Ken Anderson On What Frustrates Him About WWE, Differences Between WWE & TNA, Advice From Heyman

Ken Anderson was a guest on the Stone Cold Steve Austin podcast where he discussed a variety of topics, including his thoughts on WWE’s current product and what frustrates him.

Anderson worked in WWE as Mr.Kennedy and he told Austin the differences between WWE and TNA as well as some advice he received from Paul Heyman.

Below are some highlights from the interview, with a h/t to WrestlingInc.com for the quotes.

What Frustrates Him About WWE

“The thing that’s frustrating to me is that it seems to me that guys are told, and girls are told, exactly what to do paint-by-numbers. It’s not ‘just go out there and try some stuff and see what works and what doesn’t work’ and it’s just people are handed a script and told, ‘say this exactly verbatim.’ That’s what’s frustrating to me. I wish more people were given the opportunity to fail on their own or succeed on their own. That’s the only thing that really frustrates me.” 

Differences Between WWE & TNA

“When I was at the WWE, it felt like, at least towards the end, that everybody was walking around on eggshells. Everybody was worried that ‘tomorrow might be my last day if I say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, I’m going to get fired.’ When I got to TNA… And I think that’s the sort of management style of WWE. It’s the way they always wanted everybody to be sort of on edge. When I got to TNA, it felt like, ‘go out there and do your job and do it to the best of your ability.’ Cool. There weren’t any politics or anything like that in TNA and the biggest thing, the biggest difference, for me was Eric Bischoff was a big part of me coming to TNA. Like, and when I got there, he said, ‘I know that they sort of hamstringing you, to a degree, in WWE and telling you, ‘this is what you have to say – this is when you say it,’ he said, ‘I’m just going to give you bullet points. I don’t care how you get there, just here’s this main point we want to get to. You just figure out how Ken Anderson is going to get us there.”

Advice From Paul Heyman

The interesting thing was Vince Russo and whoever else was writing at the time, would hand me a script and a lot of the times, I would call Paul Heyman. I was really good friends with Paul and I would say, ‘here’s what they got for me, here’s what I’m thinking, what do you think?’ and a lot of times, he would really help me out and come up with a better way to say everything and do it, so Paul actually wrote a lot of my stuff at TNA when I first started.”