Post by mikey1974 on Jan 12, 2019 16:31:00 GMT -5
Jan 12, 2019 15:11:08 GMT -5 @anthony18 said:
People say if Owen would have not done the stunt he would have been fired. First of all, what kind of cold blooded company is wwe if that is true? Secondly, at least he'd be alive and at the time wcw existed and would have been interested. He could have joined Bret there! To answer your first question ... LOL! This is Vince McMahon we're talking about here. The guy who destroyed Ricky Steamboat's push because he wanted 2 weeks off for the birth of his son. The guy who screwed over Wendi Richter and Bret Hart. The guy who put out a DVD for the sole purpose of trying to destroy the legacy of the Ultimate Warrior and portray him as deranged and mentally incompetent. Cold blooded? Vince? Of course!
But even that is a moot point, as Vince would NEVER fire Owen, just for the sheer purpose of sticking it to Bret. In his book Bret recalls a time where he called vince russo after the Screwjob and said how McMahon should let Owen go, if he wasn't going to do anything for him and Owen was miserable there. After they hung up,his phone rang and Bret was surprised to hear Vince McMAHON on the other line, telling him he had just listened to the entire phone conversation between Bret and Russo, that if he wanted he could sue Bret for interference over Owen's contract, and that he would NEVER let Owen leave before his contract was up. So he would never have fired Owen. He would've had him jobbing to Golga, Droz, and the Mean Street Posse at every Raw and PPV until his contract was up, but he never would have fired him. Andsince some of the WWF wrestlers money was via merchandising and such, devaluing Owen to the point where he's selling no merchandise and taking away that revenue stream for him might have been feasible.
Vince MAY have been able to withhold his PPV royalties as well. There was some type of clause in these contracts that allowed this to happen. Cause they didn't get paid right away for PPV appearances, sometimes it would be 6 months after a PPV happened til they received their pay. Mick Foley talked about this - after he quit followin the Montreal Screwjob, he realized that he was still owed a tremendous amount of backpay that he might not see if they said he was in breach of contract for walking out, and he came back. A similar thing could have potentially happened to Owen... if he kept refusing storylines and angles Vince could've said he was in breach of contract for refusing to do what his boss was telling him to do that was job related.
In retrospect, yeah, Owen should've told him to stick it,as it certainly wasn't worth his life. But at that time, with Vince and Bret still hostile towards each other, WCW starting to fail, and with Owen's family moving into a brand new house literally at the time of his death, he may have figured he had no choice but to finally give in to what Vince wanted, lest his money vanish and potentially his future as well. It truly is a tragedy.
