Ted Dibiase recently talked about a wide range of topics on his Everybody’s Got a Pod.
During it, the WWE Hall of Famer talked about jumping ship from WWE to WCW in 1996. Here are the highlights:
On WCW going to a more reality-based product:
“I’m that old school. I mean, I grew up in the business, and, and you understand, I mean, it’s kinda like, okay, when you’re a little kid, and somebody tells you, okay, it’s magic, I’m gonna make this thing disappear, and they make it disappear. I mean, it’s sleigh of hand. You don’t know how they did it, but you did. You, you, you believe it. Well, as in the wrestling industry, we understand, you know, if you watch wrestling long enough and you’ve ever been in a real fight, you know, there’s a lot of things that you’re gonna see. And you’ll go, wait a minute. It’s kinda like if, you know, if a guy grabs you by the head of the hair and runs you across the ring into a turnbuckle if you were in a real fight, could somebody grab you if you didn’t want to go, you know, he might pull your hair out, but you’re not going you know? So it, it’s, it’s the realism, and the more realistic you can make it, the better that’s always been, you know? And it was, you know, like, I don’t know, I, I think it was Arn Anderson, you know? ‘Cause Arn produced them for a lot longer. I tried to, and I just knew it wasn’t me. To this point, it was hard for me to be a producer because I couldn’t sit down with two guys and map out a whole match. It’s like, I never did it, and if I never did it, how, how am I gonna sit down? And, you know, it’s just, it made no sense to me that that was the biggest problem. It’s like now. If I had a history with a guy and had a couple of matches with him, I might go, okay, based on what the people saw last week, maybe we should start this match tonight this way.”
On the differences between WCW and WWE:
“Oh gosh. It’s unbelievable. And I’ll be honest with you, working for the WWE, in my opinion, was better because it did become a fine tool, you know, fine-tuned machine. Because of that, that can cause chaos. When I was in WCW for the little time that I was there and wasn’t sitting at home getting a check, it was chaos every week. It was like I can remember being in the locker room, and I mean, the show has started, you know, it’s halfway over, and they’re still trying to figure out what they’re gonna do in the main event. That’s pretty scary. Yikes. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t remember seeing that. And I went, oh my God. And I, and again, that’s that constant power struggle.”
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article, please credit with an h/t to Wrestling Headlines for the transcription.