Jim Ross covered the career of Chyna on this week’s episode of “Grilling JR.”
During it, he was asked why she departed from WWE. Here is what he had to say:
“We decided not to renew her contract. We wanted her to save face. We wanted her to leave without having to die on her sword. Consequently, I decided that it would be a mutually agreed parting of the way. It left her with some credibility. It didn’t make her seem so much as a victim, which I’m not so sure she didn’t want to be. She may have wanted to be a victim and garner the sympathy that a babyface would if he was against a big heel and have insurmountable odds overcoming them. She had a meeting with Vince and then he stopped meeting with her. She still came to TV thinking she might get booked or might be used. I don’t know why we kept bringing her to television. I nipped that in the bud because it was a waste of money and a waste of her time. We made her a real good offer, I thought.
People have to understand this thing. The 400k (offered to Chyna) was probably more than she was making than when she was earning a million. She gets an increase in her downside, so if she gets hurt, she is not booked, whatever, she is going to make about $8,000 a week. If she gets back rolling and gets creative rolling again, and she invests herself as she did before in her character, then the chance for making more money and being higher up in the card is obviously there. Her deal to me was ‘I’m as valuable as Stone Cold is to WWE.’ Chyna is as valuable to Stone Cold Steve Austin is and so, therefore, she knew there were a handful of guys making a million dollar downside and he was one of them. That was the magic number. At that time, that was the number you strived to attain if you are a talent because that was the top of the pay grade. That’s 19,000 and change a week. A lot of guys took it as they earned it. Jericho and I were talking about that today. He had some 2 or 3 million dollar years on about a $350,000 downside. It’s there to make. That’s the incentive of it. That’s why it works so well. Her deal was ‘No, I don’t want a $400,00 guarantee, I want a million dollar guarantee’ because she wanted exactly what Austin and Undertaker and some of those cats were making. She was never going to be cast in their light or used in their way. It would not have been a good investment for us to make. Now, if Vince had said to me, ‘Look, she’s had her heart broken. She’s had some bad luck here, blah, blah, blah, give it to her,’ well then I would have given it to her if that’s what he wants. It’s his money. But that’s not what he wanted.”
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