WWE Senior Vice President Bruce Prichard recently covered several topics on an episode of his podcast, “Something to Wrestle With.”
One of the subjects he discussed was why the late, great “The American Dream” Dusty Rhodes left WWE in 1991.
Prichard said, “Dusty wanted to be the boss. It’s that simple. Dusty wanted to be the boss. Dusty wanted to have total control. And he knew that he would not get that in WWE. Dusty knew that the hierarchy wasn’t going to change. But he knew that at WCW, he had the opportunity once again to be the all-in-control boss. And that was his desire. That’s what he wanted to do, and he knew he wasn’t going to get to do that here. So it was that simple. He had an opportunity, and he went back to Vince and told him he had that opportunity. And Vince told him, ‘Congratulations, go do what you want to do.’”
On it being that cut and dry:
“It really was, yes. Look, there was a lot of mutual respect there. Dusty and Vince didn’t want to hold him back for fear of ‘I don’t want to hold him back and keep him here, and then he harbors resentment the whole time he’s here.’ Thinking that, ‘Oh man, I could have done this, or I could have done that.’ So it was just the right thing to do.”
On the payoffs getting smaller at the time:
“I think in general, yes. But also during that time, you know, Dusty was the other half of those. I don’t know how many cards Dusty was on of Warrior cards where Dusty was on with him headlining. And again, don’t — I love Virgil to death, loved The Dream to death. And it’s our idiosyncrasies that just kind of get people to love you hate you a lot of times. And Dusty — every night, we would be on the road. And we would be somewhere, and you would get the, ‘Oh, last time I was here, Hogan was here. We’ve already at least double that.’ We’d go to the curtain, look out and go, ‘What the f**k’s he looking at? It’s terrible.’ I think that it had waned a little bit. I think that we kind of jumped the shark with Dusty and Randy [Savage] in that whole scenario. We got a lot more out of it than we probably deserved to get out of it. And it was just time to move on in that regard. And I think Dusty’s desire to go elsewhere — you know, later on in that. But Dusty’s days of headlining the card and drawing? I think they were over. But him being a part of a package, and being the American Dream, the Common Man, and doing all of that? I did not think was over. And I thought that that was still all there, and could have been a huge, huge deal.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
