He was worried that McMahon was panicking, reacting too much to what was happening down in Atlanta. Granted it was hard not to worry when, as recently as the summer of 1997, Raw’s ratings had dipped below the 1.5 mark and the company was losing $135,000 a week. It had gotten so bad that watercoolers were taken out of the executive offices. But Cornette was sure that things would turn around without turning Raw into an apocalyptic freak show.And that’s exactly what he feared was happening as McMahon began to take more cues from a pushy new writer. Vince Russo was one of the WWF’s most ardent defenders in New York when he worked as the host of an AM radio show that covered wrestling, and he’d managed to parlay that support into a job writing for the WWF’s magazines. A driven man with long hair, lean features, and a tough-guy accent, he would sit for hours outside his boss’s office, waiting for him to come out so he could pitch ideas.And what Russo was pitching seemed to be working.
