Talking on his latest episode of Wrestling with Freddie” podcast, Freddie Prinze Jr. discussed what Kevin Dunn looks for in female champions in WWE.
“When Beth Phoenix was in her prime, Total Divas wasn’t a thing yet,” Prinze Jr. recalled. “Women didn’t get that much love, so if she was going to get any [air] time as champion, which she should have had a lot of, they’d be like, ‘oh, we have to pair her with Santino.’ So then she had a thing with Santino where they both had a title.”
“It was a weird time where we were all kinda held hostage by the whims of Vince [McMahon] and Kevin Dunn. One guy who loves wrestling with all his heart – more than his family, more than anything in the world. And this other guy who I never got the sense liked wrestling at all. He was trying to turn it more into the NFL or Tyson vs. Holyfield, which is cool, but it wasn’t like wrestling.”
“So, you just see this room of like 20 writers throwing sand against the tidal wave. Bro, you could pitch for 20 minutes, and Kevin will be like, ‘I don’t think she’s pretty.’ And all of a sudden, six weeks of story would just be gone. And Dunn would be like, ‘Our champion has to be pretty.’ I’d ask him, ‘Did you think Mankind was pretty?’”
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