WWE Hall of Famer Paul Heyman appeared on The Ariel Helwani Show to discuss various topics, including adapting to the WWE’s current era, which is quite different from the old-school mentality.
Heyman said, “It’s a reality of the industry today that I have to accept. I grew up in this business at a time when if you’re in a bar and someone walks up to you and says, ‘You’re in that fake wrestling business –’ notice the Southern accent when I say it? No offense to all the people from the South but, if you don’t swing, if you don’t defend the business, and someone else sees it or finds out about it, you’re catching an ass-kicking and you’re getting shipped out of the territory. That’s the way it was back then. All these stories you hear of legendary bar fights of guys like Haku ripping people’s eyeballs out. ‘Show me how fake this is now, brudda.’ That’s how we were taught to defend the business and we caught the ass kickings if we didn’t defend the business. So, that’s where I grew up.”
On WWE: Unreal:
“To now be in a situation where it’s so open to where it’s not just this is how the magic is done but we’re gonna show you the wires and we’re gonna show you the crew that inserts the wires and we’re gonna show you the writing team meeting in which we discuss the wires to do the magic trick, whew, that’s an adjustment for me, and it’s an adjustment that I have to make and accept, because if I take the tactic of, wow, I’m not used to this. I’m not used to being so open and transparent about the inner workings and the secrecy. For so long, it was a secret society. It was a closed business. But then again, today, Sammy Gravano does a podcast, Michael Franzese does a podcast, John Alite does a podcast. All these gangsters sitting there going, ‘Yeah, so we clipped Mario and Rocko came in the room and we had to clip him.’ ‘I liked Rocko.’ ‘Yeah, I liked Rocko too. Too bad we had to kill him.’ ‘Yeah, and he was my brother-in-law.’ So, all these gangsters are revealing what it is so, it’s a far more open and transparent society, or at least we think it is, and I have to accept Unreal as part of the platform by which WWE is Disney-fied and picks up a streaming deal on ESPN. The way I look at it is this: I’m always going to be like this (jumpscare) when I see a camera behind the scenes because I’m still not used to it, and I’m gonna have to get used to it, because the train is leaving the station and I wanna be part of — if not the conductor, I wanna be one of the conductors or one of the top advisors to the conductors as to where that train is going.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
