Seth Mates, a former creative writer for World Wrestling Entertainment, has written a new blog for NEWSDAY in which he details the inner working of the writing team in 2002 when the decision was made to turn Brock Lesnar into a babyface.

 

Here is the link to the story: http://weblogs.newsday.com/sports/specialevent/wrestling/2008/03/why_we_took_the_title_off_of_b.html

 

 

In the story, Mates says the following:

 

So you might recall from my post last week that the initial plan when we created split titles in 2002 was for Rob Van Dam and Brock Lesnar to be the champions and to carry the titles straight on through WrestleMania.

 

 

In early August, Brock took on Hulk Hogan on an episode of SmackDown, and to Hogan's credit, he put Brock over cleanly with a bearhug, then did an injury storyline to take him off TV for a bit.

 

The plan had been for Hulk to make his big comeback a few months later, and to challenge Brock for the title at Madison Square Garden for the title at Survivor Series. It would have been quite an attraction -- Hogan going for revenge and the WWE Title in Madison Square Garden. Of course, the swerve was that Brock would win once again.

 

A month or so before Survivor Series, however, word got back to us that Hulk actually wanted to win the title in the Garden. Ain't no way that was going to happen, especially after Hogan's failed title run earlier in the year, so we decided to go in another direction -- namely, to pair Brock up against Big Show and to turn Brock babyface.

 

Now, Brock Lesnar was many things. But a babyface isn't one of them. Brock is a towering monster, the kind of imposing figure that gives little kids nightmares. But with no Hogan and with Undertaker off TV after Hell in a Cell, SmackDown needed a top babyface, so that was the plan.

 

The thought was that the best way to turn Brock babyface was to turn Heyman against him, to have Heyman cost him the belt, and then to rally the fans behind Brock with the whole "thrill of the chase" babyface build to regaining the title at WrestleMania.

 

The call was made go with Big Show because they felt they could heat him up enough to where he'd be a viable challenger for Brock who could really make an impact. I'll be honest, I fought pretty hard against using Show -- nothing against the guy, but he'd been portrayed as a lumbering dope for much of the previous two years, and for him to be winning the title -- and the first guy to beat Brock -- was a huge stretch for me. And I still remember my reaction when I got the call that they wanted to put the titles on Big Show and Shawn Michaels at Survivor Series -- I checked my calendar to see if it was 1996 again and no one had told me.

 

It also didn't make sense to use Show given that we were building towards Angle-Brock at WM19. That's why there was that convoluted storyline the following month with Angle beating Show, but Heyman representing them both, and all of a sudden they're allies -- huh?

 

Angle-Brock could have changed the business. Much as Vince McMahon and Paul Heyman helped invent reality TV in the mid and late 90s, giving wrestling its last big boom, the Angle-Brock feud could have been on the cutting edge of the next big boom, the one currently being enjoyed by Ultimate Fighting.

 

Instead, Angle-Brock became just another wrestling storyline, and one that didn't even make much sense -- Angle didn't really screw Brock over, Heyman and Show did. The storyline stuff totally overshadowed what should have been a slow build between two legitimately tough, technically sound heavyweights. And then Heyman wasn't even a part of the WrestleMania story (going off the HHH-Stephanie-Jericho disaster a year earlier, they wrote Heyman off WrestleMania a few weeks before the show).

 

But hey, at least Brock's big babyface turn worked.

 

Right?

 

 

 

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