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* And Luger didn't appear on a episode of Superstars he was supposed to be on, so WWF had to have known Luger was heading to WCW at that point.

Luger was at the post SummerSlam TV tapings, but didn't feature heavily in them, mainly working dark matches. As they had a couple of weeks of TV in the can, his Superstars interview wasn't set to air until after he appeared on Nitro, so they pulled the segment from ever airing.

 

Regarding the what if regarding Shawn, by Survivor Series '97 he was already heavily banged up with a serious pill problem and wouldn't have taken too kindly to being usurped once again as the top star in the promotion by Austin. It's hard to see him not flaking out in 1998 even if he didn't get his career threatening back injury in the casket match with The Undertaker.

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It's hard not to think that any random "Bret doesn't leave WWF" scenario wouldn't turn out more entertaining than his abysmal time in WCW. What an amazing waste that was.

Actually, the Bret heel turn from mid-98 is greatly entertaining. Excellent promos, excellent TV matches against Luger and DDP. But yeah, overall, huge waste because the booking was awful.

 

I think Mr. McMahon would have surged at some point anyway, as the feud with Austin was foreshadowed by McMahon being stunned as early as the fall of 97. People seem to think that Mr. McMahon just popped up with the Bret screwed Bret promo, but infact it was several months after than the character slowly showed up, and the real beginning of the Austin vs McMahon feud was Austin "ruining everything" with Tyson on RAW.

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I suspect Vince would still have been convinced, at some point, to turn heel. The angle where Austin stunnered Vince still gave justification for having Vince turn heel at some point.

 

I also think it would have been Shawn feuding with Austin after WM XIV, assuming he didn't have his back injury. If that had happened anyway, they probably would have sped up a Vince heel turn.

 

And yeah, I could definitely see Bret feuding with Rock. Bret likely would have done a program with Ken Shamrock as well, given that he liked working with him.

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On the other hand, if Bret stayed then it's entirely possible that Mr. McMahon never becomes a heel figure. Seems like kind of a trade-off.

Wasn't Bret the first dude who called out McMahon for being the owner of the company.

 

I think people tend to underrate his promo after a steel-cage match on Raw (I think it was Raw?) where he yelled at McMahon and dropped a "bullshit" on tv. To me, that's always been the start of the "Attitude Era". It was the first thing that caught my attention that they were maybe going in a new direction.

 

So, maybe Vince feuds with Bret to start the Mr. McMahon character.

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Yeah, the Ross angle was the first hints of turning Vince heel that I remember. He played a heel in Memphis, but I think only sheet readers knew about it, I don't remember it getting much if any coverage in PWI and the like

 

with Bret in WCW I think pretty quickly a light turned on with him that the company had no direction and he should just have fun with it. His "heel turn" and stuff where he's sort of but not really in the nWo was super entertaining, but in a kind of "I'm in on the joke and totally above all of this" sort of way. No doubt he had better intentions for his WCW run, but that company was hopeless by the time he got there

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PWI referred to him as the owner in the 80s even, which I'm sure the WWF hated.

 

But yeah, the Jim Ross angle had him talking about Vince firing him, and had Vince on Livewire for an hour defending himself. It was mentioned multiple times on Livewire that he was the guy pulling the strings.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Yeah, the Ross angle was the first hints of turning Vince heel that I remember.

Not really, Vince was clearly supposed to be the babyface in that feud.

 

Except they ran that angle in Philadelphia and when Ross refers to Vince as "the egotistical owner of this company" the crowd goes wild.

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  • 1 month later...

Any answer that isn't "Vince McMahon is an incredibly strange person with control issues" hardly suffices.

This, basically. I'm glad that Bret and Shawn buried the hatchet with each other, and after watching the Greatest Rivalries program I have little doubt as to the veracity of Shawn's remorse over the whole thing. Mostly because he didn't get very preachy about it (Bret brought up him being born again first, actually), or at least didn't appear to. The knowledge that Bret remained so violently bitter about it until it got the better of him and lead to his stroke had to have been eating away at him, and indeed Vince too.

 

I'm hoping Bret revises his book soon, in light of the recent reconciliation. It was published in 2007, and the final chapters were indicative of that he still had some grudges with Shawn and Hunter. It would be interesting if he put it all to rest that way, and talked about it frankly.

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  • 1 year later...

The whole "Bret's contract was too expensive" story has always sounded a bit weird to me. I don't know what the exact annual amount was, but was it really the crippling financial burden Vince made it out to be? Was letting Bret go to WCW really the only answer?

If I recall correctly the WWF made a loss of $5m dollars that year. Bret's contract (was it $2m-ish?) represented a near halving of that deficit, if one assumes that PPV revenues wouldn't have changed as a result of Bret's absence. So I suppose that one could indeed justify it as a cost-cutting measure, consdering Bret's base salary was so far ahead of anybody else's.

 

But somehow, McMahon and the WWF were able to pay Mike Tyson the money they did not more than 3-4 months later.

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Also, this doesn't always get brought up, but Vince was worried about losing Shawn too. Shawn had asked for his release on multiple occasions and let it be plainly known that he wanted to join Hall and Nash in WCW. Vince created that monster, but at that point he needed HBK and really, really couldn't afford to say no to him. Michaels would have faked an injury and bitched and moaned his way out of the company if he had to, it isn't like that kind of thing hadn't happened multiple times over the years, as far back as 93 when he was still a midcarder.

So why the hell didn't he just let Shawn go and keep Bret instead? Hart was a much more reliable employee and a better consistent draw than Michaels was. Getting rid of HBK would've meant Vince instantly becoming free of a lot of the backstage problems which had plagued the company; and it's not like WCW would've had any idea of what to do with Shawn anyway. And if the WWF no longer had to pay Shawn's probably-huge salary, then Bret's contract suddenly becomes infinitely more affordable. It boils down to Vince showing a really bizarre and still-unexplained favoritism to Shawn, letting him get away with all kinds of ridiculous bullshit which McMahon would've NEVER tolerated from any other performer before or since.

 

In a way, Vince and the WWF did rid themselves of Shawn Michaels.

 

It just took a significant back "injury" to do so that wouldn't come until WMXIV.

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  • 7 months later...

With Bix finding the documents with the contract offer to Warrior in 1997 after the screwjob, does this bring Vince's reasoning that he couldn't afford Bret into question? I had always assumed he was freeing up money to pay for Tyson. If he wasn't, was the screwjob always a plan to create the "Mr. McMahon" character and really didn't have anything to do with money?

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Bret wasn't getting royalties under the 1996 contract, though, was he? Warrior's offer was $750K/year plus a higher royalty percentage than everyone else in the company got.

 

I would be surprised of Bret wasn't getting royalties on Merch when "everyone else is getting 25%".

 

He also was likely getting the standard license rate, which is from the pool of money that goes to wrestlers for video. Bret was pretty prominent on those, so probably got as much as anyone from those over a course of years (i.e. Nash and Shawn spiking in their title years, but Bret consistently being #1 or #2 because of his placement on loads of videos).

 

As far as calling into question the old story, we need to remember the time frame it was given for:

 

* Vince had $$$ issues when initially going to Bret about $$$ issues (earlier in the summer)

* Vince didn't have $$$ issues at the time when Bret made the decision to go

 

Hence he had the $$$ for Warrior, especially since Bret's contract was off the books when he left.

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