Eric Bischoff recently spoke to Wrestlezone’s Kevin Kellam, and talked being able to appreciate the success he had in WCW with his 83 Weeks retrospective podcast. Bischoff said he wasn’t even sure he wasn’t to do the show in the first place, but now sees how much interest is still there, and he gets to provide a different insight on things now:
“Here’s what’s crazy about the podcast—I wasn’t even sure I wanted to do it, to be honest. Conrad called me and said ‘hey, why don’t we do this podcast? It’ll be about the Monday Night Wars, that era, 83 weeks [of WCW winning the ratings war]’ and I said people have been talking about this stuff for twenty years, twenty-five years, there have been books written about it. There’s been DVDs, documentaries, I wrote a book about it. It’s been talked about, rehashed, discussed so many different ways and times that I didn’t think there was any interest in it. But what doing the podcast allows me to do is to go back in a very positive way, and break down and detail the ‘why’ of it all, or the ‘how’ of it all in a way that has never really been discussed before in that much detail. It’s a blast for me. It allows me to go back and look at things and from a very different perspective because in being truthful about it, when I got out of wrestling, when I left WCW, I don’t want to say I had a bad taste in my mouth, bitter, but I had made up my mind that that part of my life was gone. It’s over, it’s done, it’s time to move on. I was relatively young at that point, I have a family to take care of and I was in the midst of a career shift. I closed the door on the business in a way and my experience in it, until this podcast. I spend more time talking about it and thinking about it now then I have in the past twenty years.”
Bischoff also talked about the success of Bruce Prichard’s Something To Wrestle, saying the shows might take a slightly different format, but they both can teach people about the business of the wrestling business:
“Bruce does a great job. Bruce Prichard is a good, good friend of mine, but number one, Bruce is a much better storyteller than I am. He’s got a million of them, but he spent thirty years in the wrestling business at a very high level and he’s just got a wealth of stories. Bruce dealt a lot more with talent, better stories as it relates to the backstage antics with some of the talent. My perspective is a little bit different and I talk about the business of the wrestling business, so it makes 83 Weeks different than [Something To Wrestle]. People love that. It’s a business that people are aware of, but nobody really understands how it works. We get to take a peek behind the curtain and teach them how it works.”
Related: Eric Bischoff On Running WCW: I Realized I Had To Be Different From WWE, Not Necessarily Better
