Andrew Lutzke
This shoot was presented by RF Video.
Bischoff was born in Detroit in the 50’s. He lived near the infamous “8 mile” and had to learn to live in a tough neighborhood.
Eric moved a bunch of times but he was able to watch the Shiek’s “Big Time Wrestling” show with Bobo Brazil and Dick the Bruiser.
He had no idea then that he would be ever be a part of the wrestling scene.
Bischoff has done a ton of different jobs from sales to management to many other things.
He was a pro kick boxer and ran a martial arts school for a bit.
Once in college, Bischoff was a partier more than a student and he quickly left it in debt.
Despite this, Eric started his own lawn maintenance and landscaping business and found success.
Future WCW manager Sonny Ono met Bischoff in the kickboxing circuit and the two became friends.
They were in a bar one day and discussed how they both played tag/war as a kid by tossing trinkets/stones or whatever at their playmates. This developed into the pair creating a toy kit called “Ninja Star Wars”.
Bischoff ended up with 10,000 boxes of the “Ninja Star Wars” and struggled to figure out ways to sell them.
Eric went to the AWA to discuss promoting the product on their TV. His pitchman skills impressed Verne Gagne so much that he hired Bischoff to run the syndication sales for the AWA.
Bischoff looked up to Verne while living in Minnesota as a kid. He became close with the Gagnes and even spent holidays with their family.
Verne was struggling financially but he was steadfast in his belief that his vision for wrestling would prevail.
The state of Minnesota started to take Gagne’s land for a fraction of its value and that fast tracked Verne into bankruptcy.
Wahoo McDaniel accidentally dropped Garrett Bischoff on his head while play fighting with the toddler.
Ray Stevens and Wahoo befriended Bischoff and they became hunting partners.
AWA announcer Larry Nelson got drunk and missed some AWA TV tapings, which forced Verne to use Bischoff as the on air interview guy.
Bischoff readily admits he was horrible during his early days of being the stickman.
DDP was being obnoxious in a bar and Bischoff and he ended up getting into a confrontation that went from anger to friendship.
The Gagne’s fine tuned Bischoff’s announcing abilities and polished him out.
The AWA was dead in 1990 but Bischoff didn’t know how bad off they were until he stopped getting paid by the AWA. He stayed on anyway because he wanted to remain in the business.
Bischoff felt he was a good talent and that the WWF should have hired him in 1990 to be groomed to be an on air interviewer.
Verne was an excellent teacher and demanded perfection.
Greg Gagne was given a gig in WCW as an agent as a “thank you” from Bischoff for all the Gagnes had done for him.
WCW paid Bischoff 85 grand a year to work 8 days a month as an announcer.
Teddy Long was a lot of fun and he and Bischoff became drinking buddies.
Jim Herd knew how to run a business, but wasn’t a good fit for the wrestling business. He was gruff.
Paul Heyman and Bischoff met in the AWA but they were never friends. They never clicked, even in WCW when both men ended up there.
Bischoff didn’t get to mingle with the big names during his early WCW years as he was just a peon.
Lex Luger was pompous and Eric was never very friendly with him.
The Steiners were always joking around.
Missy Hyatt wasn’t seen as an asset to WCW in Bischoff’s eyes.
Gordon Solie did what he could to teach Bischoff the old school ways of the business.
Arn Anderson was fun to watch do promos since he was so talented and quick on his feet.
Ted Turner was a big wrasslin’ fan but he wasn’t hands on running WCW.
WCW was in trouble from the very start since JCP was a bankrupt company and WCW kept many of the same components to run WCW that sunk the Crocketts.
Bischoff wasn’t very knowledgeable about how southern wrasslin’ worked compared to the mid-west wrestling Bischoff grew up on.
Ted Turner was the only person in his corporation that actually wanted wrestling to be under their umbrella.
Kip Frey was “goofy” and didn’t know wrestling at all.
Bill Watts was a bully. Bischoff didn’t think that his ideas were going to move WCW forward.
Watts carried a gun to show off that he was a bad ass. Bischoff wasn’t impressed.
Jim Ross wanted to be the head of WCW after Watts was canned/quit but he was too tied to Watts and ended up forced out of the company in short order.
Once in control, Bischoff knew WCW needed to be rebranded as not being a southern company and he also wanted to redesign all the TV arena sets to give the fans a new perception of WCW.
Taping out of Disney studios allowed for cross branding and an improved TV look. It cost WCW more money but taping in dark empty arenas as they had been doing wasn’t going to attract sponsors and made WCW look low rent.
WCW started doing more and more PPVs because WCW needed to raise revenue and this was the best opportunity to bring in large amounts of cash.
Sid Vicious and Arn Anderson’s hotel brawl in 1993 created more heat by Turner execs to shut WCW down.
Bischoff stopped running house shows to save money since they were not drawing money.
Cutting costs allowed Bischoff to gain enough trust among the execs to spend money on Hulk Hogan and others.
Hogan wanted to work with Flair because he trusted Flair to make him look good.
WCW used Hogan to open new markets in TV, advertising and PPV.
Eric defends against the idea that he had an open checkbook to spend on things for WCW. He swears he had budgets approved yearly.
Randy Savage was brought in to WCW after Hogan heavily pushed for it. He knew he could draw money with Macho Man.
Macho was a perfectionist and could be anal about his angles.
Bischoff has zero regrets about releasing Steve Austin from WCW. Austin wanted more of a push than WCW was willing to follow up on. Austin was difficult to deal with at times in WCW.
Dusty Rhodes was great to work with. Rhodes booked much of the early days of Eric’s Vice Presidential run.
DDP helped broker Hall and Nash’s deals to return to WCW.
Monday Nitro came about accidentally. Bischoff was meeting with Turner about a TV deal with China when Turner asked him what they needed to do to compete with the WWF. Bischoff blurted out that he needed a prime time show like Vince had, and Turner ok’d it on the spot.
WCW had to be different than the WWF in order to overtake it. This is why Nitro was live, had unique locations etc.
Nitro switched announcers mid-show to keep the announcers fresh and the audiences interested.
Lex Luger was not even on Bischoff’s radar before Nitro started because he really didn’t like Luger’s attitude. Luger’s surprise appearance on the first Nitro set the tone for the show right away.
Vince didn’t like it one bit when people started to poach the WWF’s talent much like Vince had taken talent from the territories a decade earlier.
Bischoff did a lot of things that were taboo in the business because he knew controversy would create a buzz.
Madusa was not comfortable with throwing the WWF woman’s title in the trash on Nitro because she knew she was burning a huge bridge with McMahon.
Scott Norton, DDP and The Steiners would hang out with Bischoff outside of the wrestling world.
A feed for RAW was never being watched live by Eric at the Nitro commentary booth despite long standing rumors that claimed so.
The luchadores and Japanese stars were brought in to provide a different wrestling style in the mid card in order to break up the monotony of the card.
Chris Benoit was very quiet. Eddy Guerrero seemed to not trust people. Dean Malenko was very quiet and professional.
ECW wasn’t being monitored by Bischoff. The details of the ECW/WCW talent trades are foggy after all these years. Heyman was never really trusted by him though.
Eric has no memory of scheduling house shows in Philly on the same weekend as ECW was running big shows.
Mike Awesome was signed to appease Hulk Hogan, not to hurt ECW.
Since ECW had small ratings, didn’t make money, wasn’t much of a factor in merchandising, Eric doesn’t understand why the WWF tried to reboot the brand?
Only 2 hours down with 2 hours to go…. See you next time!
