JBL Doesn’t Think WCW Nitro Would’ve Replaced WWE Raw On Monday Nights

On the latest episode of Something To Wrestle With, JBL talked about whether he thought Vince McMahon would’ve ever given WCW Nitro the Monday night timeslot of WWE Raw when he acquired it and more. You can check out some highlights below:

On WCW Nitro replacing Raw in Monday night timeslot: “I always knew Vince would change his mind. I would have bet everything I had [that] Vince would have changed his mind. And I’m not sure Vince did anything more than give that a little bit of lip service. I don’t believe any of that. I believe Vince said it, and I heard him talk about it. And I remember when we had the ECW PPV we put those guys over like crazy. But by then, we pretty much owned the company, or did own at the time. And I said, ‘Vince, you understand we’re leveraging our whole company. We’re putting these guys over with everybody.’ And I said, ‘Is this what you want?’ And he said, ‘Yep.’ I said, ‘Okay, cool.’ But it was different because we owned it, but we had all their top stars. And it was a completely different dynamic with ECW in 2004-2005, because we had all their top stars, these great stars that ECW had made.

“We didn’t have that with WCW. You know, we had Booker, and we had Dallas. We had a few of the guys that were great hands. You know, Sean O’Hara and Palumbo, those guys were terrific workers. But we didn’t get the NWO. We didn’t get Bret, we didn’t get any of those guys. So, I just don’t think it would ever work. And if you don’t get those guys, then they’re not going to go up against our top guys either. You look at the invasion angle at WCW, who was the lead against it? Again, me and Ron. Me and Ron were the big ones spearheading the old charge, you know. And Ron and I weren’t low-card guys, but we weren’t your main event guys either. And I did pretty much all the invasion angles, but I wasn’t Stone Cold. You weren’t getting Steve for this. And because of that, you could look at it and say, ‘It’s not going to work.’ Look at WWE now. Bring guys in; they’re not going over Roman and Cody. For good reason, because then you diminish your product and what people have believed in for all these years. And so I think that’s the same thing with WCW in 2001.”

On whether he was close with Dusty Rhodes: “Everybody who knows Dusty will tell you, ‘Man, I was one of Dusty’s best friends. Dusty was one of my best friends.’ Which, they were. Dusty was that guy. Whenever you met Dusty, he made you feel like you’re the most important guy in the world. So everybody who talks about Dusty, go through anybody talking about Dusty. They tell you how much dust meant to them and how close they were to Dusty. And if you count all of them up, Dusty had hundreds of very close friends. But he did, legitimately. He made everybody feel special. He made me feel special, just like everybody else.

“I tagged with his old partner Murdoch, and rode the roads up in Texas with Dick Murdoch. And so I had a little different connection to Dusty than most because of the tie with Dick. And so yeah, when I was around Dusty, we talked all the time. We had a really good time because we’re both from West Texas. We both had this love for Murdoch, and we both had a lot of the same friends. So I had, I think, a pretty close relationship with Dusty. I don’t want to overstate it that we were, you know, super close friends, but we were good friends.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Something To Wrestle With an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.