Former WWE producer Shawn Daivari joined the Two Man Power Trip of Wrestling to discuss his time working for the company, which includes how he felt about Vince McMahon. Daivari also reveals that Kevin Owens vs. Daniel Bryan was the original plan for WrestleMania 35 prior to KofiMania taking off. Highlights are below.
What it’s like working with Vince McMahon on the production side:
He definitely can be intimidating but it’s one of those things that-that’s his communication style. He communicates when he’s confused or whatever, maybe by yelling and screaming. I’m sure he yells and screams when he’s mad too, kinda of the way he talks. I’m not joking you, there’s been times where he might yell and scream at someone and before their segment’s over, he’s already yelled and screamed at the next person and he’s forgotten or doesn’t even care about the first one previously, but it’s because he wasn’t actually bent out of shape about it. If you’re really bent out of shape about it, you would probably not forget and remain mad about it but it’s just the way he communicates in a live environment. He definitely doesn’t communicate that way in the production meetings and stuff. The production meetings, he just — it feels like a classroom. You feel like a student sitting in class and he’s the teacher up front, but I think maybe just on headset, watching while you’re live and in production because I even get jazzed up when I’m live. Things are going good and the match is rocking. I think it’s super exciting so I can understand if something fell apart. I think I’ve been fortunate that none of my stuff has ever fallen apart so I guess I could answer that question better if Vince yelled and screamed at me one time but, I have had him yell at me as a talent before and it’s just, it’s just the way he treated you. He yells at you and screams at you about something you did that he didn’t like, and you’re booked in the exact same position the next week. Chances are, he wasn’t really mad.
Says Kevin Owens vs. Daniel Bryan was the original plan for WrestleMania 35:
Elimination Chamber, the last one where like the last two was Kofi Kingston and Bryan Danielson before they went to their WrestleMania match. That WrestleMania thing wasn’t supposed to happen. The electricity from that, them being the last two in the Elimination Chamber [in] an arena in Houston. I literally couldn’t watch it on the monitor anymore. It was so electric. I walked out in the crowd, watched it from behind the curtain because I wanted to feel — you literally feel vibration when you’re standing in front of a speaker at a concert. You feel the vibration of the crowd reaction when something’s rumbling and I don’t get reactions like that anymore so I’m trying to steal pops from the other guys,” Daivari laughed. “I went out there. I wanted to get the goosebumps and feel that. But without that electricity, that whole Kofi Mania run would not have happened. The next SmackDown, Kevin Owens would’ve come back and Kevin Owens and Daniel Bryan would’ve wrestled at WrestleMania. It might’ve been good, it might’ve been bad, it might’ve been indifferent. Probably would’ve been great. The audience, that electricity made Kofi Mania happen and as we know, that turned out f*cking amazing.
How he became a producer for WWE:
In the middle of 2018 at some point, they asked me to go to the PC and do [the] guest coaching thing, and I did that and everything and at one point, they asked me and two other wrestlers to go into a ring and coach in there which was very weird. I didn’t get it but I think later they realized that Triple H or someone in Stamford must’ve been watching remotely on camera what I was doing or how we were working or whatever, and I thought maybe they’d be interested in bringing me in as a coach at the PC and then I really don’t know how the conversation went and what direction behind the scenes I wasn’t a part of but a few months later, Hunter offered me the job as a producer, saying they pretty much wanna double up on producers. They wanna have a separate team for RAW and a separate team for SmackDown, like they do with the writers, and then they did that. They brought in [an] influx. They pretty much doubled their roster of producers and I was assigned to the SmackDown roster.
(H/T and transcribed by Post Wrestling)
