Heyman says he should have been able to turn the Minneapolis crowd against Brock Lesnar (w/Keller’s Analysis)

When asked if he takes the blame for what went wrong with the crowd reaction to Brock Lesnar and him for the live Raw in Minneapolis, Heyman said he shouldn’t have accepted the booking. If he could change anything, he says: “I would not have accepted the booking for Minneapolis. I would not have let Brock Lesnar appear in Minneapolis.”

He elaborated, though, that he feels he should have been able to corral the crowd and manipulate them to react the way Vince McMahon hoped.

“That’s my job,” he said. “I am supposed to take an impossible situation and make it look easy. And if I am as good as people say that I am, and I dare suggest I’m better than that, then Minneapolis would have been just another story to add to the story of Brock Lesnar and Paul Heyman. Ultimately, I failed in my task and I own up to my failures like a man and I accept them and I move forward. Lesson learned. If I’m faced with a similar situation again, I know what I would do differently but I’m surely not going to reveal it to the public because then they’ll know how I’m going to handle it.”

He provided an example of when he did turn a crowd against their initial instincts. “If I can go out in Chicago, right before WrestleMania, when C.M. Punk had just walked out and the 18,000 people in Chicago were hellbent and driven on hijacking that show — I opened the show coming out to Punk’s music, sit down in his pose, never raise my voice, shut them up, lure them in, get them to buy that I’m on their side, double cross them and sell them on Brock Lesnar versus Undertaker and shut down the CM Punk chant all without ever raising my voice — then I’m surely talented enough to go into Minneapolis and manipulate the crowd to say or do anything I want them to say or do.”

If Lesnar didn’t fight Goldberg, was there anyone in WWE that could have been matched against Lesnar instead at Survivor Series? Heyman says not one man, but perhaps five men. “If our dance card wasn’t filled by Goldberg this year, I thought the match should be Brock Lesnar versus the SmackDown roster in terms of the inter-promotional offering for Survivor Series because that could be a fair fight,” he said. “And then next year’s Survivor Series, we could do Brock Lesnar versus the Raw roster since, obviously, the Raw roster would be both jealous and envious of the ease at which Brock Lesnar would dispose of the SmackDown roster.”

Check out the full interview with Heyman largely in character talking about his client Brock Lesnar HERE.

Keller’s Analysis: It looked to me like Paul Heyman went out and did what he was told to do, and he knew it wasn’t going to work, and Lesnar knew it wasn’t going to work, and Heyman decided not to stray away from what orders he was given. Heyman, untethered and motivated, could have turned the crowd against Lesnar. What I watched wasn’t an effort to do that, though.