There’s been a flurry of changes in WWE over the past few weeks, with the biggest shake-up being Vince McMahon’s retirement, though that might not be the last major change. Recent reports have suggested that Executive Producer and Chief of Global Television Distribution Kevin Dunn might also be on the way out of the company, and a story regarding Dunn saying Becky Lynch wasn’t attractive enough to be SmackDown Women’s Champion has since started making the rounds. Now Freddie Prinze Jr, who previously worked as a writer for WWE, has added some fuel to that fire during the latest episode of his Wrestling With Freddie podcast, saying that Dunn could make six weeks of a story vanish by saying someone wasn’t pretty.
“It’s a very random low-key era where the numbers weren’t great and people missed out on a few wrestlers peaks like the Beth Phoenix’s of the world. Like she kind of had her peak. It was at a time where Total Divas wasn’t a thing yet, so the women didn’t get that much love. So if she was gonna get any time as a Champion, which she should have had a lot of they’re like, ‘Well, we gotta pair with Santino.’ So then she had like a thing with Santino where they were, they both had a title and Santino would do his comedy stuff and then she would save him when he would like run like a girl,” Prinze Jr. said. “So it was this weird, low-key, under-the-radar time where we were all kind of held hostage by the whims of Vince and Kevin Dunn, man. One guy who loves wrestling right with all his heart, more than his family, more than his dogs, and then this other guy who I never got the sense liked wrestling at all.”
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Prinze Jr. seems to be referring to Dunn with that last part, and that’s when he talked about what it was like pitching stories and ideas to Dunn when he didn’t think a woman was pretty enough, describing it as “throwing sand against a tidal wave.”
“He was trying to turn it into the NFL, or Tyson vs. Holyfield, which is cool, man. But it wasn’t wrestling. So, you just see this room of, they’re probably 20 writers when I worked there, and it was just 20 writers throwing sand against a tidal wave,” Prinze Jr said. “You could pitch for 20 minutes. Kevin would be like,’ Well, I don’t think she’s pretty,’ and all of a sudden, like six weeks of story, was just gone.”
“It’s like, ‘Well, our champ has to be pretty.’ it’s like, ‘Yo, do you think Mankind was pretty?’ You could throw out a number of how many less-than-handsome male champions have existed, and I shall exceed it. But it would be dead it would just be dead because he would say one thing.,” Prinze Jr. said.
Reports have suggested that Stephanie McMahon and Triple H aren’t exactly on the same page with Dunn, and that perhaps he could end up leaving WWE at some point over the next year. We’ll have to wait and see how that all unfolds, especially now that Stephanie is Co-CEO of WWE and Triple H is EVP and running creative.
H/T Fightful
