Effy Says Vince McMahon Has Been Coasting Off ‘Three Good Ideas’ For Thirty Years

In an interview with Fightful, Effy spoke out against Vince McMahon, stating the WWE Chairman has been given a pass for thirty years because he had three good ideas. Here are highlights:

On his Twitch stream: “It’s incredible. I was super nervous starting out ‘cause people will stream for three, four, five, six hours and I’m going, ‘I’m used to super editing myself down to a minute and a half, with a concept, and a single opponent and I’m quippy and witty and cut,’ right? So, you’re just sitting there and you go, ‘Holy moly, how am I going to fill this time?’ But, the people who come in keep it moving so quickly and have such interest in what you’re saying and the knowledge you have. Especially Monday nights when we watch wrestling and Wednesdays afternoons when we’ve been watching wrestling on the front page with a crazy amount of people. You get people who, you go, ‘Oh, man. We’re not known by everyone in the world.’”

On WWE and nostalgia: “There is this bite of nostalgia that we have almost rejected in this new form of Twitch that we’re figuring out that people don’t need. I know you do a lot of work with them, but WWE loves that safety net of the nostalgia bite. They love it. But, what they don’t realize is, it is diminished returns. No offense to anyone, but we’ve been to these places, we’ve been to these cons, we’ve been to these legend shows. Our fans have not, in some cases, kept care of themselves later in life and nor have our wrestlers. We can’t keep relying on the fact that they’ll tune in to a cable show to keep our lifeblood moving. The difference right now between me and the Undertaker is distribution. Because if you know the name Effy and you know I’m a wrestler, that Google search to find a full match is just as easy as finding the Undertaker. What we don’t have is that same distribution so far. But, while we look into these new avenues, we are finding that there is a much larger distribution and there’s a lot of people who would like to get on boar.”

On not being worried about not going to WWE: “”It’s a whole new dawn and I’m glad we’ve held out for this future transition. I’m still a guy who truly believes Vince had three really good ideas in the 80s and we kinda gave him a thirty year pass and surrounded him with the right people. Once you make three good ideas in the 80s, you know, revolutionizing pay-per-view and closed caption, revolutionizing what sports entertainment looks like, and revolutionizing that TV distribution into your pay-per-view model. Once you look at these things and go, ‘Those were great ideas,’ you can start to afford the people around you who came up with all the other good ideas. There’s a lot of things he’s in control of, but instead of giving him the pass and clinging on to what our idea of these WrestleMania moments is or what our idea of success in professional wrestling is, jump into something new. I joke with a lot of the kids sometimes, the reason you want to work at IWA: Mid-South is not because IWA: Mid-South is the best place in the world to work. It’s so you can say you worked somewhere where Samoa Joe, and CM Punk, and Chris Hero, and Claudio Castagnoli, and Bryan Danielson worked at.”