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Bruce Prichard made headlines recently in the wrestling community when on 11th June, WWE announced that Paul Heyman was being removed from his position as the Executive Director. Instead, Bruce Prichard, who until now, had been the Executive Director on WWE SmackDown and was leading the creative on the Blue brand, was made the leader of the joint creative team of both RAW and SmackDown as part of a joint creative team.
On the most recent episode of the Something to Wrestle podcast with Bruce Prichard, he talked about the original ECW: One Night Stand in 2005 in WWE. Prichard also talked about ECW, before the company had been taken over by WWE and how Paul Heyman actually manipulated the audience at the time.
Bruce Prichard talks about manipulative tactic Paul Heyman used before joining WWE
While the Monday Night Wars were in progress, while WWE and WCW were the biggest contenders, ECW had a strong base of supporting fans themselves. Before Paul Heyman came to WWE, there was a time when ECW was the hottest thing in wrestling.
Anyone who saw an ECW show was tuning into a far more hardcore content than could be found on either WWE or WCW. Paul Heyman was the one leading ECW at this time, and before he came to WWE, he was the man who came up with the genius product which is the reason why any time something hardcore happens, people still chant ECW, be it during a WWE show or an AEW show.
ECW is still not forgotten, and according to Bruce Prichard, this was because Paul Heyman had manipulated the ECW audience to equate anything hardcore with the name of the company.
"The thing with ECW fans is that you had a very powerful manipulator in Paul Heyman who was able to present the product in a form that made you feel that you were a part of a movement. You were anti-everything else that was out there. It was masterfully done. The audience, they saw nothing else, they heard nothing else. They did not realize that a lot of their product was garbage. However, they loved what they were presented. Now, I'm not saying all of their product was garbage. I'm saying that a lot it was not good wrestling. It was not even a good presentation a lot of the time, but the presentation on TV? Tremendous."
Bruce Prichard talked about how Paul Heyman made the audience of ECW feel that they were against every other promotion and that they were part of a niche.
