Bruce Prichard, who with one exception had been with the company for 22 years, was released on Monday. He had not been at TV for the past two weeks and people were told that he was on vacation. We're told that Stephanie had been negative about him for several years now, seeing him as the chief yes-man for Vince, and to make matters worse he'd fallen out of regular daily contact with Vince. She had buried him in the past, including in front of others in the creative meetings, for what she felt were times when he was not paying attention or giving non-committal answers. She was the person who officially severed ties. In the past he had been an important cog in the creative wheel backstage, but less so of late, and being a senior member of the team he probably had a large contract that Stephanie could easily justify cutting (though he did often complain of getting a pay cut when he moved from Head of Talent Relations to creative). We're told he was supposed to attend meetings in Stamford for two weeks out of every month, but of late he'd been showing up for two days every 8 to 10 weeks. Creative was not given a reason as to why he was released. Prichard, the brother of Tom Prichard who is now working with developmental in Florida, has had numerous drug problems in the past which caused him to miss promotions (including one that would have put him in the role that Kevin Dunn eventually got as head of TV), and since 2004 he's been required to take urine tests once per week. As far as his future goes, he's very close to Jeff Jarrett since both of their wives have battled cancer. Prichard took it very, very hard when Jill Jarrett passed away and people were very worried about him, but he made it through. Depending on whether or not he'd take the likely pay cut, he could end up in TNA because God knows they need more guys that have decades of experience at this business. Prichard was always a major supporter of Undertaker and JBL, and in fact is listed as one of the VP's of JBL's company.
We are told that Stephanie has really flipped things around internally since returning from maternity leave.
According to another source, Prichard was a creative team liaison to developmental and would take trips there to avoid having to come to TV tapings. That would be one thing if tons of guys were being brought up from developmental, but that didn't happen. He heavily pushed for Roadkill to be groomed for a feud with Undertaker. Vince had him brought up to TV and found the Roadkill in the ring didn't work at all like Bruce had claimed he worked, and after one dark match that was the end of that. He was also a big proponent of Koslov, and in fact one of the original plans was to build Koslov up for squashes for a year to set up one big blowoff on PPV (which is basically what happened, although Koslov wasn't even ready for that PPV). Prichard had a reputation for killing segments on TV that he was scheduled to produce. He only had to produce backstage skits, not anything that aired on TV, so often he would get a skit that he was supposed to produce and say, "Can't that be done in the ring?" According to the source, "It would actually become a weekly joke to see how Bruce would politic to kill something so he would have to do less".
and a bit too southern neckbeard for me.
