Author Kevin Sullivan recently posted a portion of his interview with Paul Heyman on his own website, with Heyman commenting on the WWE’s ‘revival’ of the ECW brand, how supportive Vince McMahon was of the project, and more.
Sullivan authored the new WWE 50 book, along with several other WWE-related books including the WWE Encyclopedia, and mentioned he would be releasing some of the Heyman interview that didn’t make the book to his website. You can read a few excerpts below:
Paul Heyman On The Hopes For ECW in WWE:
Vince walks into everything he does with the hopes that it will be the biggest ever … and not just the biggest in WWE history, but in the entire history of sports, entertainment or sports-entertainment. Vince does nothing half-assed. Do I think WWE was hoping for this level of success? Absolutely. Do I think WWE anticipated it? No, I think everybody was pleasantly surprised.
Paul Heyman On ECW Revival In WWE:
I never thought ECW should’ve been brought back past the original One Night Stand. And the only reason why I thought the second pay-per-view was a good idea was because it was Rob Van Dam challenging for the big title. And in ECW, that was always a big deal. So the concept came up of running a pay-per-view in Hammerstein Ballroom with Rob Van Dam facing either Triple H or John Cena, who we could paint as the anti-ECW persona.
It was almost fantasy booking because I knew that it would lead to one of the most unique, passionate, volatile atmospheres ever presented on WWE pay-per-view. But to resurrect the brand in 2006 was an impossibility because if you gave it a WWE-sanitized spin, the audience would reject it. But you couldn’t go back to what we were doing in the 1990s because the culture had changed and the style was not applicable anymore.
For more of his thoughts on why ECW shouldn’t have returned, Shane McMahon wanting to revive the brand and more, click the following link.
WWE 50 is now available for purchase. You can check out a review by Wrestlezone’s Mike Killam by clicking here.
