Paul Wight says Vince McMahon’s approach as a boss came from the talent he inherited when he took over the company.
Wight spent twenty-two years working for him. He gave his view of it on TMZ’s Inside The Ring, while saying plenty of what McMahon did was not nice.
“Vince McMahon grew up watching his father run a company, was in the business for years before I came along. I know for a fact from talking to older talents that were around when Vince was young and first took over, they ran Vince through the dirt. They bullied the s*** out of Vince.”
His example was Andre the Giant, and the problem of a man whose name was bigger than any contract.
“They would do two a day sometimes, and Andre would be advertised in both towns. They do a show at one and a show at seven, a few hundred miles apart. Andre would work once, and he wouldn’t do the second show. He’d go and play cards. No, I work once today.”
“There wasn’t any contractual power back then, because Andre was so big of a name that if Andre left, Andre could work anywhere in the world and still make the same money.”
He described what it was like to employ the generation before his.
“The talent back then, those older guys back in the day, were mean. They were very ungiving as far as what they did business wise. It was very much all about them. They weren’t worried about the company. They weren’t worried about other talent. Their thing was me, me only.”
“So Vince had to navigate those types of characters to today’s modern business, where you don’t really have those characters now.”
He said the change is generational, and that he does not mean it as a criticism.
“A lot of the talent now is a lot softer, and I mean this in a nice way, and I think it’s a good thing. They’re excited because they’re fans. They’re in the business because they’re fans. They’ve got a contract. All they want to do is be on TV. Most of them aren’t even really concerned about making some of the money they should be making because they just want to be on TV.”
“The old-timers didn’t really give a s*** about being on TV. All they wanted to do was make as much money as they could. If they could rob the entire bank and leave dust motes on the vault floor when they left, they were happy. They got theirs. They got out.”
Wight also described the locker room culture of that period as something closer to hazing than to camaraderie, involving deliberate destruction of colleagues’ property and worse. He referred to it as normal for the time.
He said that is why McMahon kept his distance from the people who worked for him.
“Vince had to learn to navigate those kinds of guys and develop a distance with his talent, because he couldn’t afford to become friends with a talent. If he became friends with a talent, those guys didn’t have the same interests that he did as far as running the business and what’s best for the company and best for every other talent, the production crew, the lighting crew, the truck drivers, everybody that Vince was responsible for.”
“The other talent didn’t give a s***. Well, you’re my friend. How are you doing that to me?”
He said he was not making excuses.
“Not saying that a lot of stuff that Vince did was nice. No, some of the s*** he did was pretty mean. At the same time, do I have anything to complain about? No, I had a great career. I did a lot of things. I worked with some of the greatest talents that have ever been in this business.”
He said the environment left him permanently insecure about his job.
“I never had job security at WWE. I never thought that, oh, I’m here forever, I’m here for life, ain’t nobody gonna fire me. No, dude. There were several times I walked in and knew I was gonna get fired. I didn’t get fired, but I always knew I could get fired, because nothing was more important than the company. And you knew where you stood. The company came first, and talent came second.”
“There was a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress daily of making sure I knew I was only going to be there as long as I was valuable, as long as I produced.”
He also remembered one McMahon rule in particular.
“He never referred to a championship as a belt. In his mind, calling it a belt diminished the idea of it being a championship.”
McMahon left WWE in January 2024. Wight joined AEW in 2021.
