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TORCH TALK DAILY with Eric Bischoff: On becoming WCW president - "Ted Turner has given me the opportunity of a lifetime or a gun that I can put in my mouth"
Nov 23, 2009 - 12:00:30 PM |
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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 four of the exclusive five-hour "Torch Talk" with former WCW President Eric Bischoff. Part 4(b) of our daily Q&As will 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 4(b). Tune in tomorrow for the next series of Q&A's from part 4.
Wade Keller: You talk about Vince McMahon not being really creative and not being equipped to reinvent himself and kind of doing the same thing. Were you ready to reinvent yourself, or was that even necessary, if the Fusient Sale had gone through? Did you have a concept in mind that would be the Next Big Thing? Or do you think you could have pretty much continued with the same formula and succeeded? Or did you really have an idea you were excited about that would change things?
Eric Bischoff: That's a good question. The answer is both, actually. A little bit of both. Again, we're talking about ten years ago. So I can't really go back and tell you exactly creatively what we were thinking about doing. But I can tell you that the majority of what I was excited about was a strategic change about as much as it was a creative change. Without getting esoteric, someone told me once - and I didn't study literature in college or anything like that, about the only thing I studied in college were women and parties - but someone told me once there's really only seven basic stories and every story that's ever been told is some kind of variation of one of those seven. One of your readers who studied literature is probably going to say, "It's not seven, it's five, or it's nine." But there's a limited number of basic conceptual stories or plots.
Even with Nitro, and even with when I sat down in a room by myself and all these jokers who all take credit for giving me the ideas and telling me that they came up with the NWO idea and all of that bullsh-- that I've heard so many times from so many people, none of it is true. I know exactly what I was forced to do because I sat in a room full of people who quite honestly weren't very creative and weren't very qualified. They came from the Crockett area, they kind of came with the acquisition of the company, and I was literally sitting around the room with a bunch of wrestling people who had never done anything other than what they had always done. I knew we were going to be forced to do something different.
Over the course of about a two or three day period in my frustration of trying to figure out, okay, Ted Turner has just given me the opportunity of a lifetime or he's given me a gun that I can put my mouth and pull the trigger right now because it's going to go one way or the other. It's either going to go really well or it's going to go really bad, and I knew that pressure is on me. After listening to everybody's ideas and every idea I heard, it was WCW Saturday Night with the lights turned up, that's all it really was, and I went into a room by myself for a couple of days and didn't talk to anybody, didn't take any phone calls, and I literally say there with a legal pad, a yellow pad, and I drew a line down the middle of the pad. I said, this is WWF, this is us. The WWF is the best in the world at these things. There was no way I was going to be better at the WWF at the things they were great at. They were number one, we were number two, but the distance between number one and number two was light years. We might as well have been number 222 at the time. And I knew since I couldn't be better than them - there was just no way possible to be better than them - I knew I had to be different than them.
That's what I did with my legal pad. I made a list of everything I could think of that was an element of their show or how they produced their show or their creative content or their character definitions. Every single thing that I could break down, I broke down. And then I picked the ones that I could relatively easily attack and make sure there was a gigantic differentiation between them and us. I firmly believed then, and it's been reinforced time and time again, that you have three choices in life when you're competitive. You either are better than your competition, you're different than you're competition, or you're automatically by default less than your competition. Well, I couldn't be less because that was a career-ender.
So I had two choices. I either had to be better or I had to be different. And I knew I couldn't be better. There was no reason for me to try to copy their formula because I would have failed miserably. So I was really only left with one choice different, and that's what we did. So going back to your question, being different worked. It clearly worked. As things evolved, things changed, Time-Warner came in, 15 people came in that I didn't know who began to tell me what my product is going to be, I leave, the Fusient opportunity is there, the thing that I focused on was, "Okay, how do we become different? And instead of just a creative strategy, what is the strategic tragedy that is really going to differentiate us. How do we become different? How do we make people go, "Okay, I know this stuff has sucked here for a little while, but there's enough of a different here that I've got to give it a shot again." It's the same way we did originally. Nitro and the success of Nitro was much about a strategic change as it was a creative change. I think that's lost on a lot of people.
MORE TO COME TOMORROW WITH BISCHOFF ANSWERING THE QUESTION IN THE NEXT PART OF THE SERIES...
CLICK HERE FOR THE MOST RECENT BISCHOFF Q&A SNIPPET
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