Credit: VOCNation
Former WCW referee Billy Silverman was recently interviewed by
VOCNation. Below are some highlights:
On the WWE locker room
after the company acquired WCW: “It was just a different time. It’s
just like anything in the real world I guess, per se, that everybody [was]
worried about their jobs. There’s only so many jobs and there’s only so many
positions. You’ve got 50-70 guys coming in and at some point [WWE] can’t carry
that. So everybody was worried about their jobs, even the guys there. And the
WCW guys coming in they were just trying to get a spot or keep a spot. It wasn’t
a good time to be there. Everybody was worried about their job. Who might get
cut, who might not get cut. There was a lot of animosity. Certain friends may
not have been so much friends at that point. I just remember it being very much
survival of the fittest … in the locker room. I just don’t remember it being a
good time. But again, looking back on it, there were just circumstances beyond
everybody’s control.”
On if he thinks McMahon could’ve saved
WCW: “Do I think that Vince McMahon would have been the one [to keep
WCW alive]? No, because he just produces a different kind of show. So I don’t
believe that he could have kept WCW going. I think that Eric [Bischoff] was a
creative genius, but I think [that] all that creative and all that genius
somehow just kind of imploded. There was nobody there guiding the ship. There
was never any one time where there was a captain, that was who the captain is,
and that was who is in charge and we all have to go with the flow. That was
always changing, constantly. There never any one influence where it was for a
period of time. It just was always changing. So it was always so
volatile.”
On the WWE Attitude giving WCW an unfair
advantage: “WCW just could not do a lot of the content that WWF was
allowed to do because Vince McMahon was there. We had a guy who used to be at
the shows from the … Standards and Practice department to make sure we didn’t
say certain words on the air … That thing with Mae Young and … Mark Henry
… wouldn’t have flown in WCW. But Vince [McMahon] was on the end of the line I
guess to approve that to let that go on TV, and he was on networks that were
more progressive with language and nudity and content, whereas WCW didn’t have
that latitude. We definitely pushed the envelope as much as we could, but I
think that’s why WCW was so good as it was, because we had certain standards and
practices to adhere to . So creatively we had to figure out how to compete with
[WWE] and still be creative and innovative and new and fresh.”