Why Shane McMahon Threatened To Fire Ex-WWE Star
A former WWE Superstar has explained the odd reason that Shane McMahon threatened to fire them during their time working in the company.
Buff Bagwell had a very brief spell in WWE when the doors closed in WCW in 2001. In World Championship Wrestling, Bagwell had made a name for himself as ‘Buff The Stuff’ and had captured the WCW Tag Team Title on five separate occasions.
Bagwell’s WWE run is only memorable for all the wrong reasons as it is said to be his Raw match against Booker T that led to Vince McMahon pulling the plug on running a separate WCW brand entirely.
Speaking to Chris Van Vliet on his Insight podcast, Buff Bagwell explained how it was Shane McMahon that had already threatened to fire him if he did one, seemingly insignificant, thing on TV and how that threw him off his game:
“Little thing I never told anybody, they were about to play my music and Booker went out first. Think about it, he had 2 belts, and I went out second, I never saw that before. He may have not got music, I will have to check that. But my pyro was off the charts, here was what I was told 10 seconds before I came through the curtain, out of nowhere like a ghost, Shane McMahon appears.”
“He says ‘Mark, you can’t look in the cameras?’ I go what? He goes ‘You can’t look in the cameras.’ I go ‘Shane, that’s all I do. I look in the cameras, I pose and wear the top hat, that is my whole gig bro.’ He says ‘You can’t do it or you’re fired.’”
“I want you to watch a Buff Bagwell match anytime the year before, and then watch that match. I don’t look anywhere near that camera the whole time in 3 years. That takes me completely out of my world. I come out, do the pyro, do the posing, but then it is like where is the camera? I see it and I start talking to someone over here, I was out of my game right there. They took my leg off right there. I was told not to look in the camera or I was fired.”
As it turned out that match with Booker T was Bagwell’s last with the company and he was shown on TV being unceremoniously thrown out of the building by The APA.
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