Eric Bischoff Names Biggest Wrestling News Story Of 2022
2022 was a wild year for professional wrestling. From Cody Rhodes jumping back to WWE from AEW, "Stone Cold" Steve Austin returning to in-ring action at WrestleMania 38, Sasha Banks and Naomi walking out, and of course the "Brawl Out" scrum, it's hard to believe that all four of those things happened this year. And yet, it didn't stop there. Because if you ask WWE Hall of Famer Eric Bischoff, only one story from 2022 can top this list — and to him, it's not particularly close.
"Absolutely, without question, the biggest news story I think in the last 20 years if not longer, is Vince McMahon stepping down and resigning," Bischoff said on the latest episode of "Strictly Business." In July, McMahon officially announced his retirement after an investigation into hush money payments made by the former CEO himself surfaced. In the months since the list of allegations against the former chairman hasn't gotten any shorter. But up until that moment, many people — fans and those within the industry alike — simply assumed McMahon would run WWE until the day he died and not a moment shorter. Bischoff was one of those people.
"I never really believed I would live to see the day when Vince McMahon stepped down," he continued. "I really thought he would outlive me." He believed McMahon was going to be around "long after everything else vanishes from this earth," but these allegations, not to mention the attention they drew, was ultimately too big to ignore. Many stories in wrestling can come and go, but this one was never going away. "Obviously under the circumstances, really he had no choice," Bischoff added. "Well he did, but he made the right one, as opposed to trying to fight it."
What Bischoff Finds the Most Fascinating About Vince Stepping Down
Again, it is difficult to overstate just how shocking this turn of events was. For the longest time, it seemed as though there was no WWE without Vince McMahon. No matter how big WWE got or how public the company became, everyone always knew that it was McMahon working behind the scenes. "Here's what I find the most fascinating," Bischoff started, "is because WWE is a publicly-held company, and a big one, for such a long time whenever the WWE stock prices were discussed in public, one of the biggest concerns has been 'What happens when Vince McMahon leaves?'"
Bischoff believes that this is the biggest wrestling news story of the past two or three decades, noting that WWE is a big company in any category and not just wrestling. Now he's gone, and the company that so many people have bought into for years seemingly without question is under new leadership. "For decades now, everybody has bought into the fact that Vince McMahon is the Wizard of Oz. He's the guy behind the curtain making all this stuff happen."
In his absence, WWE's stock prices climbed to a record high in October, which McMahon benefited from greatly. In fact, things seem so much better from a financial standpoint without him in charge that when a report surfaced recently suggesting he was looking to make a comeback, those prices almost immediately dipped. At the end of the day, Bischoff credits McMahon for building such a stable enterprise, saying "he also put together an amazing team of people that not only proved to be able to handle WWE's business without Vince but so far have been doing so in a way that suggests WWE's stronger today than it was before Vince left."