Tony Khan On The Collapse Of WCW
Mismanagement, politics, in-fighting... WCW at the end was a wild mess
In its short life thus far, All Elite Wrestling has been called by some sections of the wrestling audience ‘WCW 2.0’ with both positive and negative connotations attached to the moniker.
The comparisons between the two companies - such as running on TNT in the USA - have not been lost on AEW President Tony Khan, who shared his thoughts on the dying days of WCW on the Pardon My Take podcast:
"Some of the things that went wrong for WCW were giving creative control to a lot of the wrestlers and some of the storylines were asinine,” said Khan “Some of the ideas were great, but it was a very disorganised show and then when they brought somebody else in from the WWF to be a writer, Vince Russo, he made it ten times worse. He took a problem… they had a massive hangnail and he just chopped off the arm. That was part of the problem.
“Then, you had another major issue, which was the management. Most successful wrestling companies have had one supreme commander at the top. He's owned it, booked everything, run the place, run management. Whether it's Vince McMahon organising everything, Cowboy Bill Watts, Eddie Graham, Fritz Von Erich, countless others. That made sense as a business model. Strong management, WCW didn't have, and I could provide. [I’m a] more organised booker than anyone [WCW] had.”
Here’s hoping AEW doesn’t follow the bad examples set by latter days WCW.
H/T: Fightful
