By James Caldwell, PWTorch assistant editor

In the early 1990s, there were rumors of WCW's demise under the ownership of Ted Turner's organization, which would have meant no Monday Night Wars and a completely different wrestling landscape today.

Former WCW president Eric Bischoff shed light on Turner executives considering "pulling the plug" on WCW in the early 1990s before Bischoff became executive producer in 1993 during a new podcast interview with "Stone Cold" Steve Austin.

"What I saw from my perspective was that Turner Corporate was tired of (wrestling politics)," Bischoff recalled to Austin. "They tried the Jim Herd experiment. That didn't work. They tried a couple of other variations of Jim Herd. They tried Kip Frey. That was a disaster. They tried all these different variations of management and leadership and I knew that Turner Corp. - I don't remember who told me - but I had gotten word that they were considering pulling the plug. (pause) I said, 'If they pull the plug, I'm going back to Minneapolis.'"

"So, I threw my name in the hat," Bischoff continued. "I had heard they were looking for an executive producer - they tried the Bill Watts thing - and they wanted to get away from wrestling people. They wanted someone to run the company who understood the entertainment business, but wasn't so entrenched in wrestling that they were sucked into the politics of it."

Bischoff, who was a mid-level announcer at the time, said none of his colleagues knew he was in the running for the top position. Bischoff said he gave a standard marketing pitch to Turner executive Bill Shaw and "obviously it struck a nerve."

"I was passionate and I felt it. I believed in it. I believed in myself," Bischoff said. "I've been passionate about wrestling since I was a little kid and I was passionate about my approach to it. And the solution that I had, especially given that Turner had identified as their problem, which was not wanting any more wrestling guys running a television company. So, it worked."

Austin asked what his solution was. Bischoff replied: "I had a vision. The vision was to broaden it because (pause) - if you go back in time and look at what WCW was and where it existed in that moment of time where I had that opportunity, it was considered a very small, third-rate, kind of Southern, hereditary aspects of the NWA and Crocket regional promotion, and they were trying to compete with the WWF at the time. So, if you want to compete at their level, you have to be able to play at their level. So, my approach was to mainstream it and to make it feel bigger and make it feel more mainstream and less regional."

The shift from "wrestling guys" to Bischoff was documented in the 1993 PWTorch Newsletters. A WCW News item from September 1993 captured what Bischoff told Austin: "Insiders say executive producer Eric Bischoff is presenting new ideas at meetings and trying to take things in a new direction, but his ideas are being written off by the old guard."

[ LINK: Austin & Bischoff conversation available HERE at PodcastOne.com . The WCW discussion is at the end of the conversation. ]

[Torch art credit Travis Beaven (c) PWTorch.com]

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