Brian Gewirtz Says WWE Didn’t Put Mike Adamle In A Position To Succeed

Mike Adamle was regarded as a talented player in the NFL and known as a very well respected sports commentator. He was also tenured by WWE in 2008, and worked closely with ex-WWE lead writer Brian Gewirtz. There are a lot of stories about that time that have yet to surface.

Gewirtz was recently on Talk is Jericho to promote his new book, There’s Just One Problem…: True Tales from the Former, One-Time, 7th Most Powerful Person in WWE. During the podcast, Gewirtz also spoke in depth on the situation regarding Mike Adamle’s downfall.

“So taking a page from, literally, the Chris Jericho book, and knocking yourself down a level, I have the idea of Mike Adamle, the announcer, as the GM with the idea that he would be more like Michael Scott from the office. He had his own Summerfest moment when he started. He called Jeff Hardy, ‘Jeff Harvey’, live at the Royal Rumble, and fans immediately were like, ‘We hate you forever now.’ So like, what if it wasn’t a malevolent force as the GM, but it was just someone who was completely over their head and didn’t know any better and was trying to make friends with the boys, but creating disaster. It just seemed like it could be at least a different approach to the authority figure angle. But, you know, we didn’t put Mike in a position to succeed at all, because Mike is a sports broadcaster, he’s not really a character. You know, we were taking his real life foibles and kind of making it into a character. He’s a really pleasant guy and a great guy off camera and everything. But we were giving him so much exposition, and he eventually was reading it off a clipboard and everything. It was just pretty brutal, so we pivoted quickly off of that.”

After this 2008 storyline dissolved, the “Hollywood GM” era was born, as it was also noted in the podcast. Gewirtz then went on to continue his point about Adamle’s tenure in WWE.

“I proposed, like, what if it was a different WWE legend every week who is in charge? So you can have a mixture of babyface, heel, sometimes ambiguous. You don’t know what they’re going to do. Vince did like that idea. Then Stephanie added on to it and said, ‘We can even mix celebrities every now and then amongst the legends.’ For some reason, that turned into, ‘Dammit, we’ll have a celebrity every week.’ The quote was, ‘It will be like Saturday Night Live, only better.'” 

WWE has seen a lot of people flow through the commentary booth, and some haven’t been so successful. We’ll have to see if more stories are out there that we have yet to hear about this interesting time in WWE history. For more up to date wrestling news, be sure to check out Ringside News!

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