Eric Bischoff: Controversy Creates Cash (Wwe) [Hardcover]

Eric Bischoff (Author), Jeremy Roberts (Author)

Book Description

Series: Wwe | Publication Date: October 17, 2006

Under Eric Bishoff's watch as president of WCW, the company went head to head with Vince McMahon's WWE and beat them at their own game before WCW itself spectacularly imploded. But by then, Bishoff had made an indelible mark on televised wrestling, producing shows that had appeared more dangerous, more sexy, and more edgy than anything that had come before. He did this to such an extent that in 2002, McMahon seized the chance to bring in his former nemesis as General Manager of RAW; since then, true to form, Bishoff regularly surprises fans with matches that would once have been unthinkable for television. In this revelatory look at his life and career, Bishoff frankly discusses the things he did, both right and wrong, as he helped shape the sports entertainment industry into today's billion dollar business.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jeremy Roberts (cowriter) has written on a variety of subjects. His nonfiction work includes biographies of Mussolini and Joan of Arc for A&E Books.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

East Rutherford, N.J., July 15, 2002: I'm sitting in the back of a stretch limo in the parking lot of Continental Airlines Arena, waiting to make my appearance on a televised wrestling show. I've been on television hundreds of times before, on hundreds of wrestling shows, but tonight is going to be different -- very different.

Tonight I'm appearing on the show I almost put out of business. And the person pulling open the car door to welcome me is the guy I almost forced into bankruptcy: Vince McMahon.

Could anyone have predicted this day would come? Never! But that's the thing about wrestling. There's a saying in our business: Never say never.

"How are you feeling?" Vince asks.

"Great."

"Nervous?"

"Not at all. Excited."

Vince looks at me for a second, like he's not quite sure he believes me. We go over what we're going to do onstage.

This is only the second time in my life that I've met Vince McMahon face to face. The first was more than a decade before, when he said hello to me after a job interview in Stamford. I didn't get the job. I didn't deserve it.

The history of pro wrestling might have been very different if I had.

The funny thing is, I feel as if I really know Vince well. We're like two soldiers back from a war; we've been through the same battles, albeit on different sides.

"Here's what I'd like you to do," Vince tells me. "When you hear me announce the new general manager of Raw, and you hear your music start to play -- come out, acknowledge the crowd, shake my hand, and give me a big bear hug! And milk it for all it's worth...."

He gets out of the car. Inside the arena, the crowd is hopping. They've been told Raw is getting a new general manager, one guaranteed to shake things up.

There's an understatement for you.

If you're a wrestling fan, you probably know that Raw is World Wrestling Entertainment's flagship Monday-night television show. You probably also know that Vince McMahon is the chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, better known as WWE.

What you may not know is that almost everything that makes Raw distinctive -- its two-hour live format, its backstage interview segments, above all its reality-based storylines -- was introduced first on Monday Night Nitro, the prime-time show I created for the TNT Network. For nearly three years, my company World Championship Wrestling, kicked Vince McMahon's ass. Nitro, WCW's flagship show, revolutionized wrestling. The media called our conflict the Monday Night Wars, but it was more like a rout. Nitro beat Raw in the ratings eighty-something weeks running.

Then Vince caught on to what we were doing, and the real battle began.

Unfortunately for me, and the wrestling business in general, the fight wasn't really between WCW and WWE, which was called World Wrestling Federation at the time. In fact, the real battle was between WCW and the corporate suits who took over Turner Broadcasting with the merger of Time Warner and then AOL. That was a fight I was never capable of winning, though, being stubborn by nature, I didn't realize it until it was nearly over.

Stephanie McMahon pops her head into the limo. Stephanie, Vince's daughter and one of the company's vice presidents, has come to take me in to the show.

Ready? she asks.

I'm ready.

Nervous?

Excited.

She stares at me a second, probably convinced I'm lying. I'm sure she thinks I'm a train wreck. The auditorium is packed with people who hate my guts, or I should say hate my character's guts.

Not too many people bother to distinguish between the character I play on television and who I really am. Worse, a lot of people think they know who I am because of what they've read on the Internet or in the "dirt sheets," the newsletters that cover the wrestling business for fans.

Wrestling fan sites are generally populated by people with too much time on their hands, who have very little real insight into what's going on in the wrestling business. A lot of them create their own stories and realities just to watch other people react to them. As a result of that, there's a lot of misinformation floating around out there about a lot of people, not just me.

Which is one of the reasons I decided to write this book.

The truth is, I hate most wrestling books. I read a sentence, a paragraph, sometimes a page, then quit. They don't take a serious look at the enterprise. Most are bitter, self-serving revisionist history at best -- and monuments to bullshit at their worst. A lot of the guys who write them seem desperate to have the last word on everything. Rather than telling people what we're really all about, they refight old battles that everyone but them has forgotten. They come off like whiners, complaining about everything.

That's not me.

I've had some bumps and bad breaks. Everyone does in life. But pro wrestling for me has been full of good things. I started out as a salesman and then, by necessity rather than ability, became an on-camera talent. I went from that to being chosen, improbably, to head the second largest wrestling promotion in the country. We were a distant second to Vince McMahon's company, bleeding money every year. With hard work and against heavy odds, we became number one. What had been a company generating 10 million in losses on 24 million worth of revenue, became a company with 350 million in sales pumping out over 40 million in profit. Then things went to hell. After a wild roller-coaster ride I ended up back where I had started -- as an on-air talent, ironically, with the guy I had been at war with for years.

And ultimately we became friends.

Let's go, says Stephanie. You're on in a few minutes.

We get out of the car and begin walking through the backstage area. My appearance has been a well-kept secret until now, and the looks of shock on the wrestlers' faces as I pass confirms it.

I can hear the crowd in the arena as I reach the holding area backstage. WWE writers have given me a two-page script to memorize, and the words are bouncing in my head. The funny thing is, I've rarely had to memorize a script before -- all these years on camera, I've improvised my lines. But not tonight. The writers for WWE have spent a fair amount of time on this script; my job tonight is to deliver what they want.

But even before I look at the words, I know what I have to do tonight. I have to find my inner heel. Once I'm out there, the adrenaline will take over, and I'll be fine.

There's a hush outside. Vince McMahon has come onstage and is about to introduce me.

Wrestling began in the United States as a sideshow carnival attraction. It thrived and grew because it blended showmanship, unique characters, and illusion. It still does, in some respects. But it's also a business, and a very sophisticated one at that. The business structure and revenue model are extremely complex. No other form of entertainment, quite frankly, combines the different revenue streams and opportunities that WCW had, or that WWE has now. I hope to give you some idea of that complexity in this book.

What happened to WCW while I was there is as much about business as it is about wrestling. A lot of wrestling fans think WCW unraveled because of things like guaranteed contracts for wrestlers and the decision to give Hulk Hogan creative control over his matches.

The fact that we may have overpaid some wrestlers was one reason WCW ended up in a position that was difficult to recover from. But it had nothing to do with why WCW failed. If our talent budget was half of what it was, in the end, it would have made no difference. The company failed because of what happened inside Turner after it was bought by Time Warner. Turner's merger with Time Warner, and Time Warner's ultimate merger with AOL, was the single largest disaster in modern business history. WCW was just one of many casualties. There was a lot of collateral damage. Even Ted Turner suffered in the fallout.

Did I make mistakes? Sure. I'll list a few of the bigger ones here. But I'm tired of hearing things like, Eric Bischoff killed WCW because he overpaid wrestlers and was a Hollywood guy and so on. That's all bull. Take Eric Bischoff out of the equation, and WCW still goes down in flames, maybe even faster.

What happened to WCW is a cautionary tale. My story isn't just about wrestling and sports entertainment, but about what happens to creative enterprises and individuals when they get caught in the maul of a modern conglomerate and the short-term "meet Wall Street expectations" thinking that's so prevalent today.

I know I'm not going to convince every reader who picks this book up that what I say is the absolute truth. It's possible that I've remembered some things subjectively or have a very one-sided view of them. Plenty has been written about WCW and my time there. But none of the stories of its demise have come from someone who was there. It's been written by people who were either just making shit up or hearing rumors. I was there, on the front lines. They weren't.

I'm on. I walk out toward the man who was my most bitter enemy for four or five years. We embrace.

That rumbling beneath your feet, I tell Vince, is a whole lot of people turning over in their graves.

Copyright © 2006 by World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: World Wrestling Entertainment; First Printing edition (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 141652729X
• ISBN-13: 978-1416527299
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #452,641 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read for long time wrestling fans..., February 5, 2007

By 

She Reads and Dreams - See all my reviews

This review is from: Eric Bischoff: Controversy Creates Cash (Wwe) (Hardcover)

Eric Bischoff makes a comment early in this book that goes something like this: books written by people involved in professional wrestling are usually either shameless self promotion or utter bull****. This is true. And while Bischoff isn't short on self promotion or bull**** himself, this book is much more compelling than I thought it was going to be when I picked it up.

Bischoff (through his ghost writer) is amazingly honest about his failures and readily admits to mistakes he made with storylines, talent, the executives at Time Warner and his own staff while running WCW. This is a rarity in any kind of autobiographical tome, but it is down right amazing coming from someone with ties to professional wrestling. Usually what you get is a lot of "it wasn't my fault" "they wanted to hold me down". And while Bischoff takes no prisoners with his flat out disrespect for the way things went after the big AOL Time Warner merger that left WCW out in the cold, it was refreshing to read Bischoff admit to making his own mistakes in how he dealt with talent like Steve Austin, and how utterly stupid he was to take on the production of another two hour live show (the forgettable Thunder) and by pushing Nitro to three hours when he knew he didn't have the money or the people to sustain it. He explains in the book why he did it, but admits it buried WCW.

There are candid accounts of his ties with wrestlers like Randy Savage, Lex Luger, Hall, Nash, DDP, Bret Hart and especially Hulk Hogan. He even casts his own light on the Montreal Screwjob and is very candid about Vince Russo's contribution to WCW which made me laugh.

Bischoff has an ego that's hard to miss - he congratulates himself a LOT on what he did well, and the reader gets the impression that if the merger hadn't taken place and if Bischoff hadn't had WCW snatched from him at the 11th hour by Vince McMahon and the WWE when Time Warner finally put it up for sale, he would still be running a successful profitable WCW. Interesting. One thing that is very obvious, though, is that when Bischoff was running WCW he was really running by the seat of his pants, making it up as he went along, which makes what he achieved with WCW in its heyday all the more impressive.

This book is a must read for anyone who remembers the Monday Night Wars back in the mid to late 90's. While Bischoff is better known by today's fans as an on air talent, he once ran the most successful wrestling company in the USA and almost put Vince McMahon out of business which is something no one else has ever - and probably will ever - come close to doing. For that reason alone, one sort of has to respect him and his contribution to professional wrestling.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars All in all, it's worth a read, October 20, 2006

By 

Cory L. Tetrick (Baltimore, Maryland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eric Bischoff: Controversy Creates Cash (Wwe) (Hardcover)

Eric Bischoff: Controversy Creates Cash is the autobiography of Eric Bischoff, who rightfully self boasts himself as the second most influential man in professional wrestling history, behind Vince McMahon. In his autobiography, he attempts to cover his side of the things. Although he does tell an interesting story, some things just seem to be missing.

He begins his story like most biographies, about his childhood. He does not dwell on this for long as he knows the audience of the book is more interested in other things. He talks about his early days as a salesman for AWA, before starting out as an awful interviewer and commentator. He moves onto his early time in WCW, denying completely lacking any management experience at this point, until he decided to toss his name in as a replacement for several unpopular other heads of World Championship Wrestling.

As he gains control of the company, he speaks of his early attempts to turn the company around, to varying degrees of success. He talks of his early politicking as he brought in Hulk Hogan, and other former WWE stars he brought in. He speaks of the Early days of the nWo, and how he first started to make WCW profit. But he finally starts to admit defeat to the greatest opponent to WCW's success- not the WWE, but Corporate Big Wigs as Ted Tuner slowly lost control his company. And lastly, losing WCW to the WWE, and finally returning to WWE as an on screen character.

While Bischoff covers a lot of things, the book seems a bit sparse in some details, and he doesn't seem to address his bigger blunders, such as bringing in the Ultimate Warrior, or having David Arquette become WCW Champion- and seems to obviously skewer the truth in his favor at times. He also seems to go out of his way to avoid hurting anyone's feelings at times, seemingly trying to make himself look like the good guy.

All in all, it's worth a read, just to get another side of the story- even if it isn't the total story. His insights on such moves as firing Steve Austin and Sean Waltman by Fed Ex are worth hearing straight from the horses mouth. It may not be the entire truth, but you can make yourself all the wiser if you read this book in tandem with R.D. Reynold's Death of WCW- The truth may not be either or, but the key to it lies somewhere in the middle.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bischoff doesn't tell all, October 16, 2006

By 

B. E Jackson (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Eric Bischoff: Controversy Creates Cash (Wwe) (Hardcover)

I was expecting to read about Bischoff criticizing many WCW and WWE wrestlers because, if you've ever seen WWE Raw during a commercial break, Bischoff runs down a list of people in the wrestling industry who he believes will be angry with him when these certain people read his book. I don't think so. His opinions on the wrestlers are pretty brief and he doesn't do much in the way of putting down anyone. Disappointing.

The book does give you information on his career in WCW and WWE that you've probably never heard before so the book is certainly worth reading at least once. But putting the word "controversy" in the title isn't accurate, in my opinion.