On Monday, September 14, PWTorch editor Wade Keller interviewed former WCW President Eric Bischoff an exclusive multi-hour "Torch Talk" interview covering a variety of controversial subjects from the Monday Night War period, his days on WWE TV, his 2006 autobiography, and the "Rise & Fall of WCW" DVD.

The following is the latest installment of Part 3 of our daily Q&As to be published here at PWTorch.com, which is unprecedented with our VIP-exclusive "Torch Talk" series.

To both READ and LISTEN to the entire interview, you'll want to become a VIP member, which also includes instant access to our newsmaking multi-hour in-depth hard-hitting "Torch Talks" with other top WCW players such as Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, X-Pac, Vince Russo, Ed Ferrara, Hulk Hogan, Goldberg, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, and others (ALL AVAILABLE AT THIS LINK FOR VIP MEMBERS). To subscribe right now and be the first to read the entire Bischoff "Torch Talk" and have VIP-only access to the audio, click here. The first audio segment and transcript installment is now available for VIP members.

We present today's latest question and answer from Part 3. Tune in Wednesday for the next series of questions from Part 3.

Wade Keller: I think part of the argument (against giving big-money contracts to veteran WCW wrestlers), the nuance of it is Stevie Ray was quite limited, but he was part of the Harlem Heat, but by then Booker T had split off at the time, and I just remember at the time, and there's so many things you can remember and forget, when word got out in the locker room with guys I talked to that Stevie Ray was making more than Ric Flair, or that Rick Steiner, because he had an all-in guarantee, his incentive to produce in the ring was pretty clearly low. I know he's a friend of yours, I'm not asking you to bash him or anything, but as an observer of a TV show, he looked like somebody who was phoning it in. I think a lot of people looked at that and said, ah, there's a lot right about WCW, but this is an area where it seems like the money is being given in the wrong way at a guaranteed level to guys who aren't difference-makers, and it might reduce their incentives to go out there and produce what somebody as super-talented as Rick Steiner could, which we saw in the late-'80s and early-'90s, he's at a stage now where he seems to be taking advantage of the situation.

Eric Bischoff: Yeah, and that's a subjective opinion by people who didn't really have a full grasp of what was actually going on inside. Stevie Ray never made more money than Ric Flair. I don't know where that one got started, but that's laughable.

Keller: Rick probably did.

Bischoff: Well, whatever. (laughs) There's a lot of that revisionist commentary and perspective. Some of it's fair and accurate, but a lot of it has been twisted and turned so many ways, it's really hard to comment on it realistically. This is the first time I've ever heard that Stevie Ray was making more than Ric Flair. It puts a smile on my face. It's hard to react to.

Keller: I want to go back to this one more time. On the WCW brand being utilized by WWE, it was kind of pieced together, but this is the question I want to ultimately get to. Do you think WCW was such a damaged brand by 2001 that Vince entertaining the idea of turning Raw into a WCW show and keeping Smackdown a WWE brand, or doing something where one hour was WCW and another hour was WWE, all of those ideas were entertained, was a bad idea. Me, I looked at it at the time, and a lot of people think it was the biggest mistake Vince ever made, but I disagree with that conventional wisdom. I think the WCW brand was pretty damaged; it was too expensive to bring in the top guys who weren't available or were happy collecting seven figures not doing anything. They didn't want any more money to have to work for it for a couple years at least, understandably. I just look at it not as a blown opportunity. WWE still had business churning at a really high level at that point. So to force a damaged brand into the mix at that time, which would have been a fantasy in 1995 or 1998 that you would have been crazy to not do, I think by 2001 it would have been a dead issue. That's my opinion. Did you at that time, were you watching things thinking they blew it, or did you think, Don't let this brand poison a successful formula that WWE has going at the time.

Bischoff: I think Vince made a great acquisition. I think it was a brilliant move to acquire WCW. I think it would have been impossible given all of the things that you stated and more for him to come up with a way creatively to make it really work. He didn't have the talent. He had the trademarks and he had the library, and that was all he had. The talent that came with it nobody really cared about. It wasn't really WCW.

WCW at the time would have been Hogan, it would have been Hall, it would have been Nash, it would have been Goldberg, it would have been Luger, it would have been Bischoff, it would have been Diamond Dallas Page. Now, if you would have been able to wave a magic wand and make all of those guys come over with the brand, I think it would have worked. But that wasn't going to happen for all the reasons you stated and more. It was never going to happen. And, as you pointed out, clearly, he didn't need it. He was rockin' at that time; he was on top of his game at that time. Why would you possibly try to force-feed something that was broken, that didn't have the talent to support it into a machine that was humming along perfectly. It would have been stupid.

MORE TO COME ...

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