Bruce Prichard Explains Why WWE Didn’t Use WCW Stars At WrestleMania X-7 Days After Buying WCW

In the latest episode of Something to Wrestle, Bruce Prichard spoke about WWE purchasing WCW days before Wrestlemania X-7 and said that even though they owned the contracts of the stars, there were no plans to use any of them at the event. Here are highlights:

On promoting Wrestlemania during the final Nitro: “We owned it. It was no longer enemy territory, so we owned it. We were going to utilize every opportunity that we had. And the fact that we were able to do it on TNT was just one more avenue to promote Wrestlemania. Been a fool not to. You’ve got it and it’s there so use it.”

On if there were plans to use WCW stars in the ring at the event: “No and here’s the reason why. First of all, that didn’t take place until a week and a half before Wrestlemania. The finality of it, the actual purchase going through, so on and so forth…We were out of the running, so we thought, and then all of a sudden back in, and it took place. It took place, as we’ve stated, very quickly. When we got down, we knew what we’ve purchased. We purchased the assets and we purchased the tape library and some other assets but there was no commitment to talent at all because we didn’t know what we had. We didn’t have all of their contracts and to try and sort through all of that in the time frame that we had…damn near impossible. The main names, they were all under AOL/Time Warner contracts with huge guarantees that we were not going to assume. We’re not even going to entertain it. Plus I don’t think that a lot of that talent would have wanted to come over at the time because they were getting guaranteed money to do nothing. So to that effect it was a non-issue. In addition to that, we had Wrestlemania booked.”

On possibly using the talent in the Shane McMahon vs. Vince McMahon match: “There was preliminary talk of ‘Do we use them in the Shane-Vince match?’ Possibly bringing those guys in and from the get-go Vince was adamant: no. It’s not about them, it’s about Vince and Shane and it needed to remain that family issue and stay there. If you bring in other guys it would muddy it up and it would just confuse ’em. Because the guys that we had, very few talent that we kept on and absorbed their contracts, I don’t think anybody would have known them anyway. It wouldn’t have mattered. It wouldn’t have been any impact anyway. So that was nixed from the get-go.”

If you use any of the above quotes, credit Something to Wrestle with an h/t to 411mania.com