Bruce Prichard (Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard): "Vader didn't come as Vader when he came in. He was a shell of that guy and never could get his gr..."

Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard · March 7, 2026 · 2h 0m

Episode 504: Revenge Of The Taker REMIX

🎧 Listen to the full episode on Something to Wrestle with Bruce Prichard

Vader's WWE run

Vader didn't come as Vader when he came in. He was a shell of that guy and never could get his groove back. He put on a lot of weight, his knees were bothering him, he was breaking down, and all of a sudden he realized that it's a little different thing when you've got guys as big as you and they're hitting back.

Vader's Kuwait incident

Vader was fined the largest fine we'd ever fined anyone up until that point. It was thirty thousand dollars and expenses.

Bret Hart's 1997 heel promo

There's nothing that Bret said that wasn't true. Everything Bret said was true. And it was, I think, as people look at our country a lot of times, that's what they see. The country had lost its way.

Nation of Domination

The idea for the Nation was to give Ron Simmons a platform for Ron to break out and hopefully be that babyface down the road. When obviously that didn't happen, it became okay when Rock joined and Rock grabbed that microphone, then that became the platform for Rock to break out.

Signing Taka Michinoku

Paul Heyman is the one who told me about Taka. It was Heyman that said he goes, 'No, you don't want Sasuke. Sasuke was pushing himself. You want Taka.' And we took Taka.

Stone Cold Steve Austin's heel turn

Steve's merch at that point had already exploded, so there's no problem there. You look at what's best for business overall, and I think that is what was best for business overall.

Wrestling gimmicks

I hid behind Brother Love. Are you kidding me? Easy to go out and be Brother Love. I didn't have to be Bruce. I had a confidence in Brother Love that I didn't have the same confidence in Bruce.

Vince Russo's influence

I knew we started sitting in on meetings. Oh yeah. We had definitely, yes. Had Vince [Russo] sit in on meetings. I thought Vince offered good ideas too, I really did.

Best WrestleMania

I will still say that WrestleMania 17 is probably the best of all time.

Neville Meyer / WWE going public

Neville [Meyer] was a guy that would go into companies and prepare them for going public. That was his M.O. Neville was coming in to observe and to watch all the aspects of our business. He sat in on every Vince meeting.