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.
Mr. McMahon the character is a very effective heel.
I've probably done 1,000 interviews about the 'Monday Night Wars' and how 'Nitro' was made.
People always said during the Monday Night Wars that the only way we were able to compete was due to a large checkbook and deep pockets. That's not very true at all. That is a false narrative designed to shape history. WWE had significant advantages over WCW and vice versa.
The fact that we are watching a live 'Monday Night Raw' every week is due to 'Nitro.'
One of the reasons The Bullet Club is what it is, while it may be kind of a wink and a nod to the nWo, it's also young, fresh guys of a new generation.
The WWE also embraced more of a reality-based approach to wrestling a year or two after I established it. I knew, deep down inside, were it came from. The WWE did it better than I did, and they're still here, and I'm not, but nonetheless - I knew where it came from.
If you go back in time and look at a map of all of the television markets where wrestling was most popular, historically, the deepest concentrations of those markets were in the northeast.
I think most people, most rational people, most people that I would feel comfortable sitting in a room with, understand that wrestling is scripted entertainment. But they don't want you to remind them of that.
When WCW first really began to enjoy the success that we enjoyed, it was because of the story lines that we were putting out in front of people.
A character like mine, there is only so much you can do from a storyline perspective. You can be that heel authority figure, which I was for a few years in WWE and WCW, and it's interesting, and it's fun, but after a while, you've kind of done everything you can do creatively.
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.
I never got close to the creative in AWA; not only was I not close to it, I wasn't allowed to be in a room close to it when they were talking about creative. That is how tightly held Verne Gagne believed in kayfabing people who he didn't believe needed to be in the process.
Clearly there's value in Twitter and Facebook; otherwise, none of us would be involved in it.
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.
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.
There are very few voices that can speak with any kind of authority or credibility on what happened back during the time when WCW and WWF were going head to head, and I think the audience is interested in that period of time, clearly. And like I said, nobody could speak to it quite the way I could.
I'd like to manage someone, a young talent that maybe doesn't have the mic skills.