Bill Watts
By Scott Keith on September 16, 2020
Hi Scott,
I primarily know Bill Watts from his short run at WCW. What were his strengths as the booker at Mid-South? Would he have been able to make a success of WCW if he had stayed on or was his thinking too behind the times by then? I am guessing the failed attempt to get Ron Simmons over as world champ did not help.
He wasn’t ever really “booker” because he was the big picture guy like Vince. He had guys like Bill Dundee or Dick Slater doing the day to day booking for him. Same with WCW. He was more about “This is the direction I want things to go” as I understand it. We just say “Watts wanted…” as shorthand for him filtering his decisions through the actual booker.
As for WCW, no, he never would have been a success because that’s not what they wanted from him. They wanted expenses brought down drastically (done and done!) and contracts under control (which they were) so the company stopped bleeding money. Really anything else was gravy but Watts still managed to fuck it up anyway with the racial stuff. But they were never going to succeed past a certain level because Bill didn’t have the backing of TBS to do so.
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