One of the bigger news items from yesterday was the story about the email blasts advertising Paul Heyman for Raw and Eric Bischoff for Smackdown. This lead almost everyone to believe that their new positions as director of Raw and Smackdown respectively would be on air characters despite Sports Illustrated breaking the initial story stating they wouldn’t.
Many people rightly assumed that the graphic and the copy for the shows would have to be pre-approved before making it to the department that would send it to the arenas, which emailed it to fans.
However, Bryan Alvarez stated on the Friday evening edition of Figure Four Daily (with Lance Storm) that the emails were sent out prematurely and that Vince was “furious” when he found out about the emails. Below is a partial transcript of Alvarez trying to explain the confusing situation. (timestamp 16:33 – 19:19)
“So I started texting and emailing people there [WWE] and I’m like, ‘Whats going on? Just 24 hours ago these guys were not gonna be tv characters.’ And the first couple people that I text are also baffled. And one of them notes, there was a meeting last night that went till 4:23 am. But it was only Raw. Nobody has even pitched anything for Smackdown yet. And I was also told that last week because of the ppv, Vince didn’t even look at the Smackdown script till he was on the way to Smackdown. Long story short. Why would there be advertising about Bischoff being on Smackdown when they hadn’t even talked about Smackdown yet? (Referencing the “Raw” creative meeting the night before that went to 4:23am)
So then I start thinking that the emails must be fake. But then everybody starts sending me their email blasts. One right after the other. It’s abundantly clear its not fake. This is all during Observer Live and I’m getting messages back and forth and people there are going, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know why this is out there.’ Like is it real, is it fake? Then somebody sends me an email blast from Raw advertising Paul Heyman there. Well…last night at the creative meeting, there was no mention of Paul Heyman being on Raw. But finally I get the message from WWE that they are real email blasts. So then it’s like, ok what’s going on?
So the story is… Vince I guess is trying not to micromanage everything like he has done in the past. Plus he’s got the XFL coming up. So apparently he’s not micromanaging the department that’s sending out these email blasts. And so I have no idea how, but 24 hours later the people in that department still thought that Heyman and Bischoff were gonna be television characters. And so they put together these email blasts advertising them as being there as characters. I don’t know how it got through all of these channels but it got sent out to everybody. Around the time that I got it everybody else got it. Vince got it. Vince was furious, not understanding why these were sent out. And so at this moment Heyman and Bischoff are not supposed to be television characters. But because the email blasts had been sent out, there is the chance that they’re gonna have to put them on tv because it’s been advertised. This is a 7 billion dollar company with 500 employees and this is what happened in the last 24 hours. So that’s the story.
On this morning’s episode of Wrestling Observer Radio Dave Meltzer echoed this same story.
“Somebody screwed up in making it. Somebody screwed up in approving it. And it was sent out and Vince didn’t know. And nobody needed to know, knew. Basically when we found out they [WWE] found out. I don’t want to say it was a panic or anything like that but it was not a happy time. The jist of everything is that it wasn’t supposed to happen. Bischoff was not booked to be on tv on Tuesday. Heyman was probably not booked on television. He may have done an interview in some form to do a Brock Lesnar thing with Seth. I think he was booked for a segment to do the same stuff that he’s been doing but it wasn’t like he was gonna redo the show or be a tv general manager or anything like that. But somebody assumed that he was. Eric wasn’t even supposed to start for a couple weeks. But because they advertised him, he may be there now. As of late Friday evening Eric was not planning to be there on Tuesday. But Vince still may talk to him and say he has to come because they accidentally advertised him. I don’t know if he’ll do that or not.”
