MVP Interview

MVP recently spoke about his goals in TNA and more. Here are the highlights…

On his goals for TNA: "WWE is a spectacular company, and their market saturation and visibility is monstrous, but the most prosperous time during the history of wrestling was during the Monday Night Wars when WWF was going head-to-head with WCW. You had 12 million people a week tuning in to watch wrestling, and the fans benefited as well as the wrestlers. TNA is a smaller company and doesn't have the outreach and audience that WWE does, but I'd like to try, along with some of the other guys, to move the needle a little bit, and try to create something where fans can go 'Hey, this is really cool, there's something going on over here that we can watch as well,' because I firmly believe that there's room for two big dogs in the yard."

On the apparent TNA departures of Hulk Hogan and Sting: "While it's sad to see them go, it's also tremendously exciting to see that void filled by new stars who are stepping up and working hard to try to become legends in their own right."

On joining WWE in 2006: "When I conceived the MVP character and pitched it to WWE, they liked it and hired me for the character. So I knew coming in that there were big plans for me, and the only way that character would work was if it was done to the extent it was. It had to be a big grandiose figure, and I had to be able to fit the bill to make that character work."

On Chris Benoit: "When I got signed, we traveled together, we trained together, and he was hugely responsible for my success. Of course, you can't condone what he did, but I tell people all the time, there's an issue with mental illness. There's a stigma attached to it. If someone has cancer, we feel sorry for them, but if somebody has a mental breakdown, we don't feel the same way. All those negative connotations make people sometimes not want to get help if there's something going wrong. What Chris did was horrible, it was tragic, but I knew him personally, and I knew that he loved his wife and child, and I had been to that home and I had interacted with them personally."

On WWE including Benoit footage on the Network: "I think that's a good thing, because regardless of what happened out of the ring, he is without question one of the best in-ring technicians that ever existed. So, if you're a fan of wrestling then you have to be a fan of Chris Benoit the wrestler, and maybe not so much Chris Benoit the tragic murderer."