Paul Heyman Recalls How He Was Originally Paired With Brock Lesnar In The Early 2000s

Paul Heyman discusses how he became Brock Lesnar’s advocate.

When Brock Lesnar exploded onto the WWE scene in the early 2000s, it was clear that he was being groomed for big things in the company. Then, when he was paired with Paul Heyman, this was only heightened.

While speaking on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast, Paul Heyman discussed Brock’s first run in WWE in the early 2000s and revealed how he came to be Brock Lesnar’s manager.

“So I went to Vince and I said, Taz brought me Brock Lesnar. ‘Oh, yeah. Keep an eye on him. I’m wondering what you think of him.’ ‘I’ll tell you two things. Number one, I think he’s the next big thing and number two, we are screwing this up.’ ‘How are we screwing this up? I started telling him what the advice was and he goes, ‘Oh, God damn Paul. Get involved in this right now.’ I said, ‘You want me to produce him?’ ‘Yea, you take over. He’s yours.’ ‘Okay.’ So I started lining up his matches. Here’s what I want you to do and here’s how I want you to display it. I put together a couple of matches of his. It was two that week and I think maybe two the next. The opponents were the same, Spike Dudley and Funaki because I knew they would make him look like what he needed to look like.”

The night before Mania, Vince comes to me and he says, ‘I’m not going to put you with Benoit.’ I’m like, thank God I’m not on television. I didn’t want to go back on TV. I was like, okay, that’s great. Thank you. All right, I found peace in my ability to pull out of the public eye. He says, ‘I’m going to put you with Brock Lesnar’, and I just said, Bingo. Okay, money. Oh, my God. You just gave me a completely new life because I knew, oh my god, you want me to talk for this guy? Okay, this is the easiest job in the world.”

The decision was made to start him the day after Mania and let his first Mania be in the main event a year later and that was supposed to be for the title, but we fast tracked that. We got the title on him by SummerSlam. We were just moving and Dwayne Johnson was going off to Hollywood, so the timing was perfect for us and Steve Austin had left. So it was, wow, we were going to anoint the next big thing. So the first promo that I did with him, I called Brock the next big thing. We’re on the jet that night and Vince turned to me and he goes, ‘What did you call him?’ I said, ‘I called him the next big thing. Brock Lesnar’ and he said, ‘That’s terrible.’ Why would you call him that?’ ‘Well, because he’s the next big thing.’ ‘Terrible name. Why would you stick that on him? Oh, God, people are gonna vomit all over that.’ Thank God by the next week, there were signs in the crowd, the next big thing, and it caught on.”

Paul Heyman

In 2023, Paul Heyman and Brock Lesnar are no longer aligned as Heyman would turn on Lesnar in favor of his Tribal Chief, Roman Reigns. Meanwhile, Brock is still in the middle of a lengthy feud with Cody Rhodes, defeating The American Nightmare at WWE Night Of Champions a few short weeks ago.

H/T to Ringside News

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