Trivia / Eric Bischoff

• Creative Differences: Partially responsible for running off New Japan from WCW by trying to tell them how to book its shows, and then attempting to enter into a talent exchange with All Japan.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Bischoff is always very defensive of the nWo, even when faced with its shortcomings. When Bischoff joined WWE, he was invited onto their late night show WWE Confidential, where host Johnathan Coachman asked him at what point nWo stopped standing for New World Order and started standing for Not Working Out. Despite this obvious attack on his booking, Eric genuinely laughed at this (before talking about everything he tried to do to keep the nWo popular after the fans started getting sick of it, noting Kevin Nash's Wolfpac was working for a while).
    Eric Bischoff: (4.17.97 Prodigy chat): I read somewhere if something is working don't try to fix it. Our ratings are high, our arenas are selling out, we can't keep merchandise in inventory. You're right ... there must be something wrong with Nitro.
  • Garrett Bischoff as a wrestler in TNA. Randy Orton the guy wasn't.
• Dye Hard: After appearing with white hair while WCW's dying days, he appeared with his hair dyed black when he appeared in WWE. It was eventually lampshaded when he lost a match to Eugene at Taboo Tuesday 2004 and the fan-voted stipulation was that the loser gets shaven, and Vince Mcmahon noticed that his roots were white ("You're a phony son of a bitch!").
• God Does Not Own This World: He thought he could challenge the suits at Turner Entertainment because he'd always have Ted Turner in his corner. But when the AOL Time-Warner merger went through, Bischoff took an extended vacation. He later attempted to buy the company; the deal fell through, and it was bought for a song by Vince McMahon.
• He Also Did: The production company that Bischoff owns has produced reality shows such as, Scott Baio is 46...And Pregnant, Lay it Down with Cee Lo Green, and Finding Hulk Hogan. He is also starting an online review site to compete with the Observer.
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • His WCW theme, which really captured his sleaziness, is "White Train" by Tito & Tarantula, the same song they used in that big fight scene in Desperado.
  • The theme song used for his WWE debut was "Back in Black" by AC/DC, albeit WWE only got permission to use it that one time. Only people who watched Bichoff's WWE debut live (at 9pm EST) were the ones who heard him come out to it. By the time the not-live version hit the other half of the country, it was already edited out.
• Replacement Scrappy: Several old-school wrestlers viewed him as this when he was chosen to replace the recently-fired Bill Watts. Mick Foley explained it thus:
  "What I didn't know was that Eric had been impressing the bosses with his smooth ideas and even smoother talking: in essence, he'd been impressing them by being everything Bill Watts wasn't. The Turner people had been getting real tired of Cowboy Bill. He cursed like a sailor, peed in a trash can at an office party, and was just uncouth in general. The final straw came when some comments he had made to an underground wrestling newsletter were brought to the attention of baseball's all-time home run king Hank Aaron, who had a front office job with Turner. The comments were construed as racist, which didn't sit well in a politically correct company like Turner, and the Cowboy was forced to ride into the sunset."
• What Could Have Been:
  • Eric Bischoff is living proof of the adage, "'Tis better to be lucky than good." He had a great run with WCW, took them to the top, and could've put WWE out of business had his luck not run out.
  • What if Vince McMahon hired him back in 1990? Eric was just a sales jockey for the American Wrestling Association when fate stepped in and handed him an announcing gig. But the AWA was short on time and eventually folded. Out of work, Bischoff sent a job application to the company he would later dedicate his life to destroying, the WWF, but was turned down.
  • Chris Jericho, Jim Ross, and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin are three examples of people Bischoff said would not draw. Fast forward to circa 2017: Jericho was in the upper card of WWE for over a decade and one of their most prolific performers in their history, Jim Ross is widely considered to be to commentating what Ric Flair is to wrestling, and Stone Cold went on to be one of the most popular and successful wrestlers of all time. (Hard to win a war if you keep handing your enemy ammunition.) While he owns up to having said that about Jericho, he denies he ever said that about Austin. Though Eric and Austin are on better terms these days (Eric was a guest on Austin's podcast), Eric says that he still doesn't regret firing him. He said he did recognize that Austin had talent, but at the time he was rather unprofessional. Even Austin admitted that in hindsight it was the right call, as he acknowledged that he was unmotivated and difficult to work with at the time. Which probably has some truth to it, since Austin did prove to be difficult to work with during his 2002-03 walkout, "Stunning Steve" wasn't exactly selling out arenas, and the Stone Cold persona wouldn't have been born had he stayed in WCW, anyway.
  • Despite huge profits rolling in from the sale of Rey Mysterio Jr. masks, Bischoff decided he would be a bigger draw without his mask. He then proceeded to... do nothing with him? Rey Mysterio later became one of the two most famous luchadores in the world (shared with Eddie Guerrero, another victim of WCW's lack of faith), including becoming a two-time world champion, while his mask is the most valuable one in all of mainstream wrestling.

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