Bryan Alvarez talks upcoming “100 Things” book for WWE fans

PC: The dedication at the beginning simply says “To Vince,” is that to Vince McMahon, Vince Verhei, or Vince Russo?

BA: It’s Vince McMahon. You know, the original Death of WCW, because it was basically a story of how not to kill your wrestling promotion, I dedicated the original to Hunter and Steph. Just the first names. I figured everybody would know who Hunter and Steph were. Then when we did the anniversary edition. I mean, Impact with Dixie Carter was still around, and so that one I dedicated to Dixie and Bob because they needed it more than Hunter and Steph did at the time.

And this one here wasn’t really like The Death of WCW, I mean the company is in a shambles right now, but like they’re not going out of business. They have more money than they’ll ever even know what to do with. So this wasn’t so much like, hey Vince your company’s gonna die, it’s to you this time. This was, I mean at the end of the day, WWE is Vince’s company and his life and his legacy and everything. So, essentially I wrote a book about everything about WWE, and so it’s to Vince. It’s his book.

PC: What was the decision process like in deciding what to include in the list?

BA: So, they basically said to me, because they do a lot of “100 Things” books. And they said, the first thing that you should do is make the list. That’s like number one. I think I’d already written Vince McMahon or something like that, and they said just sit down, and if you write the list, the rest of it is gonna be much easier.

So, I sat down and I put together the list relatively quickly. And I think originally I maybe had, I don’t know, 110. And I had a bunch of people that I sent the list to, and I said, “what do you think of this list? What am I missing? What can I take out?” And you know, the four or five of us kind of collaborated. It was like an Excel, or what is it, Google Docs?

We just kind of went through and pared it down, and I actually ended, when we were all done, I had 95. Because the whole idea was when I finish writing the 95, it’s possible that I’m gonna remember something and go “oh my god, I need to do an entry for Bruno Sammartino” or something totally obvious, so I left five open.

And I sent it all to them and I said here’s 95, and if you guys can think of anything, or if any of the people I sent it to look at can think of anything, we had five more slots to do. And that was it. I did the last five slots, and the book was done.

PC: Was there anything that got cut from the list that you wish could have been included?

BA: No. In fact, I really had to struggle to get the last few. Because at about 97 or so, I mean there’s always more that you could do, but if you read it, anything that I didn’t put as part of the list, like number 98 or whatever, I mean whatever that was it probably was mentioned somewhere else in the book.

I don’t think there was anything that was like a big giant glaring omission. If there was, maybe it’ll be 101 Things next time. But I felt after like 97, 98, that I’d pretty much covered everything. And then it was sort of like, “aw, what can I do for two more.” And then we kind of racked our brains and came up with, The Intercontinental Title I think is 99, and 100 is just, there is actually wrestling outside of WWE.

Which I wasn’t even gonna do, but the final final deadline was like in the Spring, when WWE TV had just gotten so horrible. And I was like, you know what, I’m just gonna tell people that this ain’t the be all and end all, and there’s other stuff if you’re getting frustrated.