Road Dogg shoots on the “frustrating” end to his first run as creative writer for WWE Smackdown

WWE Hall of Famer “Road Dogg” Brian James did an interview with Chris Van Vliet. Road Dogg discussed his first stint as a creative writer for Smackdown from 2017 to 2019 and here are the highlights courtesy of ChrisVanVliet.com…

On a storyline he pushed that never went through: “I’ll tell you this, and I’d love to have a conversation with you about it. It worked out exactly how it was supposed to work out, but I was wrong. I wanted Big E to win the title at Kofi Mania. I thought Big E was the guy, and a guy on my writing team who now writes for NXT said, ‘You’re wrong boss. You’re wrong. It’s Kofi.’ And I didn’t realize that Kofi had such a personal connection with the fan base. I was just looking for who’s the next guy and I didn’t think oh, the guy’s sitting right here. I was trying to make this guy over here and, yeah, never been so happy to be wrong though. What a moment. You can go back in time and fuss about what happened the next week or the next year or whatever. Who cares? Kofi won the title at WrestleMania, and nobody can ever take that away. Big E had his moment. It was gonna come around, just it wasn’t time yet. I saw something that it was there. It just wasn’t time yet. The timing was Kofi. It was Kofi time and have I never been so happy to be wrong and couldn’t be more happy for the guy it happened for too. If I was writing again, we’d do it one more time, because I think it would work again. I 100% think it would work again.”

On sudden creative changes: “That’s the WrestleMania that broke me, that kind of broke my spirit and was the kind of one where I went home after that. There was a lot of all that leading up to it, a lot of talk about I’d been writing the show for a while, and it had been successful and not successful and successful. We were in a good place with it. But the times they were a changing and I felt a little less like it was my show, and when I fought for it I always lost. It was just one of those things where I said, Yeah, I’m done fighting this fight. It was really fun at first. I feel like I had a lot of creative freedom at first. I don’t know if you remember, but that first Backlash when Dean Ambrose was the SmackDown Champion, and it was, and it was Heath Slater and Rhino were the Tag Team Champions. It was a fun little wrestling show, a little two-hour fun wrestling show that was gaining some traction, and then it just felt like it drew the attention of everybody, then everybody wanted to play, and the sandbox that was mine was not mine anymore. That’s hard. I knew it wasn’t my show. I know the deal. But if I’m the head writer and this is my creative that I’d like to close the show ending like this, on the build-up to that Kofi Mania, I’d like to end it like this, and I don’t get good reasons why we not doing that. And again, me maybe being cocky and narcissistic. I think I know better than everybody. But here’s the truth about me, and this is cocky and narcissistic. I’m good at this wrestling crap. I’m not good at the physical aspects of it, but I’m good at putting it together. I’m good at thinking about what will get good reactions. I’m good at it. I know what I come up with for this segment, for this show, is gonna work. I know that for a fact. What you come up with the show, I don’t know if it’s gonna work. I can watch it work and go like, Damn dude, good. That was awesome. It worked, but I didn’t know it was gonna work because it wasn’t mine. But because I know how to go out there and make the people talk about me for a second, or get their attention and keep it for a minute I feel like I can do the same here, and I wasn’t being given that opportunity at the end. And so it was frustrating. It was creatively frustrating. And I think that’s the maybe creatively frustrating should be the era of that, because I’m sure I wasn’t alone in that.”