Vince Russo gets a lot of crap from all people who have been a wrestling fan and especially from ex colleges and some of it I can see why but I think some of it is a bit harsh. 

His time during the attitude era in creative is a damn site better than the creative people in the WWE right now. Some of it may have been a little bit too much but at least during his time there practically all the roster had a story whether it was a top of the card star or someone from Sunday Night Heat which got audiences and people watching at home invested in the characters. 

Obviously the focus was not on the actual matches as much due to the backstage skits but still he always had all the roster involved in something and I just think some of the stick he gets at times is a little harsh. 

Absolutely not. He gets far too much shit these days then he deserves. The new talking point is he was solely successful because of Vince is silly to me when he was the one that pushed McMahon to enter new territory and change the industry.

He absolutely does not deserve the blackballing he's received.

Oct 7, 2017 22:54:21 GMT KJ said:

Absolutely not. He gets far too much shit these days then he deserves. The new talking point is he was solely successful because of Vince is silly to me when he was the one that pushed McMahon to enter new territory and change the industry.

He absolutely does not deserve the blackballing he's received.

Spoken like a bro who loves a bro, no homo... BRO!

Bro.

In a word: Yes.

You can forgive bad booking. But Vince Russo is dickhead.

Look at it this way, Eric Bischoff was a one-trick pony who has humbled greatly in the last decade. He's a different guy. Russo is still the dickhead he was then.

The real question is, was Heyman really that good?

Russo should have been a WWE-lifer. Behind the scenes, he was putting on compelling television and while it could often backfire in an industry like Pro Wrestling it comes with the territory. As Russo makes mention, the WWF didn't need him to come up with the Pink Slip On The Pole match, or the Pat Patterson vs Gerald Briscoe drag match or Mae Young giving birth to a hand, that was all on McMahon, the guy who loves the smell of his own farts.

The worst decision he made was making himself the face of WCW as it was dying. Had Vince taken the humble position of head writer, collected his cheques and tried his best to push guys like Bret Hart, Chris Benoit, Perry Saturn, Billy Kidman, Booker T, Kanyon, Vampiro etc. fans would have given him a free pass.

It's been awhile since I checked in on Russo. Last I heard, he was struggling personally and seemed to be making stupid decisions borne out of desperation. I hope the past few months have been kinder because Vince seems like an affable guy which is how he was able to find work despite his work in WCW.

He had some great attributes and deserves a lot of credit but at the same time I do feel like he was really that bad. Some of the shit he booked was amazingly stupid, all of the worked shoot bullshit that he would try to book like guys walking out of matches because they didn't want to put somebody over. When he was in his prime there in late 98 through 1999 to me was just an overall really bad time in WWF and then he went from that to running WCW into the ground. Some of the shit I've read that he booked in TNA also stands out. 

But I mean WCW was even worse off before he got there. I'd take Russo's WCW over that period after Starrcade 98 up through Summer of 1999 which was absolute garbage. It was like an instant breath of fresh air when Russo arrived to WCW, things got sexier and more dangerous and more unpredictable almost overnight. But it went down the shitter really quick as he went full retard with some of his ideas and there were even times when it felt like he was actively trying to kill WCW with some of the shit he was booking. I have respect for Russo as a booker but overall I can firmly say I am not a fan. He doesn't even belong in the same sentence as Paul Heyman.

For every good idea Russo had in WCW, he had an equally bad one and that was true from the very first show, Halloween Havoc '99. The idea to put the kabosh on Sting/Hogan was great because fans weren't interested in seeing Hogan challenge for the title or for Sting to wrestle as a heel. Getting that out of the way, even in the fashion that he did was fine because WCW desperately needed to make changes. The decision to follow that up by trying to create the Deadly Games and eliminating the hottest star in the company in the first leg of the tournament was awful. What a way to ruin your tournament then and there. Not only was Bill eliminated, he was eliminated by the guy they were trying to promote as a babyface in The Hitman in such a heelish fashion that fans couldn't buy into him.

While the Sullivan/Nash era that proceeded it was the drizzling shits, the Russo/Ferrera era that followed was just a different flavour. Their era wasn't as damaging as the other, but somehow they saw the show sink to further depths.

Russo really was that bad. I've been shocked by his improving reputation the last five years. I somewhat understand the exercise of looking for good since he wrote such a successful period, but anything that seems extremely Russo is bad. Nobody says, "That was pure Russo," in a positive fashion. You just put up with it because Steve Austin, The Rock and Mick Foley were on the same show. Those guys don't come around often. Russo's "everybody on the card matters" style was basically just doing what Paul Heyman had already done, was still doing at that time, and not nearly as well, but with the benefit of a much better roster at the perfect time in the zeitgeist when WCW, not WWF, had kicked off a wrestling boom.

Oct 7, 2017 15:48:19 GMT Arrogance_Personified said:

Obviously the focus was not on the actual matches as much due to the backstage skits but still he always had all the roster involved in something and I just think some of the stick he gets at times is a little harsh. 

This is something I think Russo deserves credit for. He believes in giving everyone something to do and some type of purpose/development.

And on the topic of backstage skits, I don't think we get nearly enough of those these days.  The interview segment and backstage authority figure's office segment are really overdone and I think we could use more variety.

For the most part, yes.

Russo had two positive attributes and one that would have been positive for most people but was kind of a negative with Russo....

1. As others have mentioned, he found something for everybody to do. This is good. And while it is rarer than it should be in wrestling, Russo is hardly alone in this. As Kilgore mentioned, Heyman did it earlier and better. A guy named Chris Kreski who was Russo's immediate successor in WWF also did it better imo.

2. He understood the trashy/edgy pop culture that was all the rage at the time. Unfortunately, he was a one trick pony who never left 1998. He kept doing the same Jerry Springer style crap years later in TNA when that sort of thing was no longer cool.

*He had a lot of ideas. Too bad many of them were terrible. I forget who said it but some WWF star of the day said something in a shoot interview like "Russo had a thousand ideas. The problem was he only had one good idea for every ten bad ones."

Russo broke all the rules of booking. He burned through stories that should have lasted months in a week. He switched champions and turned wrestlers constantly without rhyme or reason. Things rarely made sense. And I suppose that was all part of the fun in a way. For once anything really could happen in the WWF, whether it made a lick of sense or not. But that's only going to work once. And I think the only reason it even worked one time was because Russo had a handful of all time greats on the roster who could make anything work. Notice how badly he flopped once he went to WCW and no longer had Austin, Rock, Foley and Vince around to make everything work.

Russo was hit or miss. He had some great stuff and he had terrible stuff. Unfortunately, at the end it was all bad.