While talking to Chris Jericho on his podcast Wrestling With Freddie, former WWE booker and actor Freddie Prinze Jr. revealed his way to approach Vince McMahon when pitching ideas, especially when it came to pushing smaller guys.
Prinze recalled that it was Jericho who gave him important advice: “You and I had a conversation. Again, I don’t know if you’ll remember this. But I was having a hard time pitching some of the smaller guys, and you just kind of smiled and looked away. Like you were remembering something way back when, and I didn’t know what it was, but I’m like, staring at [Jericho]. Like, ‘What’s he gonna say? What’s he gonna say?’ Whatever you were gonna say you change to Freddie,’ you said. ‘Father, Son.’ I went, ‘What do you mean?’ I grew up without a dad. So it didn’t click with me, and you said, ‘His dad loved the big guys and he’s his father’s son. So he’s always gonna see the big guy able to beat up the small guy, no matter how much evidence you show him because his father told him it was that way.'”
The former booker used this advice when trying to convince McMahon to give guys like Kofi Kingston and Jeff Hardy a chance: “I remember getting on the plane with Vince, and kind of looking at him nd I just changed it changed my whole philosophy on how I pitch things, especially how I pitched the smaller guys and the first one I tried it with was Kofi. I literally just pitched it like, like a Spider-Man comic where all the bad guys beat up Spider-Man the whole time. But it’s his goodness that’s gonna sort of bring it out and not hulk out. But, we always pitched it where, ‘Of course, he wouldn’t win the title, but we’ll just get him into that match.’ We’d always be like, ‘We’ll cross that title bridge when we get there. So, so it really changed the way I pitch and I started having a lot of success with it, and after Kofi came the Jeff Hardy storyline, which brought him to the championship, and I literally started just looking for different angles. I started seeing that he was selling more merch than even Hunter was selling, and so that’s what I went into the pitch with. It was like, No, the creative was the creative, but I was like, ‘Hey, man. This dude’s selling more merch than anyone in the company right now.’ Even the people who are against the idea, [I was] like ‘He’s selling more merch than you, bro.”
H/T to Fightful for the transcription.
