Post by Pennyroyal_Tea (admin) on Oct 9, 2005 13:57:12 GMT -5
Byte This Review
Wednesday September 21, 2005
Host: Todd Grisham with Droz
Guest: Eric Bischoff
Report by Michael KopStick, Torch Back and Better than Ever Contributor
Eric Bischoff is asked what he will do when he wins the WWE Title at Raw Homecoming from John Cena. Bischoff smirks that he knows a good “gentleman’s club” over in Dallas, so he’ll take Jonathan Coachman and some other guys out on the town. He’ll show Ric Flair how to party, “and I don’t need the Viagra.”
Bischoff says, though, that there is no possible way for him to prepare for a match against the WWE champ, who is in great physical condition, whereas he himself is a fifty-year old man.
WCW Nitro’s Tenth Anniversary is coming up and Eric is asked how he looks back at the promotion he raised up to peaks and then let descend to valleys. “I had a lot of great memories at WCW, the things that I experienced and things that I accomplished.” He does think back to previous mistakes and bad choices that he made, wondering what could have been if he didn’t make those choices, but he doesn’t let it get to him. He doesn’t dwell on it. It’s just life, he says. “To be very honest with you, I really thoroughly enjoy what I’m doing right now. I love the relationship that I have with WWE, I like the people that I work with a great deal. I have a tremendous amount of respect for almost everybody that I work with so when you have that you tend not to dwell on the past.”
Host Todd Grisham asks Eric how his relationship is with Vince McMahon, if he’s good to Eric, if they don’t talk that much, etc. “All of the above,” replies Bischoff. “I don’t talk to him that much. My nature is that I’m not a very needy person when it comes to communication. I told Vince – and he probably doesn’t remember this but – the very first night I came in to WWE, he met me backstage after the show was over and we shook hands, and I said, ‘Vince, my goal here is to be high performance and to be very low maintenance.’ And that’s what I strive to be. And part of high performance is being a professional, doing the best you can do, being willing to try things that you may not be comfortable with but still put 110% into. That’s what I can contribute as a professional. But in terms of being low maintenance, to me, having been in a similar position as Vince McMahon, is not being that needy guy. Not needing to go over to Vince and have a dialogue every time I see him and feel the need to have Vince convince me, or to communicate to me, on a regular basis what he expects out of my character and things like that because, quite frankly, it’s time consuming. And if all of us that were performers and superstars of WWE were to try to get that five minutes, well, there’s 80 guys backstage that want that five minutes. And then you’ve got producers that need time and writers and directors and technical producers, there’s so little time on a Monday, the day that I do see Vince, that I try to stay out of is way, quite frankly. But that is the relationship that I like to have.” So, they get along great professionally, they understand each other. The social level is “non existent. But I have a tremendous amount of respect for him.”
Todd switches gears and BT plays a clip of Hulk Hogan joining Hall and Nash to form the NWO. Eric says that he knew it was going to be big and that they would get a strong crowd reaction, but he never imagined how phenomenal it would get. They really only knew six hours before it happened that it was going to take place. There were questions of if Hulk Hogan would actually go through with it. “And once we got through that drama and emotion, which was pretty stressful, then it was just anticipation. It was really one of the most exciting things that I’ve experienced – even though I wasn’t necessarily involved on camera – having orchestrated it, having been the architect behind it, and the way we were able to keep it a secret from everybody for as long as we did, it was pretty cool.”
Eric says that when he took over WCW in 1991, he wasn’t looking to revolutionize wrestling and take over, his main goal was just to keep this struggling company strong enough to survive. At the time, everyone at Turner wanted the company gone except for Ted Turner himself, who justified that WCW gave so much free programming to his stations, despite the company itself losing ten million dollars a year.
People saw Uncle Eric as Mr. Moneybags, spending gargantuan amounts on bringing in wrestlers and signing them to incredibly lucrative contracts. “But what they fail to remember was that for the first two years of me running that company I was literally making people count the number of pencils in their desks so that we didn’t have a lot of waste, a lot of fat going on. The first two years of my existence there was really cost cutting and cutting all our expenses cut down to the bone. Once we got our expenses cut to the point where we just could not cut anymore, that’s when we started building, and that’s where things started happening..”
And then it was time to go big time, with Monday Nitro. Eric explains, “It really wasn’t until that fateful Monday afternoon or Tuesday afternoon when I was sitting in Ted Turner’s office and he said, ‘Eric, what do we need to do? I want this company to be number one. What do we need to do?’ Out of a quickly – it was just a defense mechanism because I wasn’t prepared to answer that question, quite frankly – I said, ‘You need to be on prime time. WWE is on primetime on USA Network and we’re Saturday night or Saturday afternoon. We need a prime time spot. And when he gave it to me, that’s when I knew I had to do something big, I had to be aggressive, I had to think out of the box and I had to revolutionize the business.”
Besides the stuff we all saw, the revealing of Raw match outcomes on Nitro, the DX invasion of WCW, there were also crazy stuff going on behind the scenes, as well, Eric reveals. Litigations, copyright lawsuits, and threatening letters were all abound in the backlight of the Monday night wars.
And when Eric challenged Vince McMahon to a match, that wasn’t just at the spur of the moment, at the top of his head, either. He got the idea from seeing the DX invasion of WCW. He was watching Sean Waltman (X-Pac) challenge Eric Bischoff to come out and fight. Well, Eric wasn’t interested in fighting X-Pac. “My beef wasn’t with Sean Waltman. Sean Waltman was a washed up, kind of hangaround that I kept around as a favor to Scott Hall and Kevin Nash. And I was prepared to keep him around as a favor as long as he didn’t piss me off. But the truth was he got a little arrogant, he got a little frigid, he wanted more than what he was worth and I just got rid of him. I was tired of dealing with him, he was a has-been.” No, his issue was not with the puppet Waltman, but the puppeteer himself, Vince McMahon. And this was a very exciting challenge for Eric when he made it because there was so much real emotion he was venting when shooting promos against Vince, and nobody knew if Vince was even going to take him up on the offer and show up to fight. “In fact Hulk Hogan said, ‘You better be careful because he will show up. He’s going to take this seriously.’” So, he didn’t know if Vince was going to show up to try and rip his head off or not. “But it would have made a hell of a buy rate wouldn’t it?” he laughs.
Eric goes into character mode to discuss his upcoming match with John Cena. Although he doesn’t want to step in the ring, he does want to come out on top and therefore he finds himself lucky to have Kurt Angle in his corner, whom he considers to be “the baddest man on the planet.” (Uh oh, could them be fighting words for a returning WWE superstar/rattlesnake?)
Talks shifts to discussing another phenom of WCW, Bill Goldberg. Eric says that he doesn’t remember who introduced him to Bill, because naturally since Goldberg became a big success, everyone will take credit for it, just another characteristic of this business. He was impressed with Bill, especially when he began training at the Power Plant, with his intensity and his learning aptitude. Even in dark matches, he would rile fans with his strong charisma. So, WCW brass decided that even though he was still green, still raw, they should send him out there as a tough destroyer and to keep his matches short so he doesn’t get exposed. But keeping his matches short was what made him take off. Since his matches were different, his excitement was different, his energy was different, the fans became more attracted to him and he surged in popularity. Unfortunately, when he was at the top, his rawness began to show and he didn’t fully understand the business, he had people pulling at him in different directions, he wasn’t able to make many of his own decisions. “He was constantly confused and emotional, unsure of himself. Couple that with the fact that he grew a big head immediately, and that lead to disaster,” Recalls WCW former boss.
As far as Ric Flair, Eric says that he’s always had a really weird relationship with the Nature Boy. They’ve shared drinks together on a few occasions and Ric has tried to tear his head off on another. A “love-hate relationship” would be too strong of a word because it’s probably neither. “As far as we are today, Ric is a professional, he is a consummate professional and I think, his mind, he’s put the past behind him, I know I certainly have. I don’t carry any baggage around with me.” At the same time, though, Eric is sure that Ric does harbor some lingering resentment because of their past.
Todd Grisham says that a lot of people are wondering what a WCW One Night Stand would be like. Eric says he thinks it would be great. He feels that the WCW Invasion was such a “misfire” because so many people who were part of the Invasion weren’t in WCW and vice-versa. There was no Sting, Luger, or even Bischoff. So there could be a great opportunity for a wonderful show. “But I doubt it will happen.”
And with that, Bischoff goes and BT leaves to a commercial break, which I will explain in detail…
First shot shows a beautiful mansion, possibly Vince McMahon’s own. Inside we see a dinner feast that looks like it could be Thanksgiving, but really there’s probably so much food there because most of the people sitting around the table are all six feet tall wrestlers! Yep, it’s John Cena, Viscera, Triple-H, Carlito, Torrie Wilson, Kurt Angle all sitting around, and at the head of table is Vince McMahon, who stands up and says, “Alright, listen up. We’re moving,” smiling to his wrestling family.
We then see Roddy Piper in another room of the house deconstructing and putting away his bagpipe, Carlito in yet another putting his sand from a Cabana set into a briefcase, Kurt Angle, too lazy to take a big box downstairs, throwing it out the window, a bed with two divas on it being carried outside while they’re having a lingerie pillow fight on it, John Cena lifting his belt in front of the house yelling ‘yea!’ while pyro fire comes out of the bushes, and Triple H sledgehammerring drawers that were left outside.
Then everybody is loaded into a car and Vince gets in the driver seat, and the second the door closes, Triple-H, in the back, asks, “Hey, are we there yet?” while John Cena, in the front, asks, “Want me to drive?” and another diva complains, “I’m hungry,” while the car takes off, pulling a WWE Raw ring behind it like a trailer. And the announcer says, “Raw is moving, October 3rd at eight, on the USA Network.” And finally, from one of the left behind boxes that Kurt Angle threw over the house pops out a referee.
Great spot! Maybe you’ll get to see it on Smackdown since WWE can mention it there. Maybe you’ll see it next Monday night. Maybe you’ll have to force yourself to watch Byte This to see it, which frankly isn’t that bad now that the Grish is at the helms; he’s a pretty witty dude. It takes me back to the fun days of Josh Mathews and Dr. Tom. And taking me back makes me feel old so I think I’ll stop just about… now. Okay, I’m at Mublumm@aol.com. Peace.
Credit: pwtorch.com
Wednesday September 21, 2005
Host: Todd Grisham with Droz
Guest: Eric Bischoff
Report by Michael KopStick, Torch Back and Better than Ever Contributor
Eric Bischoff is asked what he will do when he wins the WWE Title at Raw Homecoming from John Cena. Bischoff smirks that he knows a good “gentleman’s club” over in Dallas, so he’ll take Jonathan Coachman and some other guys out on the town. He’ll show Ric Flair how to party, “and I don’t need the Viagra.”
Bischoff says, though, that there is no possible way for him to prepare for a match against the WWE champ, who is in great physical condition, whereas he himself is a fifty-year old man.
WCW Nitro’s Tenth Anniversary is coming up and Eric is asked how he looks back at the promotion he raised up to peaks and then let descend to valleys. “I had a lot of great memories at WCW, the things that I experienced and things that I accomplished.” He does think back to previous mistakes and bad choices that he made, wondering what could have been if he didn’t make those choices, but he doesn’t let it get to him. He doesn’t dwell on it. It’s just life, he says. “To be very honest with you, I really thoroughly enjoy what I’m doing right now. I love the relationship that I have with WWE, I like the people that I work with a great deal. I have a tremendous amount of respect for almost everybody that I work with so when you have that you tend not to dwell on the past.”
Host Todd Grisham asks Eric how his relationship is with Vince McMahon, if he’s good to Eric, if they don’t talk that much, etc. “All of the above,” replies Bischoff. “I don’t talk to him that much. My nature is that I’m not a very needy person when it comes to communication. I told Vince – and he probably doesn’t remember this but – the very first night I came in to WWE, he met me backstage after the show was over and we shook hands, and I said, ‘Vince, my goal here is to be high performance and to be very low maintenance.’ And that’s what I strive to be. And part of high performance is being a professional, doing the best you can do, being willing to try things that you may not be comfortable with but still put 110% into. That’s what I can contribute as a professional. But in terms of being low maintenance, to me, having been in a similar position as Vince McMahon, is not being that needy guy. Not needing to go over to Vince and have a dialogue every time I see him and feel the need to have Vince convince me, or to communicate to me, on a regular basis what he expects out of my character and things like that because, quite frankly, it’s time consuming. And if all of us that were performers and superstars of WWE were to try to get that five minutes, well, there’s 80 guys backstage that want that five minutes. And then you’ve got producers that need time and writers and directors and technical producers, there’s so little time on a Monday, the day that I do see Vince, that I try to stay out of is way, quite frankly. But that is the relationship that I like to have.” So, they get along great professionally, they understand each other. The social level is “non existent. But I have a tremendous amount of respect for him.”
Todd switches gears and BT plays a clip of Hulk Hogan joining Hall and Nash to form the NWO. Eric says that he knew it was going to be big and that they would get a strong crowd reaction, but he never imagined how phenomenal it would get. They really only knew six hours before it happened that it was going to take place. There were questions of if Hulk Hogan would actually go through with it. “And once we got through that drama and emotion, which was pretty stressful, then it was just anticipation. It was really one of the most exciting things that I’ve experienced – even though I wasn’t necessarily involved on camera – having orchestrated it, having been the architect behind it, and the way we were able to keep it a secret from everybody for as long as we did, it was pretty cool.”
Eric says that when he took over WCW in 1991, he wasn’t looking to revolutionize wrestling and take over, his main goal was just to keep this struggling company strong enough to survive. At the time, everyone at Turner wanted the company gone except for Ted Turner himself, who justified that WCW gave so much free programming to his stations, despite the company itself losing ten million dollars a year.
People saw Uncle Eric as Mr. Moneybags, spending gargantuan amounts on bringing in wrestlers and signing them to incredibly lucrative contracts. “But what they fail to remember was that for the first two years of me running that company I was literally making people count the number of pencils in their desks so that we didn’t have a lot of waste, a lot of fat going on. The first two years of my existence there was really cost cutting and cutting all our expenses cut down to the bone. Once we got our expenses cut to the point where we just could not cut anymore, that’s when we started building, and that’s where things started happening..”
And then it was time to go big time, with Monday Nitro. Eric explains, “It really wasn’t until that fateful Monday afternoon or Tuesday afternoon when I was sitting in Ted Turner’s office and he said, ‘Eric, what do we need to do? I want this company to be number one. What do we need to do?’ Out of a quickly – it was just a defense mechanism because I wasn’t prepared to answer that question, quite frankly – I said, ‘You need to be on prime time. WWE is on primetime on USA Network and we’re Saturday night or Saturday afternoon. We need a prime time spot. And when he gave it to me, that’s when I knew I had to do something big, I had to be aggressive, I had to think out of the box and I had to revolutionize the business.”
Besides the stuff we all saw, the revealing of Raw match outcomes on Nitro, the DX invasion of WCW, there were also crazy stuff going on behind the scenes, as well, Eric reveals. Litigations, copyright lawsuits, and threatening letters were all abound in the backlight of the Monday night wars.
And when Eric challenged Vince McMahon to a match, that wasn’t just at the spur of the moment, at the top of his head, either. He got the idea from seeing the DX invasion of WCW. He was watching Sean Waltman (X-Pac) challenge Eric Bischoff to come out and fight. Well, Eric wasn’t interested in fighting X-Pac. “My beef wasn’t with Sean Waltman. Sean Waltman was a washed up, kind of hangaround that I kept around as a favor to Scott Hall and Kevin Nash. And I was prepared to keep him around as a favor as long as he didn’t piss me off. But the truth was he got a little arrogant, he got a little frigid, he wanted more than what he was worth and I just got rid of him. I was tired of dealing with him, he was a has-been.” No, his issue was not with the puppet Waltman, but the puppeteer himself, Vince McMahon. And this was a very exciting challenge for Eric when he made it because there was so much real emotion he was venting when shooting promos against Vince, and nobody knew if Vince was even going to take him up on the offer and show up to fight. “In fact Hulk Hogan said, ‘You better be careful because he will show up. He’s going to take this seriously.’” So, he didn’t know if Vince was going to show up to try and rip his head off or not. “But it would have made a hell of a buy rate wouldn’t it?” he laughs.
Eric goes into character mode to discuss his upcoming match with John Cena. Although he doesn’t want to step in the ring, he does want to come out on top and therefore he finds himself lucky to have Kurt Angle in his corner, whom he considers to be “the baddest man on the planet.” (Uh oh, could them be fighting words for a returning WWE superstar/rattlesnake?)
Talks shifts to discussing another phenom of WCW, Bill Goldberg. Eric says that he doesn’t remember who introduced him to Bill, because naturally since Goldberg became a big success, everyone will take credit for it, just another characteristic of this business. He was impressed with Bill, especially when he began training at the Power Plant, with his intensity and his learning aptitude. Even in dark matches, he would rile fans with his strong charisma. So, WCW brass decided that even though he was still green, still raw, they should send him out there as a tough destroyer and to keep his matches short so he doesn’t get exposed. But keeping his matches short was what made him take off. Since his matches were different, his excitement was different, his energy was different, the fans became more attracted to him and he surged in popularity. Unfortunately, when he was at the top, his rawness began to show and he didn’t fully understand the business, he had people pulling at him in different directions, he wasn’t able to make many of his own decisions. “He was constantly confused and emotional, unsure of himself. Couple that with the fact that he grew a big head immediately, and that lead to disaster,” Recalls WCW former boss.
As far as Ric Flair, Eric says that he’s always had a really weird relationship with the Nature Boy. They’ve shared drinks together on a few occasions and Ric has tried to tear his head off on another. A “love-hate relationship” would be too strong of a word because it’s probably neither. “As far as we are today, Ric is a professional, he is a consummate professional and I think, his mind, he’s put the past behind him, I know I certainly have. I don’t carry any baggage around with me.” At the same time, though, Eric is sure that Ric does harbor some lingering resentment because of their past.
Todd Grisham says that a lot of people are wondering what a WCW One Night Stand would be like. Eric says he thinks it would be great. He feels that the WCW Invasion was such a “misfire” because so many people who were part of the Invasion weren’t in WCW and vice-versa. There was no Sting, Luger, or even Bischoff. So there could be a great opportunity for a wonderful show. “But I doubt it will happen.”
And with that, Bischoff goes and BT leaves to a commercial break, which I will explain in detail…
First shot shows a beautiful mansion, possibly Vince McMahon’s own. Inside we see a dinner feast that looks like it could be Thanksgiving, but really there’s probably so much food there because most of the people sitting around the table are all six feet tall wrestlers! Yep, it’s John Cena, Viscera, Triple-H, Carlito, Torrie Wilson, Kurt Angle all sitting around, and at the head of table is Vince McMahon, who stands up and says, “Alright, listen up. We’re moving,” smiling to his wrestling family.
We then see Roddy Piper in another room of the house deconstructing and putting away his bagpipe, Carlito in yet another putting his sand from a Cabana set into a briefcase, Kurt Angle, too lazy to take a big box downstairs, throwing it out the window, a bed with two divas on it being carried outside while they’re having a lingerie pillow fight on it, John Cena lifting his belt in front of the house yelling ‘yea!’ while pyro fire comes out of the bushes, and Triple H sledgehammerring drawers that were left outside.
Then everybody is loaded into a car and Vince gets in the driver seat, and the second the door closes, Triple-H, in the back, asks, “Hey, are we there yet?” while John Cena, in the front, asks, “Want me to drive?” and another diva complains, “I’m hungry,” while the car takes off, pulling a WWE Raw ring behind it like a trailer. And the announcer says, “Raw is moving, October 3rd at eight, on the USA Network.” And finally, from one of the left behind boxes that Kurt Angle threw over the house pops out a referee.
Great spot! Maybe you’ll get to see it on Smackdown since WWE can mention it there. Maybe you’ll see it next Monday night. Maybe you’ll have to force yourself to watch Byte This to see it, which frankly isn’t that bad now that the Grish is at the helms; he’s a pretty witty dude. It takes me back to the fun days of Josh Mathews and Dr. Tom. And taking me back makes me feel old so I think I’ll stop just about… now. Okay, I’m at Mublumm@aol.com. Peace.
Credit: pwtorch.com