12:09 AM EST

Our very own www.wrestlingnewsdesk.com writer Anna Elizabeth Anderson recently covered the return of Paul Heyman for The National Ledger.  Read the full story below, or view the original story by CLICKING HERE.

Paul Heyman Breaks Silence: Talks About WWE, ECW and His Next Project 

by Anna Elizabeth Anderson

Paul Heyman has come of hibernation. The Mad Scientist has re-emerged with a new project entitled "The Heyman Hustle" and a partnership with Rupert Murdoch's flagship, the UK Sun.  The Sun's always excellent Simon Rothstein of the Wrestling and Sports sections' writing team "The Lilsboys" conducted a world exclusive interview with Heyman, who has not given one press statement since leaving WWE-ECW on December 4, 2006. How anyone kept Heyman silent for that long, only the Devil knows.


The Sun is playing the interview up huge, with front page stories on their main page (which is practically unheard of for someone out of the wrestling world), and on their wrestling section. In an interesting twist,
Heyman also revealed an attempt to buy the Northern California "Strikeforce" MMA promotion, which features Frank Shamrock, Cung Le, and Heyman's friend Daniel Puder.  Some highlights from the fascinating interview are below.

 
On what happened with WWE: "I think what it boils down to is Vince McMahon and I have totally separate and distinct visions for what a wrestling or sports entertainment product should be... The problem was that Vince started to take the difference of opinion personally.  And once that personality conflict comes into play, when you're trying to steer the direction of a product, it becomes a bad work environment...It's his company, so obviously he has to stay!"

On the ECW resurrection: "The brand should never have been brought back after the very first One Night Stand in 2005.  The follow-up show in 2006 made money, but only because it served as the platform for Rob Van Dam to beat John Cena.  Then Sci-Fi Channel was willing to give a test run for the brand ECW and they currently pay a lot of money for that TV show.  So the theory of bringing ECW back and making it profitable worked as a business move. But the expectation from the audience that ECW was being brought back only served to be a monumental letdown."

On WWE-ECW: "By comparison, if someone were to resurrect The Beatles and say: "You know what, we want to make them more globally accepted, so we're going to have a white guy, an Asian female, a Hispanic Bisexual and an African-American with a Scottish accent."  In the land of WWE that actually makes sense.  But no matter how you look at it, it's just not the Beatles.  So in the same light, it's just not ECW... If you look at the attempts to recreate the nWo, to re-create Goldberg and, even now, trying to recreate Ric Flair's career on the line, Vince's magic only happens when he creates it from the get-go.  If Vince doesn't create it from the get-go, he can't embrace the formula."

On "that" pay per view: "I thought the undercard was horrible.. The entire complexion of the event was a downer.  I also thought that we were doing Bobby Lashley no favors the way he was going to win the title. Lashley winning the title, especially if you eliminate Rob Van Dam and CM Punk early, would be leapfrogging over RVD and Punk.  Van Dam was the sentimental favourite, Punk was the kid that all the crowd was getting behind and they wanted to see the upset.  If you don't appease the need for the audience to see that new hero get crowned like Punk did the week before at Survivor Series when DX let him say 'Are you ready?' then the audience will feel ripped off.  If you don't put that spotlight on Van Dam, with whom the paying customers have just taken this long ride back into the title chase, then the paying customer will feel ripped off. 

My opinion was to start the chamber off with the Big Show saying: "I'm a seven foot tall, 500lb giant, I'm gonna mow through every one of you."  And the first to take him on would be Punk. Playing to the fact that UFC is so hot and in the public consciousness, Punk chokes out Big Show in the first round of the Elimination Chamber, four-and-a-half minutes in, and now the champion is out.  You know for a fact, before any two contenders lock up, I'm getting a new champion at the end of this match.  Then, the first guy to come out after Big Show v Punk, would be Van Dam. You let Van Dam and Punk fight it out, and then you start feeding in the heels.  Vince hated this. He especially hated the fact that Big Show liked it."

On The Big Show: Big Show is so underappreciated in terms of how smart he is to the business, and how willing he is to make new stars.

On Trying To Buy Strikeforce: I don't know whose names I'm supposed or not supposed to discuss, so I will skirt the issue of who else was involved by simply saying we formed a group of qualified, intelligent, motivated people last summer and had some meetings with Scott Coker about buying Strike Force and obviously keeping Coker intricately involved. I think Strike Force was in a position to, if not challenge UFC, then be what ECW was in the 90s which is a very viable alternative brand.  I have a lot of admiration for what Scott Coker and his team have built in Northern California, and I like the name Strike Force. Good name for branding. ...The negotiations stopped because one of the key people in our group ended up being someone we didn't want to get stuck with, because we realised in the negotiations that he was the wrong guy for the deal. Scott Coker is a good man ... and think he deserves a lot of credit for what he's built.

On The Heyman Hustle: (See the first advert here).  "Our goal is to break ground in the wireless/broadband and digital/mobile platforms, which get so much attention from the entertainment industry right now because its unchartered turf and no-one has been able to figure out what the future holds on this constantly evolving concept.  We want to peel back the layers of celebrity and we're going to demonstrate that larger-than-life personalities are not only found on television and the movies.  We're going to find the extraordinary in the ordinary and find the ordinary in the extraordinary.  So, we're just diving in as deep as we can go and trying to be the leaders of the exploration of this new universe.  So, we're content providers in a brand new, exploding, and already rapidly changing field."