Former WCW President and infamous Monday Night RAW General Manager Eric Bischoff recently sat down with Wrestling Inc. to discuss his return at the RAW 25th Anniversary show last month, his thoughts on today’s wrestling landscape, IMPACT Wrestling as a “number two” promotion, and a whole lot more.
On if he misses being a full-time part of the wrestling business:
First and foremost I miss the creative process, which includes not only creating storylines and trying to develop characters, and the obvious; but I really miss directing and producing talent. That’s fun for me. Especially younger talent, or talent that’s considered middle-of-the-road talent that hasn’t quite broken through yet. When it comes to interviews and their characters communicating with the audience, I love that.”
“And I do love the reaction from the crowd, whether it’s a good reaction or a positive reaction like I received [at the RAW 25th Anniversary show], or if it’s my ability to create heat, because that’s how I made my money over the largest portion of my career as a character.”
On people considering IMPACT Wrestling the #2 promotion behind WWE while he and Hulk Hogan were a part of TNA:
“Were we a legitimate number two? There’s an old saying: ‘numbers lie, and liars use numbers.’ I guess in one sense you could suggest that for a period of time TNA could have been considered by some to be number two. But the difference between number one and number two was the equivalent of the distance between number one and number 222. We may have been number two, but number one wasn’t even on the horizon.”
On IMPACT Wrestling ever growing beyond a “niche” product, and the creative figureheads behind today’s promotion:
“At the risk of sounding cynical or derisive, which I don’t mean to be, there’s nobody at IMPACT Wrestling or Anthem Sports that has the vision, the knowledge, the experience or the ability to see an opportunity that would allow them to create a brand, or a product that would be different enough to grow an audience, and catch the audience’s imagination, while simultaneously – and this is the art within the art – not turning off the existing fanbase.”
“That takes a unique talent and vision, and more importantly a real understand of not only the ‘wrassling business’ – there are people there at Anthem that have spent a cup of coffee in a small closet of the wrestling business, in their own little world. And again I know that sounds derisive, but I’m trying to paint a picture here. The people that are involved in it have never played on a large stage. They’ve never dealt with major networks, or faced the challenge of appealing to a large audience.”
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“None of them have ever really dealt with the wrestling business on a major scale, so it’s impossible for them to have the knowledge because they’ve never done it. They’ve never been exposed to it. Likely they’ve never even been in a room where it’s been discussed. They probably haven’t even had the privilege of bringing coffee to a room full of executives to overhear the business of the business being discussed. As negative as that sounds, what I’m really trying to say is that there’s nobody there who has the background or experience to see that opportunity.”
On the impetus of the NWO and learning from the methodology of Japanese wrestling:
“Had Scott [Hall] and Kevin [Nash] not made their way over to WCW I don’t think I would have pulled the trigger on the NWO storyline. I had the idea, or the framework of the idea, in my head for quite some time. Despite what people think they know, or what people have read based on what other people who think they know have said, I didn’t rip the idea off from anybody in New Japan. I didn’t copy anything that I saw when I was doing business in Japan. But what I did learn in Japan was the psychology behind reality-based storylines.”
“I studied closely for a year or 18 months the difference between the way the product in the U.S. is promoted at every level, and the way it was promoted in Japan. And I noticed the difference in promotion manifesting itself in the way that the audience perceived it, and the way that the local media supported the product. I would go over to Japan and be a part of their big New Year’s Eve show on a Saturday night for example, and by Sunday morning it was [making]headlines in the Tokyo newspaper.”
“At that time back in the 90s nobody was covering wrestling. You almost had a hard time buying coverage of pro wrestling, outside of the wrestling magazines. So I studied that phenomenon pretty closely, and coming away from that experience in Japan I knew that when the opportunity was right, I wanted to create a storyline that had that sense of reality and believability in it, so that the media and the audience would respond accordingly.”
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