Scotty Riggs Reveals Why Eric Bischoff Signed Him To Three-Year Deal In WCW
Scotty Riggs was a regular in WCW during the 90s, first as a member of The American Males with Marcus Bagwell and then a part of Raven's Flock. He talked about working with Eric Bischoff when he joined The Wrestling Inc Daily.
"I never really crossed paths with Eric. Kevin Sullivan was the only guy I was dealing with because he was booking the talent. The only thing I spoke to Eric with in the five years I was there was twice about my contract, twice about meeting my wife at the time and there was one other thing I can't think of," said Riggs.
He then brought up the night that Bagwell turned on him and joined the NWO. While he was getting beat down, Bischoff was kicking him and Riggs kept yelling at him, "YOU'RE STIFFING ME! YOU'RE STIFFING ME!" Bischoff responded, "NO I'M NOT! NO I'M NOT!" as Riggs was totally ribbing him the whole time.
"The was the only generic conversation I had with him that dealt with the business was that right there when Bagwell turned on me," stated Riggs. "When it had anything to deal with matches, it was Arn Anderson or Kevin Sullivan. If I needed advice I would speak to Dean Malenko or Chris Benoit. Any other business stuff I dealt with JJ Dillon ? he was the one who did talent relations with us."
Riggs recalled working without a contract in 1996 and that's when Bischoff gave him his first contracted deal and pay raise. Then Bischoff read in the dirt sheets that Riggs was going to leave for WWF to work their cruiserweights division and another deal was made.
"Eric came up to me in catering and said he wanted to talk about my contract. He never talked to me anytime before," revealed Riggs. "He said he wanted to offer a three-year deal with a pay raise each year. I finagled a little more in the last year?
"That's basically the only conversation I ever had with Eric. He did nothing with the wrestling and he dealt more on the TV level. When it came to matches, we had a lot more leeway. We were underproduced and we put our matches together. The creative part was ours, 'You have 15 minutes to do this?You have 7 minutes to do this.' But you did everything else yourself."
After splitting up with Bagwell, Riggs became a member of Raven's Flock and he recalled that experience.
"That was probably the most fun I've had in wrestling. We got to sit ringside. We got to come out of the crowd before the NWO did it. We were sitting in the crowd and being real heels. People didn't like us at all as we were villains. Kevin and Scott were heels but were the heels that the fans liked. Fans didn't like us and we would get spit at and cussed at," said Riggs.
He talked about a match with him and Saturn vs Benoit and Mongo in which The Flock was victorious. But they then escaped through the crowd and with them being heels, they had punches thrown at them by fans.
"I wrestled with the eye patch which was a complete and different thing," said Riggs. "Raven at first said he didn't want me as part of The Flock because it was retreading a guy. He didn't want Kidman really. He liked bringing Perry and Stevie from ECW but he didn't want retreads like Lodi and Sickboy?
"The fact that I wore an eye patch and changed my outfit, Raven said, 'Hey this works.' I embraced the change and the eye patch was cool. It's fun to see that I'm getting questions now on Twitter about Moxley wearing that eye patch. Nobody's done the eye injury in a long time where it's made sense."
Riggs said that no one knew he was going to do the opaque eye contact spot when he removed the patch on Nitro. When the eye patch came off everyone in production freaked out.
"That was how under-produced WCW was. If I hadn't thought of that on my own?and Kidman doing his little itch thing. These are all things we did ourselves," said Riggs. "The reason The Flock worked so well is that we did things that nobody really liked and we embraced it. We traveled together, acted like idiots together and trained together. We weren't really nice to people outside of the ring and kept to our personas. We didn't sign too many autographs. We understood if we're gonna maintain heat and stay on TV, we've got to keep the image up.
"That's what was fun about it: being the villain. People don't mind playing the bad guy but they don't wanna be the bad guy."
You can follow Scotty Riggs on Twitter @realscottyriggs.
Rigg's full interview with Wrestling Inc aired as part of Monday's episode of our podcast, The Wrestling Inc. Daily. Subscribe to get the latest episodes as soon as it's released Monday – Friday afternoon: by clicking here. The full interview can be heard via the embedded audio player below: