Former WCW President Eric Bischoff spoke to AlternativeNation.net this week about a number of topics, including David Arquette’s WCW Title win, how Vince Russo analyzes ratings, Triple H’s leadership in WWE, Randy Savage’s fallout with WWE, Global Force Wrestling and more. Here are some highlights of what he said about:
Randy Savage’s Fallout With Vince McMahon:
“I think the general attitudes, and feelings – I don’t want to suggest I know Vince McMahon, because I don’t. I’ve met him, I’ve worked with him, I’ve had some good conversations with him. I have what I think is a pretty good perspective and read on him, but by no means do I really know him or understand him completely, but I think at his core, Vince is a very loyal person. He understands the nature of the business, and the mentality in it. There have been so many times where people who have left, or left under good circumstances, or in many cases have done things that were pretty shitty to him, he’s brought them back, and given them a soft place to land. But, you don’t know that, until you land there (laughs), you don’t know until you come back. For the most part, I think the feeling was that once you leave Vince, and go to the competitor, that you had burned a bridge. I think in retrospect that’s not true, clearly, but at the time I think Randy’s perception was that it was over, it was done, and Vince would never bring him back.”
Similarities between Vince & Stephanie McMahon:
“Vince was very, and probably still is, demanding of Stephanie. I think there’s one thing that I saw in Stephanie that made me think that she probably at some point could be Mini Me (laughs), so to speak, and I don’t mean that derisively, but she has a lot of Vince’s same personality traits and characteristics. She’s super-intense, she has an incredible work ethic, she is very strong willed, and she knows what she wants, and what she likes. I saw that when I watched her produce segments, I saw that when I watched her produce my segments. I watched that when I had her rehearse me over and over and over again, until she heard an inflection exactly the way she wanted to hear that inflection. That part of her personality is very similar to Vince’s, it was very very particular, so I saw indications of that early on, but I didn’t have an occasion to see that same thing out of Triple H, because he was probably 75 percent talent, and 25 percent in the circle so to speak.”
Comparing Hulk Hogan’s nWo Heel Turn To A Potential John Cena Heel Turn:
“You’ve got to put everything in the proper context. There were no NWO shirts for sale before I turned Hulk Hogan heel. One disadvantage I had when I launched Nitro, compared to WWE, is that they had very sophisticated licensing and merchandise, WCW didn’t have any. This is one of the reasons I had to guarantee contracts, because if I didn’t guarantee how much money somebody was going to make, there was no chance in hell they were going to make enough to live off of if it was in part based on licensing and merchandising that didn’t exist. It is what it is, and was what it was, based on what I inherited, when I inherited it. But it was also an advantage, because I didn’t have to risk the same type of financial impact that for example WWE might be analyzing, ‘Okay, what happens if John Cena merchandise goes away?’ I didn’t have that challenge, because I wasn’t making any anyways. I had nowhere to go but up.”