Former WWE star Maven took to his YouTube channel, where he discussed various topics, including being told Vince McMahon wanted to go in a different direction.
Maven said, “Now this next one is the number one thing no wrestler ever wants to hear even more than they’re keeping you off the shows or silence after a match. The number one thing no wrestler wants to hear is, ‘Vince McMahon wants to move in a different direction.’ Now, obviously, Vince McMahon doesn’t have the influence in the wrestling business that he once did. I’m only talking about my era because during my time, we were all wrestling for an audience of one. Didn’t matter what the crowd thought, didn’t matter what other wrestlers thought. Didn’t matter what your producers or your agents thought, if Vince was in your corner, if Vince liked you, you were going places, and if he didn’t, well, sorry about your bad luck. Now backstage at TV day, wrestlers are always going up to producers to writers just with ideas on where their character, where their gimmick should go. Most of the time these writers, they might blow you off, or, ‘We have something for you down the line,’ or, ‘We have to get done with this angle, then we’ll explore this.’ Or a producer might, Oh yeah, you know what? That’s a good idea. Let me take it and see what they say.’ But hearing that your hopes, your dreams, your idea, means absolutely nothing to the one man in charge. That’s about as demoralizing as it can get, and things can be going great. You could be written into several segments. Week after week, everything can be on the exact track that you visualized, but it can all come to a head the moment a writer or an agent producer tells you, ‘Vince wants to go in a different direction.’ Once you hear this devastating line, they can have one of two meanings. The meaning you hope it has is they just need time. They need to let other storylines play out, and they need to let Vince get in a different head space, a different frame of mind. Vince is human, like us all. In love with an idea one day, thinks it’s the worst idea on Earth the next. He goes with the trends sometimes, and sometimes he feels like he is the one making the trends. If you hear, ‘Vince wants to go in a different direction,’ you immediately start hoping that you have the ability to stay until a new direction, something else that captures his attention is presented. But for most people, it’s the opposite. If they hear ‘Vince wants to go in a different direction,’ that mainly means the sand in your hourglass is running low, and that could mean that maybe Vince doesn’t see value in you. He doesn’t see a place for you in a storyline arc, or maybe even on his on his television. He doesn’t see where you can be a draw. Everything about the man is transactional. Everything is dollars and cents. He has to pay a certain amount of money. He expects a certain amount in return.”
On his own experience with the phrase:
“For me, personally, I know exactly what it feels like to hear that exact statement after my night as Raw General Manager in 2004 after meeting Vince, as soon as I came through the curtain, wrestling Triple H for the title, after having Vince tell me, ‘Great job. We put a lot on you tonight, and you did everything amazing.’ After hearing all that and thinking my career was on an upward trajectory, a few weeks later, I would have the writers come up to me and tell me, ‘Vince wants to go in a different direction.’ So I, in the matter of a month, went from being in the main event on a pay-per-view, relegated to obscurity, relegated to valueless in the eyes of the one man who it mattered to. There would be no coincidence that within a half year later, I would be shown the door.”
You can check out Maven’s comments in the video below.
(H/T to Fightful for transcribing the above quotes)
