During the Monda Night Wars, Eric Bischoff had developed a reputation of doing whatever it takes in order to win, even if that means putting WWE out of business. On a recent episode of his 83 Weeks podcast, Bischoff explained himself. He said more focused on making WCW the top wrestling promotion than putting the WWE out of business.
“The narrative over the past 20 or more years has been how I was so single-mindedly focused on simply putting WWF out of business, and I have said this before, but that is not true. I may have said some outrageous s**t, part of that was to try and motivate people.
Part of that was to get my character over because I knew some of that would leak, part of it was me being me. It wasn’t necessarily me wanting to put them out of business; I was focused on being number one. Whether I was number one by a mile and they went out of business, or whether I was number one by a mile and they were a solid number two really didn’t matter to me. Nobody is ever going to believe that, but me, but I really don’t give a s**t at this point in my life, but it’s true.”
Despite WCW Nitro having a dominant 83-week run of beating WWE RAW in TV ratings, Eric never thought WWE would ever go out of business.
“While I was happy to have beaten them soundly in the ratings, it wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, they’re almost dead! We’re so close.’ It wasn’t that; it was just another week of us proving that we were on the right track, we had a great formula.
We were getting support from Turner Broadcasting, we were getting interest from sponsors, and the international market place. All of those things that were difficult for WCW to even think about. Nobody could even think about that or have a realistic conversation without people pissing their pants if they were trying to talk about beating WWF in the international market place, or outselling arenas, or having bigger buy rates, whatever. Nobody could have that conversation two, three years up until this point.”
Eric said those boosted the morale in WCW, helping them believe they were on the same level as WWE.
“Now that we were actually achieving things that nobody else believed we could achieve, there was a level of confidence, not arrogance and I am not talking about myself I am talking about in the office that all of a sudden people were believing in themselves, and suddenly a rating where we were getting a 3.1 and they were getting a 1.5 all that made us do was that it gave us more confidence that we were on the right track.”
h/t to Wrestling Inc for the transcription.
