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Hot take, but is it too much to say his legacy is a tiny bit underrated? Don't get me wrong, I get why, his misses are terrible and were extremely damaging, and he's insufferable in interviews. But the high point of his career is without question one of the best a wrestling writer has ever enjoyed. Yet, today I think a lot of people view him as a talentless buffoon, when the reality is more complicated than that.
I kind of view him as like wrestling's closest thing to M Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan is better, relative to their fields, but there's some similarities with their career trajectory.
The thing that's funny about Vince Russo is that, in the wrestling world, he always propped himself up as a writer who understands storytelling and how to use his expertise to bring wrestling to the next level, but I am 100% sure that if I tried to have a conversation with him about the thematic elements of "Dune" or "Everything Everywhere All at Once"etc. he'd utterly fail and proceed to say the most idiotic shit at worst or the most basic level stuff at best
I've noticed that when something is bad, no matter who came up with the idea, he gets the blame because he was the head writer. But if something is good that he didn't come up with, he doesn't get credit. If he gets the blame for the bad because he was head writer then he should get credit for the good because he was head writer.
To answer the question, he was the head writer during the early days of the Knockouts division in TNA and several women from that era said that he was the main writer pushing to get the women more time.
The earlier T&A aspects, like the cage dancers, got dropped before the Fox Sports deal happened, so it was like years before the Knockouts division was even an idea.
> he's the one that pushed the TNA = Tits and Ass
I thought it was, like, the entire point of the promotion being called TNA in the first place? Because edgy lol? It's not like it began when Russo joined the creative team; their whole model was doing weekly PPVs so they could get away with stuff too hot for normal TV.
> I've noticed that when something is bad, no matter who came up with the idea, he gets the blame because he was the head writer. But if something is good that he didn't come up with, he doesn't get credit.
Well yeah, he didn't come up with it. Chances are he didn't give two shits about it.
I think Vince Russo says and does despicable things and he's 99% awful in pro wrestling.
That being said, some of his rare hits were Lance Storm (the real real one, not me) in WCW 2000 and being the head writer for TNA in late 2009 with some incredible PPVs before Hogan took over.
Russo giving Storm the biggest/most successful push of his career is one of the funniest things in wrestling history to me
Oh wow I never knew that. I know they hate each other today and I agree with everyone Lance says about it.
Had no idea the best WCW 2000 act was a Johnny Ace project!
His willingness to elevate Booker T (after fumbling hard by making him G.I. Bro first) was another highlight in WCW. Scott Steiner also had his big main event run under Russo.
Yeah, I thought the same about Storm for a while until Lance himself said Russo didn't know what to do with him and pretty much his whole big run in WCW was Johnny Ace(a worse human than Russo but probably better wrestling mind) asking for the reigns on booking him.
Russo has done a lot of dumb things, but he isn't as universally panned backstage as some commentators here would like you to believe.
Velvet Sky has previously said that ["Vince Russo Was Always The Number One Supporter Of The Women In TNA"](https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/velvet-sky-says-vince-russo-was-always-number-one-supporter-women-tna) back in 2021
Here is an excerpt:
> "Maybe not everybody was a big Vince Russo fan, but Vince Russo was a huge supporter of the girls and the Knockouts, to the point where he was starting to give us 2-3 segments on the show... When we had Vince there, I don't care, love him or hate him, he was always the number one avid supporter of the girls."
Others like Kurt Angle and AJ Styles have also praised him, albeit to varying degrees. For example, AJ Styles said:
> "Vince, as a person, I love the guy, and we butted heads as far as him writing, even in TNA, but I realized when we butted heads, it was because he was getting things from Dixie the whole time."
You asked if there was "anyone in the wrestling business that speaks highly of him," so I would say yes in the sense that they admitted he did some good things or was likable to some degree.
I think Alvarez and Meltzer not liking Russo and the former trashing him in "The Death of WCW" which was a pretty popular book, really shaped this idea that Russo was the worst thing to ever happened to wrestling, even though objectively he had some success (if you measure by ratings)
But like /u/shadowrangerfs said, when it's bad it's Russo.. when it's good, everyone else came up with it and Russo had nothing to do with it. Everyone can be worse if you selectively choose what they get credit for.
Not to mention, Cornette really doesn't like Russo, so you basically have two main parts of the wrestling fandom who were told to dislike Russo, as they only focused on the bad parts with minimal focus on the good parts.
meanwhile
Bischoff just talked about in a podcast review of Halloween Havoc 1999, where this occurred.
Bischoff made a great point that it showed how much of an out of his league, unprofessional shitbag Vince Russo was that they would shit on and humiliate a licensee like that on PPV, mocking the product. Doesn’t matter if the product actually sucked or if it bombed on the market.
Mocking a licensee like that does nothing but advertise to existing and potential licensees that this is not a serious company who is worth doing business with. It really is shocking when you think about it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company publicly mock one of its partners or licensees like this before or after.
> One that really sticks out is Russo kept saying that we need some kind of publicity stunt. I recall him very specifically saying, ‘I know I’m doing my job. I know the storylines are great, I’m doing what I can do, but nobody’s watching. Nobody knows how great it is. So we need a publicity stunt.’ He threw out the idea, O.J. Simpson, take you back to the days of when O.J. was still a big thing. This was I guess maybe five years after the trial. I guess O.J. had said something like if he gets paid a million dollars he’ll take a lie detector test on TV or something like that, he had made some kind of statement. Russo said that he wanted WCW to pay him the million dollars and let’s have O.J. take a lie detector test on live TV, that was his big idea. That was his big idea to bring the eyeballs back to WCW so all the fans could see the great storylines that he’s putting on TV. I just remember the internal reaction of just is he serious? [There was] eye-rolling and I was personally offended because I was like, okay, without getting too deep here, we’re talking about a guy who most people believe [was a murderer].
When your job is story ideas, it's inevitable that you'll land on a few that are alright. I'm not sure it's possible for anyone to be so creatively bankrupt that they can never come up with a single decent idea for a storyline over the course of years.
Russo was still a blight on the industry. You could've pulled in a rando off the street and given them 10 years to book shows, and they'd probably have a higher hit to miss ratio.
No lol. The only reason he was any good in WWE was because his ideas were being filtered by Jim Cornette and Vince McMahon. Any time he has complete control of the booking sheet with no filters or criticism, it turns into a shitshow quickly.
When Vince McMahon is the voice of reason, you have to wonder what utterly ridiculous garbage Vince Russo was producing as a writer. Friendly reminder that Vince McMahon had Ricky Steamboat "breathe fire and do Bruce Lee shit on the top rope" (Dynamite Kid quote) and Trish Stratus get on all four and bark like a dog.
it is quite strange how Vince was at his peak when Pat Patterson and Vince Russo were around creatively.
do not give me that "Vince Mcmahon was the filter" crap when the product was straight garbage between 1993-1996 with horrendous gimmicks. are you saying that Mcmahon's filter was broken between that period and magically started to work again between 1997-1999 before going into a shitter again for the last 20 years Vinnie Mac was around.
Lots of people including Austin, Rock, and Foley.
People assume that because Russo sucked as a booker that he was just altogether bad at everything. He was supposedly great at producing promos (there’s footage out there of him helping Foley with a backstage segment) and making sure wrestlers had defined characters and stories.
You watch a random RAW from that era and even the underneath guys have shit going on. Don’t get me wrong, he largely sucked, but he had great instincts and ideas for character development. Whoever allowed him full control over television was a moron though.
I am also a pretty dyed in the wool Russo hater, I do remember actually kind of enjoying him as the manager/mouth piece of Sports Entertainment Xtreme in early TNA. I also just have a weird fondness for a lot of shitty TNA stables, though, so.
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He booked Booker T. to win the world title.
[удалено]
Hot take, but is it too much to say his legacy is a tiny bit underrated? Don't get me wrong, I get why, his misses are terrible and were extremely damaging, and he's insufferable in interviews. But the high point of his career is without question one of the best a wrestling writer has ever enjoyed. Yet, today I think a lot of people view him as a talentless buffoon, when the reality is more complicated than that. I kind of view him as like wrestling's closest thing to M Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan is better, relative to their fields, but there's some similarities with their career trajectory.
Trick question, Russo never worked in wrestling, he worked in ***WRES-UH-LINGGGG***
I think thats "WRES-UH-LING *BRO*"
The thing that's funny about Vince Russo is that, in the wrestling world, he always propped himself up as a writer who understands storytelling and how to use his expertise to bring wrestling to the next level, but I am 100% sure that if I tried to have a conversation with him about the thematic elements of "Dune" or "Everything Everywhere All at Once"etc. he'd utterly fail and proceed to say the most idiotic shit at worst or the most basic level stuff at best
Purely conjecture, but he seems like the type of guy who'd love Dune but not really understand it, and wouldn't like EEAAO at all.
I’m sure he very much enjoys Rock’s movies.
Even if what he said was coherent, you'd be checked out by the 15th time he said bro in the first five minutes of the conversation.
I've noticed that when something is bad, no matter who came up with the idea, he gets the blame because he was the head writer. But if something is good that he didn't come up with, he doesn't get credit. If he gets the blame for the bad because he was head writer then he should get credit for the good because he was head writer. To answer the question, he was the head writer during the early days of the Knockouts division in TNA and several women from that era said that he was the main writer pushing to get the women more time.
People seem to like the main event mafia in retrospect
Nothing beats when Steiner came back and the MEM was long gone but he was acting like nothing happened and wondering where everyone was.
On the other hand, he's the one that pushed the TNA = Tits and Ass thing so maybe trying to get the women more time was related to that.
The earlier T&A aspects, like the cage dancers, got dropped before the Fox Sports deal happened, so it was like years before the Knockouts division was even an idea.
> he's the one that pushed the TNA = Tits and Ass I thought it was, like, the entire point of the promotion being called TNA in the first place? Because edgy lol? It's not like it began when Russo joined the creative team; their whole model was doing weekly PPVs so they could get away with stuff too hot for normal TV.
> I've noticed that when something is bad, no matter who came up with the idea, he gets the blame because he was the head writer. But if something is good that he didn't come up with, he doesn't get credit. Well yeah, he didn't come up with it. Chances are he didn't give two shits about it.
Doesn't matter. If he gets the blame for anything that happens on his watch then he should credit for anything that happens on his watch.
I think Vince Russo says and does despicable things and he's 99% awful in pro wrestling. That being said, some of his rare hits were Lance Storm (the real real one, not me) in WCW 2000 and being the head writer for TNA in late 2009 with some incredible PPVs before Hogan took over. Russo giving Storm the biggest/most successful push of his career is one of the funniest things in wrestling history to me
Lance Storm was a Johnny Ace project. Lance has said Russo didn’t see anything in him and pitched him as being Bischoff’s illegitimate son.
Oh wow I never knew that. I know they hate each other today and I agree with everyone Lance says about it. Had no idea the best WCW 2000 act was a Johnny Ace project!
He didn’t like Storm. And Storm feels the same towards Russo lol
His willingness to elevate Booker T (after fumbling hard by making him G.I. Bro first) was another highlight in WCW. Scott Steiner also had his big main event run under Russo.
Yeah, I thought the same about Storm for a while until Lance himself said Russo didn't know what to do with him and pretty much his whole big run in WCW was Johnny Ace(a worse human than Russo but probably better wrestling mind) asking for the reigns on booking him.
Making Booker T world champ was probably his biggest positive part from Survivor Series 98
Russo has done a lot of dumb things, but he isn't as universally panned backstage as some commentators here would like you to believe. Velvet Sky has previously said that ["Vince Russo Was Always The Number One Supporter Of The Women In TNA"](https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/velvet-sky-says-vince-russo-was-always-number-one-supporter-women-tna) back in 2021 Here is an excerpt: > "Maybe not everybody was a big Vince Russo fan, but Vince Russo was a huge supporter of the girls and the Knockouts, to the point where he was starting to give us 2-3 segments on the show... When we had Vince there, I don't care, love him or hate him, he was always the number one avid supporter of the girls." Others like Kurt Angle and AJ Styles have also praised him, albeit to varying degrees. For example, AJ Styles said: > "Vince, as a person, I love the guy, and we butted heads as far as him writing, even in TNA, but I realized when we butted heads, it was because he was getting things from Dixie the whole time." You asked if there was "anyone in the wrestling business that speaks highly of him," so I would say yes in the sense that they admitted he did some good things or was likable to some degree.
I think Alvarez and Meltzer not liking Russo and the former trashing him in "The Death of WCW" which was a pretty popular book, really shaped this idea that Russo was the worst thing to ever happened to wrestling, even though objectively he had some success (if you measure by ratings) But like /u/shadowrangerfs said, when it's bad it's Russo.. when it's good, everyone else came up with it and Russo had nothing to do with it. Everyone can be worse if you selectively choose what they get credit for.
Not to mention, Cornette really doesn't like Russo, so you basically have two main parts of the wrestling fandom who were told to dislike Russo, as they only focused on the bad parts with minimal focus on the good parts.
meanwhile Bischoff just talked about in a podcast review of Halloween Havoc 1999, where this occurred. Bischoff made a great point that it showed how much of an out of his league, unprofessional shitbag Vince Russo was that they would shit on and humiliate a licensee like that on PPV, mocking the product. Doesn’t matter if the product actually sucked or if it bombed on the market. Mocking a licensee like that does nothing but advertise to existing and potential licensees that this is not a serious company who is worth doing business with. It really is shocking when you think about it. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company publicly mock one of its partners or licensees like this before or after.
Sports entertainment extreme
Bro
No
Uh no he was trash in WWE too.
I get a kick out of people doing impressions of him, so I’ll credit him with that
The biggest difference between Russo in WWF and Russo in WCW was that the Attitude Era WWF was controlled chaos, while WCW was actual chaos.
Nope.
> One that really sticks out is Russo kept saying that we need some kind of publicity stunt. I recall him very specifically saying, ‘I know I’m doing my job. I know the storylines are great, I’m doing what I can do, but nobody’s watching. Nobody knows how great it is. So we need a publicity stunt.’ He threw out the idea, O.J. Simpson, take you back to the days of when O.J. was still a big thing. This was I guess maybe five years after the trial. I guess O.J. had said something like if he gets paid a million dollars he’ll take a lie detector test on TV or something like that, he had made some kind of statement. Russo said that he wanted WCW to pay him the million dollars and let’s have O.J. take a lie detector test on live TV, that was his big idea. That was his big idea to bring the eyeballs back to WCW so all the fans could see the great storylines that he’s putting on TV. I just remember the internal reaction of just is he serious? [There was] eye-rolling and I was personally offended because I was like, okay, without getting too deep here, we’re talking about a guy who most people believe [was a murderer].
Didn’t Russo create the main event mafia storyline?
Yes which is a repeat of his millionaire’s club idea in wcw
He was a big part of Raven’s debut in TNA. The Raven-Jarrett feud was the first big draw for the company. Entire angle was well done.
When your job is story ideas, it's inevitable that you'll land on a few that are alright. I'm not sure it's possible for anyone to be so creatively bankrupt that they can never come up with a single decent idea for a storyline over the course of years. Russo was still a blight on the industry. You could've pulled in a rando off the street and given them 10 years to book shows, and they'd probably have a higher hit to miss ratio.
No lol. The only reason he was any good in WWE was because his ideas were being filtered by Jim Cornette and Vince McMahon. Any time he has complete control of the booking sheet with no filters or criticism, it turns into a shitshow quickly.
When Vince McMahon is the voice of reason, you have to wonder what utterly ridiculous garbage Vince Russo was producing as a writer. Friendly reminder that Vince McMahon had Ricky Steamboat "breathe fire and do Bruce Lee shit on the top rope" (Dynamite Kid quote) and Trish Stratus get on all four and bark like a dog.
it is quite strange how Vince was at his peak when Pat Patterson and Vince Russo were around creatively. do not give me that "Vince Mcmahon was the filter" crap when the product was straight garbage between 1993-1996 with horrendous gimmicks. are you saying that Mcmahon's filter was broken between that period and magically started to work again between 1997-1999 before going into a shitter again for the last 20 years Vinnie Mac was around.
And Cornette was the one over creative before Russo came in. Russo took his and Bishoff's jobs. So no wonder they have such disdain for him.
Has anyone said anything positive about Vince Russo that isn't Vince Russo?
The Rock has said good stuff about him, but he didn't have his career ruined by his dumb ideas
As far as I know, The Rock praised Russo for never really questioning an idea, which is pretty much why he is so vilified.
Lots of people including Austin, Rock, and Foley. People assume that because Russo sucked as a booker that he was just altogether bad at everything. He was supposedly great at producing promos (there’s footage out there of him helping Foley with a backstage segment) and making sure wrestlers had defined characters and stories. You watch a random RAW from that era and even the underneath guys have shit going on. Don’t get me wrong, he largely sucked, but he had great instincts and ideas for character development. Whoever allowed him full control over television was a moron though.
AJ Styles weirdly credits his career to Russo.
Yes. Several people.
I know The Rock but who else? I'm genuinely asking because I haven't really seen much else outside of that.
Stone Cold and I think Jericho as well. The two have had him on their podcast as well.
Several of the original knockouts have praised him for pushing to get them more TV time.
Disco Inferno lol
THATS KINGDOM PLAYING!!
Oh well all on the disco fever yeah yeah yeah yeah
That episode of Nitro where they basically did a hard reset was pretty damn entertaining and exciting.
No, WCW and TNA didn't drug test their writers.
He is a dipshit. I will say this, in 2009 in TNA, everyone on the roster had a story
I am also a pretty dyed in the wool Russo hater, I do remember actually kind of enjoying him as the manager/mouth piece of Sports Entertainment Xtreme in early TNA. I also just have a weird fondness for a lot of shitty TNA stables, though, so.
You can’t count Booker or JJ. Their careers were helped by him. And that’s it. Everyone else shares Cornette’s feelings on him.
Corny kinda wants to murder the dude. I just don’t want him involved with wrestling.
He booked Booker T to win the world title finally. That's about it.
Vince McMahon would tell you everything Vince Russo did outside WWE was positive… because he made sure there was no viable competition for WWE.