Recap of Kevin Kelly on Get In The Ring radio
Submitted by Calvin Martin on Monday, September 22, 2003 at 1:07 PM EST



Sir Adam sent in the following:

A lot of people can speculate about the political situation of the WWE, but GIR
had someone on the show this week that really witnessed it. Kevin Kelly, a 7
year WWE employee talked about it all this week right after the boys settled
their feud with SD Jones in a heartwarming segment. Listen to the archive at
http://www.getinthering.tv and tune in live every Sunday at 7pm Eastern in NY 540 AM
WLIE and streamed live on http://www.wlie.com

-Kevin Kelly joins the show and right off the bat talk turns to SD Jones, and
how the boys just made peace with him. Then Phantom awkwardly asks Kevin if he
left WWE or was fired, to which Kevin confirms he was fired on March 21st 2003.
He was with the company for 7 years, and Sir Adam says “it sucks” that he got
fired. He puts over Kevin as an employee who seemed to contribute allot to the
WWE product, and that there are some others that probably could’ve been let go
before him. Kelly says it was one of the things that left him scratching his
head, because he saw many people come into the company over the years that
didn’t really respect wrestling the way he did. He never said a name, but said
“they weren’t wrestling people, I’d say ‘hey did you watch the show last night?’
‘No,’ ‘well why not?’ ‘I don’t like wrestling’, I can’t tell you how many
times I heard that over the years.”

-Sir Adam asks what the WWE is looking for when they post job openings for
writers, because he feels most of the people who get the jobs are Hollywood
b-team players. Kelly says they continue to look for the same types of people,
until they get one who fits. “You’re trying to find the right mix of
players…they are reevaluating everything constantly.” Phantom asks if his
firing was a shock, Kelly replies “the timing was, because we were two weeks out
of Wrestlemania, and what I usually did was write the voiceover notes for the
announcers, which usually turns out looking like a press kit. Probably 30 pages
of documentation, stats on each wrestler, and I noticed the announcers would
rely on that heavily, some more than others.” That was one of the things that
bothered Kelly that he didn’t have the chance to do that this year, and he
didn’t purchase Wrestlemania this year, “because it was 40 bucks, and I just got
sacked”. Phantom talks about how this year the WWE extended invites to all the
Wrestling Press for a pre-Mania conference in NY, and says it was the first time
he was treated with some semblance of respect by the WWE. Kelly says, that’s
the way it should be, invites sent out to all media outlets. Talk turns to the
WWE and why they love getting their guys on mainstream media outlets such as the
Byron Allen show, and how they don’t allow them to go on fine shows such as Get
in the Ring. Kelly says that the “braintrust” in the WWE believes that the core
wrestling audience will always be there, “they feel like they could put a WWE
logo on the bottom of TV test patterns and wrestling fans will still
watch….Listen this is not what I believe, I believe that if you have good
quality wrestling first and foremost, then good storylines you have a winning
formula, but it’s always about the wrestling.”

-Sir Adam asks if Kelly was encouraged to send ideas to the writing department,
Kelly said he was always encouraged to do so, but his ideas were never followed
up on by the staff. “99.9% of the time, they might be read, and you’d get an
email saying thanks for the idea, of course they wouldn’t use them.” Kevin
Kelly feels responsible for “ruining the wrestling world” because the one idea
he sent in that the WWE did use was the marriage of Stephanie McMahon and HHH,
and Stephanie turning on Test several years ago.

-Phantom reveals that he once reached out to Kevin because he hated his last day
job so much. He felt that Kevin seemed to be the most approachable of the WWE
staff, and sent him some ideas and tried to get into the company thorough Kelly.
While the Phantom felt that Kelly genuinely wanted the help him, was
apprehensive about doing so, and asks “Is Big Brother always watching you
there?” Kevin responds, “It’s difficult when you have to deal with anything
involving Human Resources….. when it was just strictly, ‘let’s create, let’s
have fun, let’s tell some stories and entertain’, easy simple, the more
complicated you make the business, through the business structure the harder it
is to get things done.” Kelly then explains the red tape involved in getting an
idea from an outside source, and how he had to CC so many people and if you
forgot to CC one person “you’d get an email saying ‘why didn’t you CC me?’”
Phantom then says that Kelly got fired just a few weeks after they traded
emails, and at the time hoped it wasn’t because they were conversing to which
Kelly replies “You are powerful, but not that powerful.”

-Kevin Kelly laughs when Sir Adam says that the WWE “obviously puts some money
into Byte This”, Kelly says “the only thing we had was access to great guests”.
Phantom brings up the Steve Austin appearance on Byte This before his 8 months
hiatus last year, and how fascinating it was to listen to a Superstar be dead
honest with the way he felt about the WWE product. “I had to give him the
chance to talk his way out of it…give him the opportunity to say he was
misquoted…if he said all of that negative stuff, you don’t need me saying ‘well
Steve you said this’ no, let him talk about it himself”. Then Kelly talks about
how they turned around and used the Byte This content on Confidential “which
really made me proud”. Phantom asks if Kelly thinks he was let go because his
philosophy of “more insider stuff” was opposite from WWE’s “less insider stuff”
philosophy. Pointing to his stint as producer of Confidential and how it seemed
like during his watch there was more “inside” subjects. Kelly says he “wanted
to do more cross promotion, using the website, Byte this , and Confidential to
progress storylines”…Kevin puts over the efforts of the crew of Confidential and
says he used to come up with the ideas for shows but names producers and editors
that make the show “as good as it is, and it’s a shame not more people watch it.”

-Kelly says the talent always responded positively to all of his work in WWE,
but says one time he had words with Steve Austin in 1998. During the
pre-Wrestlemania hype, Kelly did an article in the WWE magazine about Austin and
brought up all the injuries he’s suffered over the years. Austin felt that
those injuries wouldn’t be an issue and took offense to Kelly laundry listing
them, Kelly explained his point that his win would even be more heroic to the
reader when they read just exactly what he had to overcome to get to where he
was. Kelly said that there was always a mutual respect between he and the
talent, and that he felt allot of the underused guys would go to him to voice
their concerns. He wasn’t known as a “stooge” who would tell the front office
when someone was complaining.

-Kelly knows that wrestling locker rooms have a tendency to thrive on
controversy. “They love the dirt, it’s like a fraternity environment….
Everybody’s in your business, that’s one of the more problematic things that the
Superstars have to deal with when their on the road”. Sir Adam asks if radio
shows such as GIR are brought up allot if a Superstar says something on it. “IF
a Superstar is quoted with saying something that another takes offense to, you
will hear about it.” Kelly says that the recent fight between Shane Helms and
Rodney Mack is probably going to be the talk of the locker room for a few weeks.
“Now Hurricane is 0-2 in wrestling fights, didn’t he get beat up by Buff Bagwell
a few years ago?” To which the boys say he hit Buff with a frozen water bottle,
Kelly then responds, “Yeah he’s a real tough guy… once everything is settled the
fights become a running locker room joke.”

-On hazing: “one person can consider these pranks good fun while another
considers it hazing. The line changes from person to person…I can tell you in
all the time I’ve known Bradshaw he’s never done anything to intentionally hurt
someone, it’s always in fun. The thing he does is give you a big Texas slap on
the back, it might sting a little bit but that’s just him. If you went up to
him and said hey John please don’t do that to me anymore, he’d say fine.”

-Kelly talks about “a disturbed young man” who has a Kevin Kelly fansite. “The
good thing is that he’s in England and can’t stalk my family”.

-Kelly loved when he used to do the hermaphrodite bit with the Rock. It never
bothered him, Kevin believes that Rock’s success as a Hollywood actor all hinges
upon how well “the Rundown” does at the box office, because when he was
successful with the Mummy/Scorpion King wrestling was hot, it isn’t anymore.

-Kelly feels it’s a mistake to use the McMahons so much on WWE TV these days.
“it’s alienating new fans, and taking airtime away from guys who could carry the
company in a few years when wrestling becomes hot again.” Phantom asks if the
McMahon kids are forced into the spotlight by Vince or if they actually seek it
themselves, Kelly says “With Shane, he’ll do whatever is asked of him but I
don’t see him as someone who likes the spotlight. Stephanie seeks it out I
really believe she enjoys being Stephanie Mcmahon the TV character.” Kelly
hated when HHH was handed a championship belt, “I was off the road for a while,
but I know when Stephanie took over the creative team, that’s when it started to
spiral out of control. I know the creative team tried to get RVD and Kane to be
victorious over HHH for the title. HHH told vetoed the ideas because he was
‘better than both of them’” Kelly said he might have a point, “but hello it’s
fake! It’s a work!”

-Kelly still lives in Connecticut and works for New England Championship
wrestling, and Jim Kettner’s ECWA Delaware Fed. Who he puts over as the
“standard to which all other indys are based.” Kelly said the WWE gave him 4
months of severance pay, “so I can’t complain”, Kelly was sent to a resume
writing course by the WWE, and that another guy was a WWE accountant with the
company for 20 years, another guy in the TV studio for 15 years. He feels that
the WWE had a business model that counted on the XFL being successful and when
it wasn’t jobs had to be cut. He thought when Vince attacked Bob Costas after
his XFL questions, it was a case of the real person being taken over by his TV
character.

Next week PWI's Harry Burkett discusses the annual PWI top 500 wrestler issue,
more on the SD Jones story learned minutes after the show went off the air and surprise guests!


http://www.getinthering.tv








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