Source: WWE.com

The following clips come from an interview with Vince McMahon on WWE.com. While iMPACT Wrestling is not specifically cited and, in fact, WCW is specifically stated, this is an interesting look at how the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of WWE feels about professional wrestling competition. You may be surprised at his responses.

Speaking of Nitro, what was the best part of having prime time competition?
Generally speaking, good competition is great for a product. It keeps you on your toes, and forces you to adapt.

And Raw actually ran the competition out of business. Is that the show’s biggest accomplishment?
I don’t think we drove WCW out of business. That was certainly never our intent. That was the mindset of Ted Turner and WCW, but not WWE. See, if you spend all of your energy trying to kill the other guy, your product suffers. If you don’t kill the other guy, then he’s going to come back at you, and when he comes back, you won’t have done anything to make your house better. It’s no different than being in a fight and knowing that, if the other guy keeps on hitting you, that son of a bitch is going to wear himself out pretty fast.

So, rather than worry about WCW, you focused on how to make Monday Night Raw the best it could be?
Absolutely. I didn’t watch their stuff. Of course, I heard about it from other people, but I didn’t have time to pay much attention. I didn’t want to know what WCW was doing. I wanted to know what WWE was doing. They did everything they could to hurt us. They had the resources to attack us. We didn’t have the means to do the same thing, so we had to make ours the better product. After they had run out of ways to hurt us, they realized that they didn’t have much of a product. They blew out everything as quickly as possible, and only concerned themselves with the short-term. That worked out fine for WWE.