As promised earlier this week, I will relate some of the experiences I had with Kevin Nash, Vince Russo and Bill Goldberg during my stint as WCW Magazine editor in 2000-01. All three were mentioned on WWE 24/7 On Demand’s Legends of Wrestling as people who had a lot of heat backstage.

On Monday, I wrote that the problems Lex Luger and Buff Bagwell had with the magazine were that they either weren’t in it enough or they weren’t featured prominently enough when they were in it. Nash was difficult for the exact opposite reason. He didn’t want to be in it.

People at the magazine had forewarned me when I first took the job that Nash probably wouldn’t give me the time of day. Now, there also were plenty of wrestlers as well as employees in the office at WCW who swore that Nash was a great guy. And he was – if he invited you to be in his inner circle. Apparently, the guy I replaced as editor – he was transferred to another department within the company – was a buddy of Nash’s. So, in Nash’s view, I stole his buddy’s job. Therefore, in protest, he would not cooperate with the magazine in general and me specifically. It didn’t help my cause that Nash also didn’t care for my boss, the publisher of the magazine, because Nash felt he had treated his buddy unfairly.

I had no dealings with Nash during my first few months there, but eventually the time came when I needed to interview him. In every issue, I conducted a lengthy, in-depth Q&A with one of WCW’s top stars, and it was Nash’s turn. I heard through the grapevine that Nash would refuse to do it. The publisher suggested that perhaps, just for this one issue, we should let Mark Madden do the Q&A. Madden was a WCW television commentator and he also wrote for the magazine. More importantly, he was one of Big Kev’s peeps. I felt as if I had to make a stand. I had done all the other interviews, and I was going to do this one, too.

I approached Nash backstage before a show and politely asked if he could give me some of his time for the interview. “I don’t do anything for the [expletive] magazine,” he growled. “You guys can’t even get my age right, so why should I talk to you?” It seems that in a previous issue of the magazine – before I was even there – Nash’s age was reported incorrectly. It listed him as being one year older than he really was. I couldn’t believe a 42-year-old man – oops, I mean 41 – was acting like such a spoiled brat. I tried to plead my case, but he never even made eye contact with me. “I’m taking a shower,” Nash said as he walked away.

I was not going to give up, however. It was completely unacceptable to me that a guy making seven figures would refuse a reasonable request from a magazine published by the company that was paying him all that money. A couple weeks before that incident, Russo, the head of the creative team, had met with WCW employees from publishing, public relations, marketing and other departments to address concerns that some of the talent was uncooperative with those of us trying to do our jobs. Russo, in full pep-talk mode, said that it was going to be a new day in WCW, and if any wrestler refused to do something, we should go to Russo directly and he would take care of it.

So I went right to Russo and told him what had happened. He said he would talk to Nash. I watched Russo follow Nash into a room, and several minutes later, Russo came out and walked up to me. “OK, he’s waiting for you. He’ll do the interview,” Russo said.

Obviously, it was a little uncomfortable interviewing Nash after having to get Russo involved. And knowing Nash’s reputation for being a wise guy, I expected him to give me one-word answers and to cut the interview short, but to his credit, he was very professional and it turned out to be a really good Q&A. However, I never did get an invitation to join “Team Big Sexy,” as he called his clique. In fact, Nash went right back to ignoring me, even if we walked right past each other in the hallway. Oh well.

As for Russo and Goldberg, I never had any heat with either one of them. My problem with Russo wasn’t that he was a bad guy, it’s that he was touted as a creative genius and he was anything but – at least from what I saw in WCW. I could fill several blog entries recounting Russo’s scatter-brained booking, but much of that is already well documented.

Some of Russo’s concepts that didn’t make it to television were priceless, and there are two that immediately come to mind. In company meetings, Russo discussed in great detail his plan to do a “Who Wants to Marry a Sports Entertainer” segment, in which Glenn “Disco Inferno” Gilbertti would actually marry a woman who wins a contest. His other big idea was to pay O.J. Simpson $1 million to take a lie detector test on a WCW pay-per-view.

My favorite Russo story, however, concerns the time he said in a meeting that he was going to take himself off of television as a character. Well, he might have been off for a couple weeks, but then he not only was back on TV, but he was on more than ever and he even booked himself to win the WCW world title. At a subsequent meeting, someone reminded him of his vow to remove himself from TV. His response sounded like a line from The Godfather: Part III. “I know,” he said in his think New York accent. “Every time I try, they keep pulling me back into it.” No one said anything, but I remember thinking at the time, “They? Who are they? You’re the one writing the show!”

Goldberg was described on Legends of Wrestling as a great guy away from the business, but a bad guy to deal with during his WWE run. I can’t speak to that, but whenever I dealt with him in WCW, he was cooperative and, for the most part, friendly, although he probably did take himself a bit too seriously at times. The thing with Goldberg was that he did not suffer fools easily – and there was no shortage of fools in WCW. But if he thought you were competent at your job, whether you were a magazine editor or a public relations person or whatever, then you had his respect.