Paul Heyman recently sat down with The Independent, a British news site, to talk about a number of topics, including changing wrestling with ECW, his successes and failures, and more.
You can read a few excerpts from the interview below:
Heyman on how wrestling needed to change, and why:
“I thought that the business, the industry, the presentation needed to change in the same way music had changed. Because music was all about Poison and Mötley Crüe and Winger and all these hair bands, and then along came Nirvana and *BAM*! The whole industry changed. So in the same way, I thought wrestling needed to change, in that wrestling had become the equivalent of hair bands, and we needed wrestling’s version of Nirvana to come along and just shake everything up.”
Heyman on ECW at the height of it’s popularity:
“I was on 57th Ave. in New York City and there was a three-car pileup and a bunch of people looked at the car wreck and started chanting ‘ECW’. It’s become part of the country’s lexicon. It’s an accepted, acknowledged phrase.”
Heyman on learning to succeed and not fail:
“You cannot achieve success without the risk of failure. And I learned a long time ago, you cannot achieve success if you fear failure. If you’re not afraid to fail, man you have a chance to succeed but you’re never gonna get there unless you risk it all the way. I was a failure. Sometimes half the fun is failing, learning from your mistakes, waking up the next morning and saying, okay watch out, here I come again. A little bit smarter, licking my wounds and really not looking forward to getting my ass kicked the way I just did yesterday. And now I’m just a little more dangerous.”
Heyman is doing promotional interviews to advertise his new documentary DVD, Ladies and Gentleman: My Name Is Paul Heyman, which was released this past Tuesday. You can read the entire article with Heyman by clicking the following link.