Eric Bischoff On Taking Sting's Finisher, Wrestlers Losing In Their Hometown, International Stars
Eric Bischoff spoke to Sports Illustrated's "Extra Mustard" section on a number of topics surrounding WCW. Here are some of the highlights:
Finishing an episode of Nitro by taking Sting's Scorpion Death Drop:
"We talked last week about how important it was for talent not to get their hands on me. I had an immense amount of fragile heat, but people were dying to see me get my ass kicked. We knew that would be a great moment. I remember the anticipation and I remember feeling what was going on behind me as Sting was coming up through the ring. I remember trying to ignore that so my reaction could be as real as it could possibly be, and I also remember taking that bump because he and I never rehearsed it. It's an awkward kind of a bump to take, and it requires completely letting go. Bumps often require giving yourself completely to the talent you're in the ring with, and that's what makes wrestling such a performance art that is different from every other. Since I'd never done it before, it was a really strange moment."
Booking wrestlers in their hometown:
"I've always believed that the audience and the energy that the audience creates is sometimes just as important as the action inside of the ring. I won't deny that there were times when I allowed what I anticipated to be a local market's reaction and how I could co-op that to influence the national and international perception of the event itself. I can't speak to the psychology of what WWE did or does with talent in their hometown. It seems like a pretty rigid pattern there, so it's hard to deny, but it didn't factor into my thought-process. Rather than fight it, I tended to embrace it, and that was an underlying factor in some of the creative decisions we made."
Building international stars (Cruiserweights and Masahiro Chono in nWo):
"All of those things were part and parcel of my goal of being different from everything and anything else people had seen to that point. That's why international talent, like Chono, and the relationship with New Japan was so important to me at that time. It had been done before, and Bill Watts did it in WCW, but I wanted to bring that international talent and make it a regular part of my programming. That had never been done before, but we've been seeing that now for 20 years now. I had it easy."
Eric Bischoff also discussed main event booking. You can read the full interview by clicking here.
Source: Sports Illustrated