Paul Heyman Credits WWE For Continuing To Produce Content Through The Pandemic, Explains Why He Didn’t Introduce Lesnar At Last Year’s Mania

Paul Heyman recently appeared on the Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch where the advocate the Tribal Chief spoke on a number of different topics, most notably how the absence of a crowd at last year’s WrestleMania 36 was the core reason he didn’t do his normal introduction for Brock Lesnar in the show’s main event. Highlights are below.

Commends WWE for producing content during the pandemic:

To WWE’s massive credit, we never missed a week. We kept going through everything. We kept producing content. We are in the content creation, the content presenting, the content exploitation, the content marketing, the content sales business, and we never missed a week. Wow. It is up to us, we, the performers, to do our role in that scenario. It is a daunting task to be interacting with an audience that is not there for you to be interactive with and everything that I do is based off of the reverberations that I get from the live crowd.

Why he didn’t introduce Brock at last year’s WrestleMania:

But, when there is no live crowd, it is no longer a live performance, I am in a studio. I don’t know any musician that prefers being in a closed studio as opposed to being in a stadium full of people that are jamming with you. It’s why at last year’s WrestleMania, and the main event which was Brock Lesnar vs Drew McIntyre, when Brock and I came out to the ring, I said to Brock, I can’t announce you.’ That was our schtick. I couldn’t do it because my dance partner wasn’t there and my dance partner was the audience. I didn’t realize it until we were halfway down the aisle to the ring. It’s the difference between sex and masturbation. Sex is with somebody and it’s wonderful, and you’re making love, and it’s intimate, and it’s a give and take… Masturbation, you’re by yourself. I just couldn’t bring myself to pick up the mic and do that schtick without the audience there with me because that introduction was every bit as much about the audience doing it as me doing it. Without them, I’m just by myself. I didn’t feel it, I didn’t like it, I didn’t want it. I couldn’t do it.

(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)