Eric Bischoff recently appeared on The Steve Austin Show. Here are
some highlights…
On The Rumors of WCW Being Shut Down In The
Early 1990’s: “What I saw from my perspective was that Turner
Corporate was tired of [wrestling] politics. They tried the Jim Herd experiment.
That didn’t work. They tried a couple of other variations of Jim Herd. They
tried Kip Frey. That was a disaster. They tried all these different variations
of management and leadership and I knew that Turner Corp. – I don’t remember who
told me – but I had gotten word that they were considering pulling the plug.
(pause) I said, ‘If they pull the plug, I’m going back to Minneapolis.’ So, I
threw my name in the hat. I had heard they were looking for an executive
producer – they tried the Bill Watts thing – and they wanted to get away from
wrestling people. They wanted someone to run the company who understood the
entertainment business, but wasn’t so entrenched in wrestling that they were
sucked into the politics of it.”
On Pitching Himself To Turner
Executives: “I was passionate and I felt it. I believed in it. I
believed in myself. I’ve been passionate about wrestling since I was a little
kid and I was passionate about my approach to it. And the solution that I had,
especially given that Turner had identified as their problem, which was not
wanting any more wrestling guys running a television company. So, it
worked.”
On His Vision To Make WCW The Top Wrestling Promotion
In The World: “The vision was to broaden it because – if you go back
in time and look at what WCW was and where it existed in that moment of time
where I had that opportunity, it was considered a very small, third-rate, kind
of Southern, hereditary aspects of the NWA and Crocket regional promotion, and
they were trying to compete with the WWF at the time. So, if you want to compete
at their level, you have to be able to play at their level. So, my approach was
to mainstream it and to make it feel bigger and make it feel more mainstream and
less regional.”
