves ALL the blame for WCW's shutdown. He came in on a company that was already sinking, so he basically inherited all the damage that was done to the company.

He was assigned to be the "savior" of WCW. Just him, no one else. I just don't think he was able to handle it and on top of that, he brought out his horrible booking that he wasn't able to use when he worked for the WWF. He also wanted to create his own little version of the WWF in WCW, which meant copying their ideas. You still see traces of Russo's old tricks in TNA, even to this day.

So no, he doesn't get the full blame IMO. He just finished off WCW with what was left of it.

 

[wushady]

He definitely deserves a lot of blame for making WCW almost completely unwatchable during his time there. By the time he came to WCW WWE had already taken back the top spot in the ratings war and were pretty much dominating it. He was brought in with the hope that he could turn the company around and make it successful again. They hadn't beat Raw in close to a year and were losing a lot of money by then.

The way Bischoff ran things when he was in charge had a lot to with why they were in such bad shape. The huge guaranteed contracts with creative control. Had a lot to with their financial problems and problems with the overall product that led to lower ratings. Goldberg was the only homegrown talent that WCW produced while Bischoff was in charge. The NWO is what helped WCW overtake WWE in the ratings. It's also what helped WWE take back the top spot. With Goldberg being the only new top star and the NWO being done to death. WCW got very repetitive and stale.

WCW had a lot of great talent that were grossly misused while Bischoff was there. Had he kept and used guys like Austin, HHH, Jericho, Beniot, Guerrero, and Big Show properly things may have worked out differently. To me Bischoff is way more responsible than Russo for WCW's demise. Russo just took an already bad wrestling company and made it even worse. A lot of things he did were so bad like making an actor and himself world champion. It almost makes me think he couldn't have been serious but he was. He's come up with a lot of bad storylines in TNA and WWF too.

 

[EastCoastFan]

First of all, the biggest reason for WCW's demise was Eric Bischoff. He overspent on talent and gave the bigger guys contracts with creative control clauses. Plus Bischoff's theory of booking was to rehash old WWF angles and copy whatever Vince was doing - but not do it as well.

By the time Russo came into the picture, WCW was already too far gone. The inmates were running the asylum, and AOL Time Warner also tied their hands to keep them from doing what WWF and ECW were doing at the time. It took a long time for WCW to get into that bad a shape, and AOL Time Warner wanted a quick turnaround. They kept having consultants making suggestions on what to do, resulting in storylines that stopped and started with no logic whatsoever.

Was it Russo's fault? Not really. I don't think anyone could have saved WCW at that point. It was just a matter of how long they would survive.

 

[Azane]

Russo pissed off alot of great workers, shoot or not. His terrible management lead to the lay downs in hogan matches, who else remembers hearing people talk about never buying another WCW payper view after the Hogan Jarret (and Sting) debacles, and alot of these stem from his inability to work with his talent.

People can keep defending Russo by saying "he had a filter in WWF" but in reality, all you're saying is that he couldn't book without a billionaire business genius above him.
I can't stand when wrestling breaks kayfabe for worked shoots, and the "Goldberg didn't follow the script" tagline to a pay per view, thats just a damn disgrace to the entire industry of Professional wrestling.

Is he 100% to blame? no, Nobody will ever be 100% to blame, Ted Turner is to blame for the actual downfall, but Russo made WCW into a damn mockery of what it once was. Oklahoma made me pretty sick too.

 

[MrHashasheen]

Do I blame Vince Russo? Yes. Do I blame only him? No. I blame Eric Bischoff for wanting to be one of the boys and not knowing when to kill off the nWo. I blame Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan for holding down so many young stars and killing off the hottest thing WCW had in the Goldberg streak. I blame Jamie Kellner and the AOL-Time Warner merger for making WCW finally under threat of cancellation. I might even blame Vince McMahon for his cut-throat attitude and his focus on dominating the wrestling world.

There are a lot of people complicit in the death of WCW. Vince Russo just took the risk to make his name in reviving WCW, and ended up taking part in putting it down.

 

[Savior with faith 101]

Now i admit i never really watched WCW but have read up on things since and watched the Rise and Fall DVD. But the most obvious answer here is absolutely not. So many people have pointed out the creative control clauses in contracts of the major players, so no matter what Russo may have wanted to do, someone could always say no. I wouldnt mind betting that the reason for the constant title changes and difficult storylines is because just as he came up with an idea, someone would exercise the "creative control" clause and he would have to change his plans.

That said, from watching TNA, he doesnt seem to have done brilliantly there but again, with all the names there and all the crap that has gone on during his time (Jeff Hardy etc) you cant place all the blame on him again. Too many chefs in the kitchen springs to mind.

 

[harrythem]

Russo might've killed WCW but he was handed the gun and bullets to do it by people like Bischoff, Hogan, Nash and their ilk.

As has been said there was a lot wrong in WCW long before Vinnie Ru turned up and, at first, he did bring improvement to the company. Although there was a lot of shit he put on the air he also, rightly or wrongly, featured a lot of new guys.

I'd use an English football analogy for Russo.....he's a Carlos Quirez. Really good as a number 2 guy to someone like Alex Ferguesson (Vince McMahon) who's one of the best at his job but, give him the top job and he just doesn't have it in him.

 

[sabataged]

i tend to agree with most everyone else so far. I think Russo didn't help matters but by the time he came in, everything was so far beyond repairable. I was a fan of the angle where he was playing the boss behind the camera. That was a fresh new angle. They should of stuck with that.

Bischoff like most say, gets the blame in my eyes. Everything was just pure chaos over at WCW. The right hand never knew what the left hand was doing so to speak. I think Eric was so big on making friends and being the nerdy guy hanging with the 'cool' kids he forgot he was the boss.

 

[CH David]

Russo tried killing kayfabe, that's about it. Had someone kept him in check in WCW, they maybe could have sustained some life, for a little while longer, maybe. That's why he was considered successful in the WWF, he had Vinnie Mac around to keep his dreadful ideas out and use others that weren't so bad. WCW kinda forgot about keeping him in check, and just gave him complete reign.

Now, he did have all the people that were locked in with contracts and given control, so he was kinda tied up. Give him a small amount of blame for WCW being completely horrid when it was going under. They had screwed up Sting vs. Hogan (WCW, not Russo as he wasn't there) gave away stuff for free (see Hogan vs. Goldberg on Nitro for the title), and just wouldn't let the nWo freakin' die (Fingerpoke of Doom anyone?)! Then we had the whole merger thing that happened, you know, where they were all over management and kinda strongholding them to not be controversial and to be family-friendly during a time when people wanted controversy (see Attitude Era).

So if you're going to blame Russo for the demise of WCW, well that is just false. He certainly didn't slow it down, but the company was already downhill before he got there, and the Time Warner merger pretty much made matters worse. Russo should get fractional blame at best. Though he tried killing kayfabe, what a tool.

 

[mrarmageddon]

Russo was hired outof desperation at a time when Nitro had ratings at about a third of Raw. People too often see to forget what an absolute hole WCW was in by October 99.

Feel a bit bad for Russo, started a cool new nWo with Bret Hart as the leader and Jeff Jarrett who had made a bit of a splash in the headlines by jumpng ship at the same time. Then within a month they were both injured (in Bret's case that was it for his career). Plus he tried to push new talent with more focuse on the cruiserweights and doing cool things like the crazy David Flair and "Screamin'" Norman Smiley.

I also hate this whole "filter" theory about Vince McMahon....where was this amazing filter post-Russo when writer's suggested Katie Vick, Hornswoggle is Vince's son, DX and the little people's court under the ring. The list goes on and on...if Vince filtered so well he could surely see these were awful ideas.

 

[The Crock]

Russo was hired outof desperation at a time when Nitro had ratings at about a third of Raw. People too often see to forget what an absolute hole WCW was in by October 99.

Feel a bit bad for Russo, started a cool new nWo with Bret Hart as the leader and Jeff Jarrett who had made a bit of a splash in the headlines by jumpng ship at the same time. Then within a month they were both injured (in Bret's case that was it for his career). Plus he tried to push new talent with more focuse on the cruiserweights and doing cool things like the crazy David Flair and "Screamin'" Norman Smiley.

I also hate this whole "filter" theory about Vince McMahon....where was this amazing filter post-Russo when writer's suggested Katie Vick, Hornswoggle is Vince's son, DX and the little people's court under the ring. The list goes on and on...if Vince filtered so well he could surely see these were awful ideas.

The "filter" theory is totally accurate. Even if Vince is a brilliant wrestling mind, which he is, he's bound to have some misses. Hell, Vince has been trying to run an incest angle for about 20 years now, that doesn't mean he didn't stop Russo from pulling off some of his dumb ideas. Many former WWE employees have said it themselves, Russo's job was easy when he had Vinny Mac behind him. I mean, it's basically proven to be true anyway: Russo in WWF - good, Russo in WCW - shit. I mean, all the pressure in the world over there and everything else he had to deal with, that still doesn't make it any less noticeable as to how bad of a job he did. I said it earlier, he did a terrible job, but he wasn't the only one. Everybody in that company did terrible jobs. They didn't have a legitimate writing/creative team like Vinny Mac did, so Russo had to do everything on his own, with very little help from Bischoff and others.

 

[Fenris]

The "filter" theory is totally accurate.

However it isn't. In fact it is nowhere near true. The sum total of McMahons nonexistent "genius" is hiring smart wrestling minds then taking sole credit once they turn the bullshit he created around.

1980's: McMahon steals everyone elses stars, has George Scott booking them and doing creative(along with his daddies WWWF creative team), works out great.

Early 1990's: George Scott and daddies guys retire, Jake Roberts is gone from creative and McMahon after lavishing all of the praise apon himself takes over creative. For the next 5 years we get to enjoy the McMahon "genius" of G.I. Joe being Saddam Hussein's best buddy, Ultimate Warrior leaking pen ink from his hair and puking up green beans, wrestling plumbers, voodoo priests, trash men, multiple attempts at cloning Hulk Hogan, $100 vitamin kits being marketed to 10 year olds, ect ect ect.

Mid 1990's: Jake Roberts returns and is placed on the creative along with Russo and Ed Ferrera, things turn around.

1999 into the 2000's: McMahon again lavishes himself with unearned praise, apparently convinces the fans that he's a genius and drives off the creative team. In return we get shitty angles and a shit product now once again marketed towards 10 year olds.

Anyways the point is yeah McMahon is smart enough to hire on people smarter than he when need be but he isn't the genius he's made out to be and it is totally inaccurate to state Russo's one big moment(Attitude Era, or rather Championship Wrestling of Florida 2.0 meets ECW era) was because the guy who thought T.L. fucking Hopper was a money idea and was filtering out the bad and improving apon the ideas. Whatever.

As to Russo, deserve the blame? No. WCW was dead the moment Time Warner did the merger with AOL. There were no plans to keep WCW, the plan was always to unload it. The hope was they could get it turned around enough to unload it at a huge price. As we can see by the revolving head of creative of Bischoff, Russo, Sullivan, Nash, Banks, Russo, Bischoff there was zero chance of anything turning around. It's kinda hard to turn something around and go from high two's in the ratings back to 5's and 6's when you're only given two months max and every month or two someone different is in charge and changing around the product.

But on the Russo front and to not really defend him but give a perspective on what he walked into, aside from guaranteed contracts and creative control of course, there was a whole lot more to it than that. There was Standards and Practices for example. What was that? Well that was a Time Warner group above Russo who decided what could and could not air on TNT. That was a group who rejected idea after idea and nixed multiple storylines because they didn't like them and felt they were too risque. It's kinda hard to build any momentum when you're forced to rewrite a freakin' story 15 times per week to get it approved.

There was the issue with certain talents being offlimits for longterm use and angles because they were committed to filming movies and TV shows such as Ready To Rumble. He had to deal with music groups being booked to appear on WCW programming(KISS, Megadeth) as well as being given contracts to be part of storylines(ICP, The Misfits) before he even got there. Had to deal with the booking committee playing politics to bury certain guys and push their friends or themselves. Had to deal with 15 corporate bosses each backing this high priced guy or that high priced guy nixing plans because that guy wouldn't do a job.

I'm not saying he is great or anything or doesn't share in some of the blame, i'm just pointing out he's not as bad as the IWC and WWF/E marks make him out to be. When he first arrived in WCW it wasn't bad. You could see a change in direction and could see they were building for something and fresher talent was going to be featured. It could have been good, could have been bad, we'll never know as they ended it rather quickly and let Kevin Sullivan run The Revolution into the welcoming busom of the WWF.


But Russo's biggest failure all in all was he caught lightening in a bottle in the WWF. As the saying goes you won't catch it twice and he never realized that. His genius was beating Bischoff to the punch in regards to borrowing from ECW while mixing in 25 year old CWF angles. His downfall in WCW was thinking that would work a 2nd time.

 

[The Crock]

That's just a foolish smark mentality you're sportin'. Many, Jim Ross among them, have said the same thing I did. While Russo deserves credit, nothing he did wasn't approved by Vince McMahon. That's how Vinny Mac runs his company. He controls every aspect of it, it's HIS company. What makes that fact even more obvious (that McMahon filtered Russo), is the gargantuan failure he was in WCW, and the crap he tries to peddle over in TNA. It's no coincidence that Vince Russo has sucked everywhere but the WWF. Sure, he had some great, revolutionary ideas, but he also had some absolutely terrible ones.

Shitty angles marketed for 10 year old? What, someone mad that Vince is catering to his target market to make money? Please, the angles aren't shitty, you're just stuck in the mindset that unless the product is as good as it once was, then it MUST suck. We've gotten dome great things, Rock, Nexus, HBK/Taker, etc.

That being said, every product has its "down periods." But to blame that on McMahon not having a good team around him is dumb. Different audience = different product. Vince is still good enough to destroy his competition, and he is STILL a revolutionary mind. Best filter Russo could have asked for, straight up.