Eric Bischoff On How AEW Can Start A Real War With WWE
Eric Bischoff appeared on Foundation Radio to chat about about pro wrestling. Recently inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame, Bischoff has faced many hardships in his wrestling tenure, between stints in WCW, AWA and WWE, and he was asked how he's stayed positive throughout all of it.
"I've always had this feeling that 'it's okay, it's going to turn out just fine,'" Bischoff said. "I was horrible in school, I was a poor student, I was bored in school, I wasn't physically gifted as an athlete or anything else, I was about as average as a kid could be, but I just always believed that there was something exciting down the road."
Bischoff is of course best known for being the Executive Producer of WCW during the famous Monday Night War era, and recently served as the head of WWE Smackdown creative briefly in 2019. More than ever, Bischoff believes in getting wrestling back to a storyline driven presentation.
"You can't produce a professional wrestling show like you produce a sitcom, or a drama series on television," Bischoff said. "You can't produce a professional wrestling show like you produce a movie. But there are elements from both of those and other forms of storytelling...that can be applied and modified to fit wrestling so that you can have a more systematic and precise approach to telling your story or creating one."
Since leaving WWE, Bischoff has made several appearances for rival All Elite Wrestling. When asked what AEW could do to start a new wrestling war, Bischoff had one answer; go head to head.
"Here's what has to happen for that to be viable. AEW's got to go head to head," Bischoff said. "There's got to be a fight. There has to be a battle. Going back to storytelling, what are the stakes? Until AEW gets to the point where they're delivering a similar sized audience and start trying to take some real estate...it's a war! If you want a war, you got to have a freakin' war! You gotta do it! AEW needs to take away some WWE real estate. And when that starts happening, people will believe the war, and then they'll be invested."
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit Foundation Radio and provide a h/t to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription