83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff - Episode 274: The Great American Bash 2000

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

On this episode of 83 Weeks, Eric and Conrad take us back to the year 2000 and the Great American Bash! The guys discuss the eroding relationship between Eric and Vince Russo, the growing number of gimmicks being added to every match, and the overall disgust Eric had for this PPV now watching it back over 20 years later.  MANSCAPED - Get 20% Off and Free Shipping with the code 83WEEKS at Manscaped.com.  BLUECHEW - Try BlueChew FREE when you use our promo code 83WEEKS at checkout--just pay $5 shipping. That’s BlueChew.com, promo code 83WEEKS to receive your first month FREE HENSON SHAVING - It’s time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that’ll last you a lifetime. Visit HENSONSHAVING.com/83WEEKS to pick the razor for you and use code 83WEEKS and you’ll get two years' worth of blades free with your razor–just make sure to add them to your cart. FITE + - Fite+ is the ultimate digital platform for live sports and entertainment, and they are now offering a free 7-day trial at TryFite.com SAVE WITH CONRAD - Stop throwing your money on rent! Get into a house with NO MONEY DOWN and roughly the same monthly payment at SaveWithConrad.com ADVERTISE WITH ERIC - If your business targets 25-54 year old men, there's no better place to advertise than right here with us on 83 Weeks. You've heard us do ads for some of the same companies for years...why? Because it works! And with our super targeted audience, there's very little waste. Go to AdvertiseWithEric.com now and find out more about advertising with 83 Weeks. CUT ERICS HAIR.COM - Eric Bischoff's iconic head of hair has been famously cut during his stints in WCW, WWE TNA...and soon, TGW. Later this month at Top Guy Weekend in Huntsville, YOU have the opportunity to cut Eric's hair on stage, for a great cause. Now through Wednesday, June 21, make a donation to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital by visiting CutEricsHair.com. Share a screenshot using #CutEricsHair and the highest donor will join us at Top Guy Weekend to cut Eric's hair! Make a donation today at CutEricsHair.com and remember to share using the hashtag #CutEricsHair Get all of your 83 Weeks merchandise at https://boxofgimmicks.com/collections/83-weeks FOLLOW ALL OF OUR SOCIAL MEDIA at https://83weekslinks.com/ On AdFreeShows.com, you get early, ad-free access to more than a dozen of your favorite wrestling podcasts, starting at just $9! And now, you can enjoy the first week...completely FREE! Sign up for a free trial - and get a taste of what Ad Free Shows is all about. Start your free trial today at AdFreeShows.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, this is Dr. Tom Pritchard, head coach at JPWA, the Jacobs Pritchard Wrestling Academy. And if you want to save money, go to savewithconrad.com. Well, I kept watching the podcast, and I kept seeing the commercials. You can't help us see the commercials during the podcast. And I figured, Conrad, who else better? So we gave it a shot. We found out we were right. We were looking to refinance our mortgage.

Everybody has a lot of bills these days, and we thought, We could probably do better with the percentage rate. Everybody was great to work with. It was a matter of just filling in the right numbers, in the right place, and everybody told us how to do that and what we needed. Within the next three weeks, we were refinanced. We are saving now over $100 a month, so that's probably over a 25-year span, $25,000, which adds up.

It was so simple, and they made me feel a lot less nervous and more comfortable. comfortable when I'm talking to someone because I don't always understand financial aspects of anything but it was great working with the team everyone from top to bottom start to finish if we had questions no matter how complicated everyone made sure to explain it to its fullest to our satisfaction to where we understood my wife and I understood the process understood where we needed to start and where we were going to end up. Hey, hey, it's Conran Thompson, and you're listening to 83 weeks with Eric Bischoff.

Eric, what's going on, man? How are you? I'm doing great on Grandson duty here in Clearwater, Florida. So, by the way, I'm going to give everybody a heads up. um we may have a special guest oh i don't know if i don't know if wailon is interested in being on the show or not but he's going to be running around he's going to be making noise and there's not much we can do about it so i love it i apologize in advance for the distraction i love it another generation of bishops that's awesome man it's just what the world needs hey so uh everybody

watching on youtube right now 83 weeks on youtube dot com can see that eric has a beautiful head hair. At least for a few more days, Eric Bischoff has suffered some iconic haircuts through his career. He lost it in WCW. He lost it in WWE. He lost it in TNA. And soon enough, he'll lose it at Top Guy weekend later this month right here in Huntsville. You have the opportunity to cut Eric's hair on stage. And we're doing it for a great cause. Now through June 21st, make a donation to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital by visiting cut erics hair.com take a screenshot using hashtag cut erics hair and the highest donor will join us top guy weekend to cut eric bischoff's hair so make a donation today cut ericshair

dot com and remember to share that screenshot and use the hashtag cut eric's hair eric if you're going down you're going down for a great cause my man you know i have always admired the St. Jude organization, and I'm anxious, anxious, looking forward to losing this beautiful head of hair for a great cause and a fun bet that apparently, of course, you know, we don't know yet, but potentially, I may not lose this bet. You wouldn't that be a weird twist of fate? Sorry, Jeff Hardy. Oh, wow. If at the last moment, it's actually you that gets his head shaved, but either way, either way,

the money will go to a great cause and that's all that really matters and we'll have fun and that matters a lot too cut erics hair.com i can't believe this is a real thing and i said that a lot to myself as i watched great american bash 2000 which is our topic today we're on the heels of slamberie from last month which we covered here in the archives 83 weeks on youtube dot com here we are i guess now eric about 45 days into this new russo bischoff regime How were you guys getting along, say, 45 days in, best you can recall? The relationship was beginning to, had begun to deteriorate shortly after I got into to WCW and started working with Vince Rousseau. And it was fine for a, for a period of time.

There seemed to be a legitimate or genuine desire on Vince's part to make it work. And there certainly was on mine. But no matter what, you know, it's chemistry. You know, when it comes to creative, you've got to have the right chemistry. You can have five creative people, five really talented people in a creative environment, in a room, so to speak. And just because they're good doesn't mean they're going to create great product. Because if the chemistry isn't right, if it's not a true collaboration and with everyone focusing on the same goals, and trying to achieve the same vision,

no matter how talented the people in the room are, or how many of them there are, whether it's one or two or ten, it's probably really not going to work. And it became pretty obvious shortly after Vince and I started working together, Vince Rousseau, that the chemistry just wasn't there. We should talk about what else isn't there.

Attendance. Nitro on May the 8th is going to draw 3,388, paying fans in total there's 6545 in the building and you might think well that doesn't sound that bad and it's not until you realize this is at the TWA dome and Meltzer would say

considering the size and cost of running a show at the TWA dome this is the biggest money losing event for WCW so far this year and he writes as a reminder that this TWA dome

does 3,800 188 paying fans and just 17 months prior in a blizzard, which means there was no walk-up because it's a blizzard, had 29,000 paid. Eric, this has got to be hard to reconcile. I can't even imagine how this might have felt from the inside looking out. Wait, we were here last time and had 29,000 paid and now we've got 3,300 paid. And we're not talking about years and years apart. 17 months difference this is kind of unbelievable no it is on the surface you know when you look at everything that was going on clearly the wheels have begun falling off wcw creatively um for about a year and a half prior to this event maybe a little over a year and it was that was

the beginning and it things got continually worse for a lot of lot of reasons. It wasn't just creative. It wasn't just Vince Rousseau. It wasn't just Eric Bischoff. It was a combination of a number of things. Not going to go into the internal strife that was taking place with Turner at the time. We've talked about it at nauseam. But I think the other factor, and this is just as big of a factor, is that the WWE, when they made their decision in the late 97, starting in 98, but then really heating up with the very provocative creative that they were producing. It was very sexualized. It was very much targeted towards that 18 to 34 fringe 18 to 49 year old audience.

So you have WWE turning up the nature of their adult themed creative and content while at the same time, you've got WCW in a state of dysfunction, both creatively and organizationally, corporately, that combination. And then you've got, you know, Vince Russo's in there because Brad Siegel decided to hire Vince Russo because everybody thought that Vince Russo was going to be the big savior. Within a month of a Russo being in WCW or two months, Brad started having second thoughts. Shortly thereafter, reached out to me about coming back. And that in and of itself was a dysfunctional way of going about trying to

write in the ship, correct the ship. So there was just, there was so many things going on. And he'd throw the morale in there and just a complete lack of vision. It was a combination of a lot of things. it's a runaway in the ratings war two raw from long island that day does a 6.23 rating nitro does a 2.28 melzer would say there were 10 million pro wrestling fans watching wrestling on monday night starting at 9 pm that means basically 66% of wrestling fans who are already home on a monday night didn't even bother to turn on their television sets to watch nitro at 8p

and waited until 9p to turn on raw Momentum is a real thing, is it not, Eric? Not just in sports, but in business, too. It is. And, you know, I've said this many, many times over the years, but maintaining momentum is a lot harder than creating it in the first place. Right. You can do any number of things, you know, even in business. You can do a massive advertising and marketing campaign and promotional activity.

You can do so many things to create a surge of. interest in your product or your brand, whatever the case may be, um, that's easier in my opinion than maintaining momentum. That's where it gets difficult. And, uh, this, you know, we, we experienced that firsthand. You're going to, uh, have your, your work cut out for you the night after Slambury. As a reminder, this is the paper view where Kane took the, or, uh, I'll get right, Canyon took the big bump off the top of the triple cage onto the ramp so we opened nitro the next night with him in the hospital and he's being visited by ddp and um you and the new blood are going to come in an attack page and then Kimberly pours the contents of canyons bedpan on

Dallas yeah we're pouring piss and bedpans on performers now and then they cut to the live show where we see Newblood and David Arquette coming out and Meltzer would say Bischoff clearly feeling the heat of the criticism of Arquette and the ratings attempted to portray it as if they had this angle planned long in advance by showing back footage unfortunately they didn't none of this made sense if the idea was to get the belt back from Page by using Arquette why would Page win the belt due to Arquette in the first place if Abbott laid down in a fake fight to Arquette to full page why did he lay down for page's finisher unless page was also in cahoots at times it's hard to make logical sense

of some of this writing is that challenging for you as a performer like if you don't buy it can you still go perform it or do you have to be bought in for it to be good oh i think you absolutely have to buy in otherwise you're just going through the motions you're just doing what you're told to do and you're not feeling it i think the art in professional wrestling in any performance whether it's music or wrestling or acting or whatever the art is to to feel it to convince yourself what you're doing is real and i guess that's called method acting in a way but you have to believe it you have to feel it in order for the audience to feel it and so much of this was okay if you know the bedpan thing. I don't know what was going through Paige's mind. You know, DDP was early on a

supporter of Vince Rousseau. And I think that says more about Diamond Dallas Page's desire to look at the positive and look at the bright side and be optimistic. And I think that Page really wanted things to work with Vince Rousseau. I think, obviously, Paige really wanted Rousseau and I as a combination to work. But at the same time, some of this stuff was so ridiculous that I think, and I'm certainly not speaking for page, and we didn't have this conversation. So I don't know that this is how he felt. But I know in general, when you're really wanting something to work, even if you're not

feeling it or believing in it, sometimes you'll go through it and you'll do it because you may be wrong, you know, and there's nothing wrong with that. You know, you're not going to agree with every creative decision that's made for you. It's the degree to which you're not engaged, meaning how far from it, how far from reality, how far from your character's reality is what you're being asked to do. And if it's a big disconnect, it's tough. You'll do it anyway, but it's tough, and you're not feeling it. And generally, neither will the audience.

I want to bring up another piece of creative here. We've got Rick Flair out. He's going to be calling out his son, David Flair. David's going to come out with Daphne and Vince Rousseau. So Rousseau is sort of taking on the stepdad role here. Rick's got his old 10 pounds of gold belt here. And he's arguing with David and Vince Rousseau. And eventually he looks at David and pulls his cell phone out of his pocket and says,

I'll pick up this phone right now and call Vince McMahon and you'll be on Raw next Monday and the crowd cheers and of course eventually Rick and David make up or so you think they hug but then David jumps him steals Rick's title belt and leaves he actually is seen later jumping in a limo and telling Lex Lugar he's quitting wrestling what did you think of this is this a good storytelling Rick and his son David I think at it's core it had the potential of being good storytelling it was too much too soon for david um he just wasn't ready to carry that kind of a role but if you if you take that storyline and just separate it out from what we're seeing in in 2000 in wcd because everything was everything was

kind of a mess but had that storyline played out two years earlier and it would have built over time and it would have been executed in a more realistic fashion, I think it could have worked. There was nothing wrong with a son turning against his father for crying out loud, how many stories in the history of storytelling have been based upon a betrayal of a father and son. It's pretty common, right? And it's a great premise. It's just how do you execute it?

And this was rushed. It was sloppy. There was no architecture to the storytelling. There was no real vision for it or planned for it. It was more or less a, hey, I get an idea. Why don't we do this? And it's just hot. It's another word for hot shotting is all it was.

And again, David was so new, not really comfortable yet, nor should he have been. No one would have been comfortable being thrust in that role with the little bit of experience that David had. It was no fault of David's, certainly no fault of Rick's. But it was essentially a good story on paper that was horribly executed. Well, speaking of horrible execution, Mike Awesome has a match with ADP here and man, they are just not on the same page. Sometimes matches click, sometimes they don't. This is one of those that's a miss. Mike Awesome, of course, is fresh off of a pretty incredible run with ECD.

W and he's going to be a big part of this new Rousseau Bischoff era or at least has a big debut on that first night attacking Kevin Nash. Why don't you think Mike Awesome enjoyed more success in WCW? Timing. Timing. Again, you come into an organization. I mean, it's like, you know, take Tom Brady and throw them, you know, into the Detroit lion roster. You know, it doesn't matter. how great of an athlete or how big of a star,

Tom Brady would be. When you're surrounded by a team that is not functional, that isn't playing up to par, that doesn't have momentum, it doesn't matter. And I think not that Mike Awesome was the Tom Brady of professional wrestling at that time, but Mike Awesome was a very talented guy.

He had the right look. His head was squarely on his shoulders from a wrestling perspective. He was smart. you know he he he was good but he wasn't smart enough or good enough to rise above just the lack of momentum and the dysfunction that was wcw in the year 2000 Scott Steiner is going to come out and challenge tank abbott and tank abbott is going to do an entrance here to sort of mock Goldberg and steiner and abbott brawling melts would say is tremendous and maybe the most

exciting thing on either show and of course of essentially Rick's going to run down and it feels like he's going to be here to save his brother Scott that is not the case. Rick Steiner is turning on Scott Steiner here. We've told this story a few years prior in 1998. We're trying it again here in 2000. How many times can you go back to the well on the brother story do you think? You can go back as often as you want to, provided you've got a good premise and an emotional story and something that people will buy into. If the story is there, it doesn't matter if we've seen it before. There are basically seven stories that have ever been told in a history of storytelling going all the way back to when

cavemen would draw on walls with sticks that they pull out of the fire and illustrate the hunt or the battle. There's seven basic stories, and you can go back to any of them as often as you want to provided you do a great job putting a different spin on that story and making it feel like a new story we've talked a little bit with bruce pritchard about ken chamrock and what his upward mobility was in the w w f what did you see the ceiling as for tank abbott in wcd i never looked at tank and tried to imagine what is i didn't look at any talent and tried to determine or especially early on what anyone's ceiling is because you never know You may think you know, but you may be very well surprised.

So I never looked at anybody and said, he's only going to be or she's only going to be valuable up to a point. You know, the truth is, Tank Abbott had a hell of a great character. You know, could he go in there and have an Eddie Guerrero style match? Absolutely not. That wasn't his character. And he didn't have the skills to do that.

He didn't need it. He had established himself as a. pretty interesting character through the UFC. And when he got to WCW, he was actually quite entertaining on camera. He, so I didn't look at Tank and put any restrictors or governor plates on him, or restrictor plates or governors on him coming off the starting line. It was kind of a little, well, let's try this and see how it develops and see how the audience reacts to him.

Because the audience speaks up their mind, you know, obviously creative has, And the character has everything to do with engaging the audience and getting the audience's attention. But at the end of the day, whether I like a talent or character or Conrad Thompson does or doesn't, really doesn't matter. It's the audience, the general audience that will determine whether somebody's successful or not. Eric, over your right shoulder, there's a bug crawling up the wall. There's a bug on my shoulder? On the wall behind you, over that shoulder, on the frame around the door. Well, let me kill that some bitch.

Oh, that's a big one, too. I think my, I think might beat my ass. Hold on. If we leave this in, you have to add suspense for music here, Dave. Oh, you bastard. You bastard, get out of you. Get the hell. Don't ever come back.

Oh. Just sort of remind everybody, Eric, is that an Airbnb in Clearwater. So we have to be sure to provide a link and let them know that this one has a problem. Yeah. I don't know what that was. That was a big ass bug, though. It's the thing about Florida. They got,

and I saw the same thing when I moved to Atlanta. You probably have them in Huntsville. But I'll never forget, man. And when Lori and I, we moved to Atlanta from Minnesota and we pulled into the driveway of our new house and was in the evening. It was late at night and the porch light was on. And I saw bugs I'd never even seen on National Geographic and they were big bastards too. And that was another one. I don't know what kind of bug that was, but it looked, it looked like a tough bug.

You never know what you're going to what you're going to run into here, less than 83 weeks every week. don't here's something i blocked out maybe i don't remember this at all you had liz in matches liz is going to wrestle daphne here yeah miss elizabeth medusa's going to interfere i can't believe this is real man liz wrestling was she okay with this what do you remember about this i don't remember much i don't think i talked to liz about it you know again my my role was a little different than yeah maybe people perceive it to be um with regard to me overseeing rousseau and creative uh i didn't i didn't deal with liz on this one i didn't talk to her about it or i can't remember that she even expressed an opinion about it

we've got uh hulk hogan teaming up with kevin nash here to go to a no contest with ray Mysterio, Conan, Kidman, and Mike awesome. That's right. It's four on two. Not a lot of selling going on here. And eventually, they get a baseball bat out after Hulk Hogan and put him in the trunk of a car. Um, they're going to try to kidnap Hogan here, but the Goldberg monster truck is going to block this from happening. And then Hogan with his, uh, magic Houdini power somehow escapes the trunk. What are we doing? doing this doesn't feel like nitro anymore no it doesn't doesn't it feels it feels like a parity yes of professional wrestling more than it felt like especially when you look at nitro from as you pointed out

17 months earlier 18 months earlier we were you know firing on all eight cylinders you know with with nitrous oxide and and and in our nitro glycerin it was just things were going so well And this is the exact opposite of that. And it really does feel as you talk about this and I think back about it, it feels more like a parody of Metro than Nitro. We should mention that there's a bright spot on this show. It's Sting and Jeff Jarrett for the world title. And it's a really good match.

But maybe we've trained the WCW fans. Here's what I mean. Sting puts the Scorpion Deathlock on and Meltzer. writes, then the worst thing happened. The crowd, sensing a world title change, gets really excited. Well, actually in unison, they turned their heads to backstage waiting for the run-in. The first time I ever saw this happen was in 88 watching the Jim Crockett Promotion show, and I think it was when Sting had the Scorpion on Rick Flair in world title matches when it was first noticeable. The reason I bring that up is because the cities where the fans did

that drew smaller crowds every month until by the month of November, they were completely out of business. The only difference is these guys don't have to make money. Actually, the fans were looking in the wrong direction since Fempero came from under the ring and pulled Sting under. So he brings up a pretty good point. You got to weed through it to get it. The idea being fans don't believe that we're going to see anything. There's always going to be a non-finish, a screw job, a run-in, a DQ, a schmaz, or what have you. And so when that moment finally happens like, well, it's not going to happen. So who's coming out and they all look and they didn't come that direction,

but they did come. It was Vampiro. And I feel like this is the reason a lot of people harp on quote unquote clean finishes. Are clean finishes that important? Can you do this too often? Do you think you were here in this era? Clean finishes can be very important. At the same time,

I think you can have non-finishes. provided that they're compelling and were designed to motivate the audience to tune in to see what happens next week as a cliffhanger, if you will. But I think the third point is that, yes, we did do it too often, and we did it in too similar of a fashion without any real thought to the episodic nature of it, meaning these non-finishes and these swerve finishes at the end were more of a function of lack of storytelling and lack of discipline, creative. You hear me talk often, probably too often, about the architecture of the story.

You know, if you've got a three-week story and you know what the finish is, you know what the end of the story is, you know what you want that to be and the emotion that you want to create, and you have an idea of where you want it to go afterwards, then you work backwards from that. But along the way, during that three-week period of time, you need to hit certain emotional thresholds within that arc. And done well, sure, you can have non-finishes. Go back and look at, you know, 95, 96, 97, even into early 98, mid-98.

Nightshow very rarely had finishes in the main events, especially. But it didn't matter because it was such a compelling story that the audience was more interested in the story than they were, who's going to win the match? Right. Who's going to win the match is a byproduct in many cases to the story. Yes, it's important, you know, who's going to win the match. You want the right person to win a match, especially at the end of a three-week,

three-month, three-year story, whatever it may be. but you've got to hit certain emotional points along the way to ensure that the audience is going to stick with it and just to arbitrarily have I got an idea instead of doing this let's do this let's have imperil come out from under the ring or anybody else has nothing to do with imperial um not effective not effective and and also i think to reinforce what you're saying or what dave said i guess is yeah, when you condition the audience to the point where like a Pavlovian response as you're going into the finish, everybody simultaneously looks for the run in.

Clearly you've done a good job of, you've done a good job of ruining the audience's engagement because they know what they're seeing isn't the end of it. They see something else coming and they want to see it right away. it clearly was overdone way overdone same thing happened with i mean you've heard me on this show i've talked about it a lot wcw never had a handle on finishes ever ever ever not when i first got there as a c squad announcer not in 93 or 94 when i was the executive producer but not being involved with creative 95 when i started getting more involved in creative

certainly by 96, with the introduction of the NWO, I was very involved and creative during all of that period of time. And up until this point, in July of 2000, the Achilles heel for WCW was finishes. Dusty Rhodes had the same problem. That's where the term Dusty Finish came from. Dusty had a great mind for storytelling. Dusty had an amazing vision in many respects. but Dusty wasn't surrounded by people who were really good at finishes, and I think Dusty himself,

because he was so focused on the episodic nature of what he was trying to achieve, and seeing wrestling like a movie, um, sometimes took shortcuts when it came to finishes. And we hadn't kicked out of the, WCW hadn't kicked out of that problem by 2000 for sure. There was just nobody there that really had a good feel for finishing. I said, I've said this again, a bunch of times, you know, people say, oh, did you, of all the people

that you could have, you know, snatch from WWE, who would it have been, would have been Undertaker, would it have been Sean Michaels, who would it have been, would have been Kane. The answer is it would have been Paterson, because I think Paterson will go down in history and from the people that I've talked to that I worked with for many years in, in WWE, you know, that's Pat strength was listening to somebody lay out a story listening to somebody lay out a finish and then sitting back and really putting layers into that finish you could probably find audio of me in an interview somewhere talking about this from 20 years ago where wwe had multi-layered finishes just when you think you know which way a match is going to go and then boom something else

happens that you didn't expect, shocked you into thinking, okay, this is going to be it. And then, no, that's not it either. And this is the finish. That layered type of finish, when it's done effectively, key word, effectively, is an art form. It's the last two minutes of the movie. You sit and watch a movie for an hour and a half or an hour and 28 minutes, and it's setting you up for the final two minutes. or one minute and having a really multi-layered ending to a movie or to a match or to a television show or to a book is the difference between success and mediocrity or dismal failure.

Well, we're going to talk about some dismal failure, but first I want to congratulate Whalen. Way J has officially made his first podcast debut. So how do you do that? Did you see him running around the back? I didn't see him, but we hear him. So his voice is here loud and proud for 83 weeks, not complaining. Just, I think it's a cool moment that that makes three generations of Bischoff that have now been broadcasted. How about that?

Wow. Well, then I'm going to have to get him. We're going to have to put him on camera for a minute. We'll do a cameo here at the end of the show. As long as he's not. If he goes down for a minute before. I got to warn my wife because she's going to have to bring him in. So Mrs. B, we're going to get, we're going to get Whalen on camera here sometime on that.

hour or so so just giving you heads up she's giving me the finger so listen uh the the conclusion of that match where vampiro came and and brought sting from under the ring uh sting's going to come back up all bloody gerrit's going to pin him new blood's going to come out and beat down sting and then hogan and ash come out to make the save and the goldberg monster truck runs over rick steiner and tank abbott's car this is a little silly I think every fan watching at home could say, wait a minute, Stone Cold's been doing that on TV for years. Is Rousseau really trying to do the same thing he did in the WWF with different characters? Well, we had Austin run over stuff.

Now let's just have Goldberg do it, bro. Well, we had monster trucks, I think, in 96, didn't we? I mean, I put together a monster truck match. Better or worse. Not arguing that. I'm just saying it wasn't a regular. currents on nitro that we saw people in monster trucks running over stuff and candidly i don't think as a wrestling fan i ever said man i bought a ticket to monday night raw but i really hope to see

bigfoot run over a car like that's not a thing right this is i don't know it feels like let's just do what we did for steve here i think there was some sure there was probably a lot of that um you go to what you know and everybody does this myself included yeah everybody that's in a creative position is going to go back to things that have worked in the past. Hulk Hogan was a perfect example of that to a fault. It wasn't until he turned heel and joined the NWO that he had a different way of thinking. And a lot of that was brought upon him by his association with Nash and Hall and seeing the success of the way they thought about psychology.

And Halk adapted well. But prior to that, Halk Hogan leaned into. what worked in the 80s in the early 90s way too often. We've talked about that a lot on the show. It's not unusual. Vince McMahon probably does the same thing. Um, or did the same thing. Let's talk a little bit about what's next for, uh, Vampiro on Thunder. He's going to sit down with Mike Teney. And they're going to build to a spot where Vampiro is acting like he's going to bite the head off of Sting's crow. But Sting makes the save and beats the hell out of Vampiro. And after getting beat up, Vampiro starts laughing.

and he's making references to Steve Borden, not wanting to work. He'd rather stay home. You see, his gimmick is just another acting gig. And then when Sting is pounding on him, he's referring to Vampiro as Ian. And I guess, you know, this kind of makes Sting look like the bad guy. And Vampiro look like the baby face. Maybe that's the idea. But where were you on these characters calling each other Steve and Ian on camera?

I was out. I did not, that was, that was a trend, okay, that arrived in WCW. Look, we played to the smart audience, when I say smart audience, people who think they're smart because they read dirt sheets and they think they're knowledgeable because they do so. I'm guilty of it. I played into that. I would tickle that crowd every once in a while. Ideally, you play to.

to the inside, you play the inside baseball card in a way that those who know get it and those who don't know what you're doing because they're not part of that small percentage of audience, don't even recognize it. Then you can get away with it. But to overtly break character, which is what we're talking about here and portray a character that you want the audience to believe is real up until the point in time when you basically tell them, not you're going to just you're going to you're going to unplug the audience's interest in your in your character and in this case the brand happened too often well speaking of uh things that happened too often liz wrestled another match this time against birth of fay

uh i guess it's ronda sing here still the match ends when luger is going to rack sing Chuck Palumbo is going to come down and hit both Lugar and Liz with a bat. That's right. Liz is not only wrestling again. Chuck Palumbo is hitting her with a bat. Chuck Palumbo hit Miss Elizabeth with a bat. What in the world are we doing? Yeah.

You know, aside from the obvious here, Palumbo, a male, hitting a female with a bat. Aside, let's just put that. off to the side and recognize that it's just bizarre. Yeah. The fact that Palumbo's using the bat, which was up until that point, a Sting gimmick, right? Yep.

And then everybody started using the bat. Now you got Chuck Bulumbo using the bat. So one of Sting's trademark characteristics, we had the whole, he had all of WCW scared to the bat, scared to the bat. death, but easy for me to say. The minute Signa would come down out of the rafters or pull that bat from underneath his trench coat and pointed to someone, it was extremely effective. Yes. So let's all do it. If it worked for him, it'll work for everybody. That was the mentality, I think, of Vince Russo, particularly. And we're seeing it manifest here in 2000,

and where Sting is now breaking character, as, as did Vampiro. But now we got Chuck Palumbo using the bat. I don't know, man. It was mess soup. Speaking of mess soup, we're going to see some of that in the next match here. Horace is going to wrestle Kidman. And the stakes are Horace has to retire if he loses. And of course, you are not on team Horace.

here with Kidman, you're at ringside constantly changing the rules of the match to make sure that your guy doesn't lose, even turn it into a handicap match so you can get other people involved. And eventually, Hogan, who was banned from ringside during the match, comes in and beats up some of these guys. And then Nash comes out. Everybody's jumping on him. Russo's out to confront Nash. He's trying to take credit for creating his success in the WWF. God. And then the blood falls from the ceiling. And it misses Nash completely.

And instead, it splatters and hits a lot of people in the front row. What in the world? What a visual, too, by the way. The blood coming down from the ceiling is supposed to drink Nash and we miss it completely. This, I mean, are you, I suffered secondhand embarrassment just watching this. I'm covering my face. I don't, I mean, if you're watching on YouTube, this is just, this is bad. I'm wondering, I forgot all about this.

And of course, there's an ash with a bat because no one can be in WCW unless you have a bat. Yeah, it's required. You get it when you sign your contract. Yeah, absolutely. But I'm wondering no one, Kevin, did he go, eh, I don't think I want to do this. And because look, the apparatus, the setup for the blood was done earlier in the day. It's clearly up to the talent to know where that blood is going to or with that fake blood is going to come down and be in the position in order to take it. Although I did look at that and it looked offset instead of the blood coming down in the center of the ring, which you would expect.

Can we go back to that graphic, Mr. Silva, and take a look at that again. It appears as though Kevin is standing right in the middle of the ring, correct? Now, he's standing right over the T. So he's standing close to the middle of the ring. And it looks like that blood is coming down almost two feet from the edge of the ring. So it could have likely been a production faux paul. Or it could have been Kevin going, no, I don't want to do that. so it's just going to miss me i don't know i'll have to ask kevin next time i talk to him

kevin's a pro though i doubt that he would have done that intentionally but there's always that possibility uh the next week grabbing crabby kevin could could occasionally be a little tough to work with uh the following week on nitro it's all about the wcw title changing hands um unfortunately raw gets double the rating nitro does here at least head to head there's going to be a house of pain cage match on this show between sting and vampiro the object here is to handcuff the opponent to the cage um the lights go out and vampiro just disappears by the way the misfits in action which we talked about on our prior episode about slambury melzer is sort of comparing them to be the wcw equivalent of the oddities and just like they had sable hanging out with the oddities over there well now we've got tylene buck

who we're going to call major guns here be a part of this group with chavo as lieutenant loco van hammer as major stash and as stupid as this sounds according to melzer they wanted him to be private stash as an inside joke but he cried about it because private

is the lowest rank and he didn't want to be seen as the lower rank please tell me that's right i i don't i don't know that none of us know if any of that is true that's hilarious though is it not please i want to believe that it is funny if if true it is funny oh my god it's not it's not entirely unbelievable either given the participants yeah uh well the misfits in action you know and the filthy animals this and terry funk i mean w c w in 2000 has a lot of stuff going on here. I mean, we've even got Norman Smiley running around doing hardcore match stuff and full football gear. Ralfus is hanging around. I mean,

it's not all bad. There's some interesting out there characters, but there are in a vacuum some really interesting characters. I mean, Norman Smiley comes to mind. Like, that was a home run in this era, was it not? I don't know if I could classify it as a home run. It might have been a double. I'm saying Norman Smiley in his prior WCW existence was quote unquote just a wrestler, a phenomenal wrestler, but just a wrestler. But when he's here in this era doing the big wiggle and running away from hardcore stuff,

now he's showing that he's much more than just a wrestler. He's an interesting character that makes for some interesting television segments. Like not every guy is going to be the world champ and be working. for the big gold belt. I loved what you guys were doing with Norman in this era. I think Norman, what we saw with Norman, what I saw with Norman, was like the audience. He was a great wrestler, very little character, if any, but he was a great utility player in that you could put him in just about any kind of a match you needed to put him into,

and he could have a great, believable, entertaining match with or without a story. But I don't think anybody recognized or looked at. at Norman Smiley as someone with a potentially great character, especially a comedic one, until this point in time. I don't like the football thing. I don't like coming to the ring. I mean, it's just too goofy for my taste. But it was definitely entertaining.

And I think more than anything, it, again, I don't know this to be true. But I'm, I suspect that even Norman Smiley went, whoa, being a character is fun. And I think he had fun doing it. And as a result, even though I think the, the football gimmick was kind of lame and silly, it was far more entertaining than just Norman Smiley going out and having a great match. Well, here's something else he does entertaining. He and Ralph us get a job at the popcorn stand and then Ralphus gets them fired because he was picking his butt and putting his hand in the popcorn.

And this same show, we would see major guns get down there and give Terry Funk mouth to mouth. This is, this is the same episode of Nitro Boys and Girls. And on this same episode, Crowbar and Daphne, wrestle Candido and Tammy, and Crowbar and Daphne win. So they're now the cruiserweight champion. They are the cruiserweight champion. Crowbar and Daphne together, Eric. The Crozerweight, you had a mixed tag match for the cruiserweight title.

This is just the epitome of nothing matters. It's all none. fans it's crash tv bro yeah bro bro bro it's crash tv bro that's what this it's it's a it's a colitis scope of cluster fuck is what it really was and when you think back how how got i even think about this until you bring it up though you look at the cruiserweight division in 95 or 96 97 early 98 mid 98 unbelievable you think of mysterious Eddie Guerrero's Dean Malinkos I mean just so good Jericho if I didn't already mention him so many great talents that the the the the luches that came in to create this phenomenon called a cruiserweight division

and then here we are in July of 2000 and it is completely bastardized yes that tells you the whole story And by the way, that's not the only thing that happens in this match. The reason that this match, uh, was well received by a lot of fans, Miss Hancock comes out and starts dancing on the table in the middle of all this. Tammy is going to give Daphne maybe the worst stunner in history. Uh, ultimately though, Crowbar and Daphne get the win. And then Flair comes out to destroy crowbar and in the middle of this, Sting goes to the parking lot and it's,

car is on fire this is all in the same segment this is unbelievable um you said it you said it right there it's unbelievable yes there is no there is no storytelling whatsoever in any of the things that we just described it is all crash tv hot shot scenes strung together that made no sense to anybody but vince russo let's talk about your old pal, Rick Flair. We're going to see a tour, in fact, of Rick Flair's home because Vince Rousseau and David Flair are there to tear it up in Charlotte. And they're jumping around in Flair's bedroom. They're going in Flair's closet, getting his robes. This segment, oh, there you see. Look, that's Ashley. That's Charlotte Flair

on WCW Nitro. Beth Flair and, of course, Reed. But how about you had Charlotte and WCW years before Vince ever had her on Raw, just saying. That's a stretch. But okay, I'll take it. And by the way, that wasn't me. That was Rousseau put that together. And for better or worse. Now, this idea, I don't, I don't hate this idea.

Right. This is, the only thing I hate about it is that Rousseau's front and center. Yeah, that's what I wanted to ask you about. Is he on camera too much here for you? He's, anytime that Vince Rousseau. was on camera, it was too much. Okay. He just wasn't a compelling character and he wasn't a great performer.

He could go out there and, you know, he could, because Vince has the gift of gab. You know, Vince could go out there and run his mouth and it'll make sense to people in the moment. And then he gets on talking, you think about it and you go, no. Vince just wasn't a believable character. But he had inserted himself, the story, you know, behind the scenes was, you know, Vince Rousseau replaced Eric Bischoff. Eric Bischoff was sent home, fired.

Lack of a better way of saying it, although they were still paying me. And then, oh, they've got to bring Eric Bischoff back. The Eric Bischoff, Vince Rousseau story, was kind of front and center to a percentage of the audience. What percentage of the audience? I don't know. I don't know if anybody does, even today. But we leaned into that. And it could have been, it had the potential of being,

a good story initially. It's why I agreed to do it and let it happen. But it quickly deteriorated. And by this time, Rousseau and I were not on the same page. Shortly after this, I'm gone. Vince Rousseau pulls his own little stunt. And I threw my hands up and said, Brad, you hired him. He's your problem.

I'm done. It's either me or him. That was my ultimatum to Brad Siegel sitting in Brad's office in Atlanta. it was very simple. I said, Brad, either he goes or I go, but this working together thing isn't going to work. And this is an example of it. Talk to me a little bit about flare here because, you know, it wasn't that long ago, less than two years. And, and he's at odds. He's on the sidelines. You guys are suing each other, not happy with each other. Now he's back. And he's got an opportunity to work with his son.

But as you said, maybe it is too much too soon for David. What do you think Rick thought about working with David here? I don't know. I never talked to Rick about it at the time. I assumed, which was a mistake, I assumed that it was something that Rick would have wanted and been excited about. But I don't know that for sure.

I'd like to know what I'd like to hear from Rick about that I don't you know you want to give your family your kids in opportunity if you can I think every parent would agree with that almost every parent would agree with that I don't think Rick was any different at the time I think Rick truly wanted to see if he could help his son break into the business and and grow but I don't know that for sure Well, what we know for sure is Kevin Nash is going to wrestle Mike Awesome in a not-so great match. Nash is going to accidentally drop Awesome on his head. It's a pretty rough-looking spot with the power bomb.

And then Awesome takes a bump off the apron onto a heavily gimmicked table setting. This is all according to the observer. And the match ended with Awesome, never put in the ambulance. But I think it ended because it was a mercy killing. That's all, of course, according to Dave Meltzer, you're going to challenge DDP and ask him to bring backup. Sid's going to come in, make the save. But of course, Sid turns on DDP and Meltzer would say, they've got to bring

Paige's mom on next week so she can turn on him. Were you doing too many DDP can't trust anyone's stories here, do you think? Yeah, because it was very similar to the sting story, right? Yeah. That was the premise. of the early Crow character. Sting felt the people that were his friends, close friends, began to doubt him and doubt Sting's integrity,

which is what kind of forced or was the catalyst for Sting kind of turning his back on everybody until he could sort out who he could trust and not trust. That was the premise of a story that worked really, really well two years earlier. and now we're going to the well with the same story different characters same story eventually we get horace hogan turning on holkogen on this same show too so another hallmark of uh russo booking i guess lots of turns even on the crash he be bro bro bro bro bro bro bro it worked for me in

w w we i turned wwe around i'm the one that made that happen bro it's just a mess it was oh god i don't I don't know why it's still, I still get pissed. I don't know why. I don't care. It's not going to affect my life anymore one way or the other. But it still bothers me, I guess, for some reason I can't define or articulate. We're going to switch the title here too. Flair's going to beat Jeff Jarrett with an inside cradle in six minutes and 16 seconds.

Flair's 51 years old here wrestling with one arm because he needs shoulder surgery and they're hoping to do it in mid June. And he wrestles in street clothes. according to the observer WCW wanted him to wrestle in trunks but there was a miscommunication so he didn't even bring any trunks and he wins the world title in street clothes

in street clothes what in the world are we doing Eric this feels like you keep asking me that question and I keep searching for some kind of reasonable explanation or answer and I just can't you just sort of throw your hands up at most of this stuff

I don't know what else to do I can't I can't make any sense of it you know even look and I'm not stirring any shit up but how many well I guess I could see Rick not bringing trunks to TV bringing his gear to TV if indeed he had a bad wheel that he was preparing to have operated on because you wouldn't expect to be asked to get in the ring when you're injured yes so I guess that makes sense um Um, but if that's the case, and he was injured, why do it at all? Right. Why, why even go there?

Wait. Because we needed a swerve, bro. And maybe we needed a leader, a new leader of the new blood because on thunder, Shane Douglas is revealed as the new leader. And that leads to everyone fighting. And Kevin Nash makes a match with, uh, Kidman for the great American bash. And the stakes are if he wins, he gets a title shot at Bash at the Beach 2000. We all know where that's headed.

And, yeah, this is interesting, this feud. We even see Hogan wind up kissing Tori Wilson to a big pop. What did you think of the Kidman Hogan story and involving Tori? And I don't know, this is, feels a little weird, huh? It is weird. And I've never hidden the fact or shied away from the fact that I'm friends with. with Hulk. I was friends with them then. I'm still friends with them. So I don't want this to sound like I'm just defending Hulk Hogan, but I'm going to because Hulk was, Hulk wanted this

thing to work too. Hulk had a good deal at WCW. Hulk wanted it to work, but it was smart enough to recognize that things were falling apart. And like me, to a degree, when I agreed to work with Rousseau, went into this with the best intentions, but also recognized that he had to change too. He had to be willing to do things that his character otherwise would never have done. And Hulk didn't want to work with Kidman. Hulk thought it was a ridiculous idea from the get-go, but also recognized that there was this, and part of it was, you know, managing the roster and trying to manage morale. Part of

this was, okay, if 60% of our roster, or 30% of our roster, a large enough percent of our roster believes that they're never going to get an opportunity here, then as a leader, as the most significant

talent on the roster, or one of them at least, Hulk felt responsible to try to make things work. And the Kidman idea was his attempt. It wasn't his idea. by the way, but Hulk agreed to do it because he wanted to kind of break the perception and improve the morale to the degree that he could. He didn't want to work with Billy Kidman.

He didn't think that there was a story there. It had nothing to do with Billy. Billy's a phenomenal talent. He certainly was back then. It just wasn't believable. There was no story there that made it believable. There was not enough story there to make people go. I don't get it.

Hulk Hogan, 275 pounds, 24-inch pythons, all the stuff that we've learned and identify with in terms of Hulk Hogan's character. Now he's going to get in a ring with a guy that probably at the time weighed a buck 90 and was relatively new. It just wasn't believable, but it was Hulk's attempt to try to break through the perception within the audience and certainly within a locker room

that if you're in the middle of the card, there's no chance you're ever going to wrestle. in a main event and that's what this was and i don't think that had anything to do with making out with troy wilson i think he would have been happy to do that as a heel but the whole billy kittman's story was bizarre not bizarre it was ill-conceived maybe so was this next segment scott steiner's going to come out with a bunch of makeup on to create a black eye and a cut-up mouth and it's going to be Scott Steiner versus Mike Awesome in an ambulance match. But once he puts the recliner on, Goldberg's music starts playing, but instead it's

Tank Abbott who comes out. So Rick and Tank are going to attack Scott. He's going to hold his own until Awesome makes it three on one. They're about to put Scott on the stretcher. The Goldberg truck makes the save. Yeah, the same silly Goldberg truck from a week prior. Now Rick and Tank are going to go after the truck. Scott's going to throw them both on the hood and the truck backs it out of the arena.

So Scott wins the match. My head's going to explode. Well, wait till you hear about this next segment. Quote, Vampiro burned a sting mask. During the commercial, they soaked the ropes with gasoline. Sting came out. Then Vampiro came out and called him Steve and said they're going to have an inferno match on the pay-per-view. Sting said, that's nuts.

and he's not going to do it. And at this point, the ropes were supposed to catch on fire, but they didn't. The fans started laughing and booing, and they re-taped it later in the show, and it did work this time, but by that point,

the arena was almost empty. Man, these stunts seem to almost never work in WCW. With these ideas that the WBF could have pulled off, we just didn't have the staff for that sort of thing. Yes and no. We had some really talented people that were capable of a lot, especially when it came to stunts. But I think the over-reliance upon them and the lack of infrastructure. So, in other words, you've got Ellis Edwards, who, by the way, spent 20 years in WWE doing the same thing after he left WCW.

Ellis Edwards was the guy who was really the architect of a lot of these stunts, working close. closely with David Crockett and Craig Leathers and a team of people. It wasn't David all by himself or Ellis all by himself. But in order to effectively execute any stunt, first of all, you can't do them, you can't do stunts five times in a show or six times or ten times in a show, as we're seeing here, right? If you've got an idea for a big stunt, something to shock and surprise people or do something that's completely unexpected and perhaps not seen before, at least a version of something that hasn't been seen before, you've got to have the time to plan it, rehearse it, and execute it.

And that's where WCW, especially during this time, there were stunts that we pulled off that were pretty cool. Let's go back to, you know, Holland Nash and the outsiders running the Steiner's off the road. That stunt was so real, we had to pull it off the air because people thought it was an actual crime. So there were stunts that WCW did that we executed incredibly well and believable. Sting were propelling down from the ceiling had never been done before. It was done incredibly well and helped really define Sting's character and create a sense of drama on the show that up until that point hadn't really been seen before. So it wasn't that WCW wasn't capable of it.

It's just that at this point in time, WCW 2000, there was an over-reliance upon it and a lack of detail and discipline to design, rehearse, and then execute. This was more of a ready, shoot, aim approach to start. stunts and everybody was scrambling and rushing and there wasn't enough planning to to execute properly and that's what we're seeing here whether it be the bucket of blood or the ridiculous monster truck stunt and finish or non-finish whatever the hell that was and now this in the whole vampirial thing you know what it's funny because one of the one of the one of the i'll never forget when brad seagull called me about coming back in 2000 so you keep in mind

i'd only been here for about four or five months not even that because i really didn't come in until, when was it March? Can I remember? February, March, whatever it was in 2000. I'm here now for about 90 days, 120 days at this point. And I'll never forget one of the first conversations I had with Brad Siegel, who was the president of TNT, for those that don't remember, didn't know. When Brad explained to me why he was interested in bringing me back, he said, Eric Russo is just too dark.

everything is dark and there's nothing wrong with having a dark character or several darker keelish characters or even a baby face kind of like stings crow character that was dark and ominous but you've got to have a balance and there was no balance at this point in time and i think and i think the world of vampiro by the way i just saw him a couple months ago and he's i just i have a lot of respect for Vampiro. But at this point in time, Vampiro was so focused on that dark, demonic kind of presentation of his character that within WCW where there was so much other dark type characters, or so many other dark type characters in story, it just was too much. It was too much. And Sting wasn't the opposite. It wasn't good guy, bad guy. Sting was a very ominous,

brooding dark character in and of himself it just there was no contrast in these characters this is painful i want i want you to know it's 1026 a m on a sunday morning here in clear water i can hear my grandson play with my wife in the next room which you all probably can as well and i apologize again for that but man this is really hard to sit and look at this stuff and remember living through it because it is ugly. Well, I got a question. What's more American than a bald eagle? The 4th of July is almost here and that means a couple of things.

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with free shipping, thanks to our discount code 83 weeks. Get your independence back, this independence day, and unlock your confidence with Manscaped. That's Manscape.com and the promo code is 83 weeks. So listen, the original plan is for Flair to lose the title on the 22nd. that was the plan all along. Meltzer would write that the original plan was that Rick would lose a retirement match and then have rotator cuff surgery.

But it's not as serious as the one he had back in 96. But the plan was lose the retirement match and come back probably for the September pay-per-view. But this angle with Rousseau is now maybe one of the hotter angles in the promotion. So as of the 15th, late afternoon, Jared was supposed to be Flair, and then Rousseau changed his mind before the show, feeling people wouldn't expect Flair to win. Jarrett was said to be unhappy about it, but promised he'd get the belt back a week later.

And then Flair comes out on TV and puts him over pretty big, saying that, you know, for a guy my age to win the championship again is such a great honor. And Jared was a great champion, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, the swerve, bro. You were right. Nobody saw it coming. That's the reason we did it. And sometimes people didn't see it coming because it's just absurd, but whatever.

I just, I can't, I'm assuming the show is going to last about another hour, 45 minutes, whatever. I can't spend 45 minutes burying anybody any longer. It is what it is. Everybody did the best they could do under the circumstances, meaning Rick, obviously. They're going to pretend that Flair has a brain aneurism and do like a little, Um, uh, nash is going to come out of a casket and beat up jera and David Flair like their flies and he leaves with the belt. But this is kind of crazy, you know, that we're doing it the way we're doing it here. People coming out of caskets and we're still bringing in new people, by the way.

Pamela Paul Shock debuts here as an interviewer. What do you think of Pamela Paul Shock? Um, can I get a look at her? Do we have a graphic? I just got to see your face. She's blonde hair. That looks like Shane. She looks just like Shane Douglas.

Sorry. My goodness. You know, what I remember of her decent on the mic, but way too green to be in the role she was in. Again, it was the Vince Russo Tits and ass tour, or. kids and ass era major guns a lot of the women that that vince wanted on the show were very happy to be as trashy as needed not that pamela paul shock was trashy as a person but there was just too many women that didn't really have any talent but had other gifts there were on that show because of their other gifts

goodness gracious this is you know maybe because he can't push the the envelope content wise as far as maybe some of the risque storylines so just have folks who maybe could look the part of what he was hoping to do i don't know what do you think it was i think viz was getting as close as he could to the line but this is that was the one line that Turner didn't want to cross I mean they were they were okay with the violence and the kind of some of the crazy stuff we did because it was, after all, professional wrestling. And I think that many executives have become desensitized to a lot of the stuff that had been going on in WCW for a long time, not just in 2000, obviously. But when it came to the over-the-top sexual nature of what WWE was doing, that was a definitely no-fly zone with Turner executives.

you guys are going to lower the asylum, which is a takeoff on a UFC cage, and we're getting ready for a match here. The bulk cutters are going to come out, which I guess totally defeats the purpose of having a cage. Later, we would see Terry Taylor and Reed Flair come out. Reed's calling out David. So now we're getting the whole family involved. Allegedly, according to the observer, it says the original plan was for David to give

read a terrible beating but standards and practices nix the idea feeling it would display child abuse i guess that makes sense do you remember there being an idea to see david beat up read on nitro no i don't doesn't mean it doesn't mean that it didn't happen or it wasn't a plan or a thought or a conversation but it never progressed to the point where it involved me so it could very well have been something that Russo wanted to do that just never got done because I mean Turner would throw if I could see Turner throwing a flag on that at that time Terry Tingle Terry tingle what a great name it's a great name is that not like the best stripper name in the world I love it like if you were a stripper and you were a hot stripper wouldn't you your stage name be

Terry tingle I think it's a great name well Me too, but not with regard to the real one. She was far from being an attractive stripper. But I can see her throwing a flag on that one, and should have, by the way. By the way, somebody should have maybe thrown a flag on this. Vampiro beats Hulk Hogan in four minutes and 40 seconds. That's right. Vampiro beat Hulk Hogan in four minutes and 40 seconds.

Now, during the course of the match, Hogan ate him up. McKinman does a run-in, hits Hogan with a blow torch. And Vampiro gets the way in. A blow torch, Eric. Yeah. You know, I've been in probably thousands, maybe just hundreds, hundreds, thousands of arenas. I produced myself over 5,000 hours of professional wrestling over the years. I've never once seen a blow torch on the set.

So, I don't know. Where do you get a blow torch? Why a blow torch? I don't know. Next up, we've got Nash versus Jared for the vacant title because Flair can't defend it. And eventually, this is real. Nash is going to set up a power bomb in the aisle on Russo and the blood comes from the ceiling. But he has to wait forever because the stuff is falling late.

And when it does fall, it misses him again. But he at least tries to. move into the path and get some of the red stuff on him. Jared hits him with the guitar and pins him in about five minutes. But we got guitars and blood from the ceiling and, man, this is just, this is all just a mess. You said it.

I don't know what to say. I like to be engaging and entertaining and be a little provocative myself. Gives people something to talk about, but I don't even know how to describe what was going on any better than you just did. It was a mess. Meltzer would say there's been a lot of high-level negotiations this past week involving WCW and ECW, most notably with SFX. SFX owns many arenas and as of late has purchased concert tour rights for leading acts

like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. The deal they've done in those situations is to book the tours themselves because they own several major arenas and can cut out renal deals for other major arenas that everyone else can be on. They guarantee their performers, in this case, the latter to, $250,000 per show, and they've jacked up the ticket prices to $100 or more per seat. They've sold tons of corporate sponsorships and commercials on the live screens to help defray the cost. And at one point earlier this year, they made a strong approach to buy WCW, this company, SFX, which was immediately next by Turner. Exactly what's going on with these negotiations has been kept

secretive, but there is talk that WCW is interested, but not in selling the company. But perhaps SFX might buy promotional rights to the house shows and negotiations are in the beginning forms. Do you remember hearing about SFX, A, they had an interest in buying WCW, and B, that maybe there's a chance they'll just handle our live shows? Yes. I think I was a part of one of those initially, initial meetings. but it was a short-lived, I wouldn't even call it a negotiation.

It was exploratory at best. There was a presentation. There may have been a meeting or possibly two, but I was involved with one of them very briefly. More as an introduction and getting to know everybody and having a preliminary discussion about the idea that SFX brought to the table. But it was really a Turner corporate. discussion and my involvement was very limited at best.

But pretty much the reporting on what you just said was true. To the extent that SFX was interested in buying WCW, I had heard that at the time. Don't know how true or how serious that was. But isn't it ironic that here you had a company. At the time, SFX was a very, credible, well-funded, successful company had a great track record at the time. Turner should have sold, right?

It would have been a good move had they sold then. I guarantee you they would have got more than $4 million out of SFX. It's believed that in the observer, TBS and T&T want to maintain the TV rights to the company, but they don't want any of the headaches that come with running it or the losses that come with running it. And Meltzer would say at least two other groups have expressed interest in buying either WCW or ECW.

And there's always the Fox Network, which is always talked of doing wrestling. And according to Meltzer, had prior negotiations with you, Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage. Was that right? The three of you guys ever talked to Fox? I did. Hulk and Randy were never a part of those discussions. I met with Peter Liguri, who was then the president of FX. And it wasn't Fox Network, it was FX cable.

And who was the guy that was at Turner when the AEW deal was consummated? Kevin. Kelly? Yeah. It doesn't sound right, but I'm going to use Kevin Kelly. Kevin Kelly worked right under Peter Liguri. and I met with both Kevin and Peter and there were some serious discussions

not negotiations but there were some very serious discussions about bringing one of the shows they wanted Nitro Turner was interested in possibly moving Thunder possibly Brad was interested

Brad Segal was interested but they didn't want to move they didn't turner didn't at the time want to move nitro kevin riley kevin riley that's it kevin kelly is the wbf announcer right kevin riley was uh i don't if he was i don't know what his title was but i i had a meeting in l a with both peter legris and kevin riley on the nitro or sorry the thunder show that airs on may 31st you do an interview uh with tony chivani and you're going to claim that you've got a big deal that's going to change the landscape of the wrestling industry and it was finalized

earlier in the day and you say that the deal will be announced at the great american bash and that there's nothing Vince McMahon can do about it when you cut this promo was the plan all along for Goldberg to turn heel as we'll see or was it something else that fell through god almighty i don't know like it just feels like coming out and making an announcement but this will change the wrestling landscape forever and it's just Goldberg turning heel feels a little silly, no? Well, there was nothing else, though. I mean, it had to be it by process of elimination because it wouldn't have been a TV deal. I certainly wouldn't have been involved in those negotiations or discussions had there been one.

Because at this point in time, I wasn't even an employee of Turner Broadcasting. I was a consultant. and I would not have, it wouldn't have been appropriate to have me in, in a business meeting with regard to WCW or Turner. So it wouldn't have been that. The only thing it could have been was really Goldberg and overhyping, teasing that turn. I just love this story that makes the observer, quote, WCW sent feelers to ECW about working together,

something Bischoff discussed with Paul Heyman during the Mike Awesome legal battle of turning it into an angle, something a stagnant ECW may be more likely to consider, although Heyman said he has no interest in being part of a WCW angle. Is this real? Do you remember we're trying to do something with ECW here, stir it up in 2000? Yeah, I mean, Paul and I had several conversations. I have known Paul since 1987. We both worked in AWA together for a while. Paul Heyman worked with a guy by the name of Rob Russon. And Paul and Paul Heyman and Rob Russon were essentially Vern Gagne's live event promoters outside of the state of Minnesota.

So I had known Paul for a long time. And even during that period of time when there was a lot of ECW talent coming over to WCW because Paul was having cash flow issues, despite the lawsuit threats and all that going back and forth. Paul and I met, at least on one occasion, I remember specifically in Orlando. So there was, yeah, there was, we'd explore it. You know, we were familiar enough with each other that we'd explore it. But here's what I didn't know then, and very few people know now, is that WWE was funding ECW. Yeah. Vince McMahon had a piece of ECW, which is why Paul wouldn't have ever really been able to work with us on any kind of cooperative basis.

Let's talk about some sad news that happens on this show. There's a report that prior to this Nitro, Tammy Sitch was taken off the show because of a backstage incident. Lots of people at the time were saying she had been fired. Meltzer says that doesn't seem to be the case as of yet. But apparently other women working in the company found syringes in a restroom adjacent to the women's locker room along with a vial of Newbain, it's a pain-killing drug that has become a major problem in the ECW locker room,

and apparently this was all linked to Tammy. Quote, she was described as being in very bad shape backstage before the show, and it was said before the show that she was in the said bathroom for what seemed like in eternity. She was supposed to do a catfied spot with Ms. Hancock on the show and set up a mixed tag feud with Chris and Tammy versus David and Miss Hancock. But after Bischoff and Janie Engel were alerted,

she was pulled from the show and it's believed she was ordered to take a drug test the next day and for for years eric people have said that Kimberly took the blame for this uh the discovery and i guess that even maybe led to an issue with scott steiner and dp and this just spirals here what do you remember of this sad tamysid circumstance i remember janey coming to me and saying hey we've got an issue here i remember going into the bathroom and seeing this syringes and chris candido was in there with her um presumably using as well it was really really ugly well it's a sad circumstance uh thoughts and prayers to the candido family of course they just did a fantastic dark side of the ring on those guys not too long ago um

booker t's back he's going to come back as g i bro i don't know that book or t needed to be repackaged but we tried it and you can see Eric's visual response to that 83 weeks on YouTube.com. Rousseau, David Flair, and Daphne and a woman playing the role of Reed Flair's sixth grade teacher, Ms. Snodgrass, are going to be on the show. And she said that Reed was teaching the other kids to make fart noises with their armpits and sticking mirrors on classmates' shoes so he could look up the girl's skirts. And this has to be Rick Flair's son. David challenges Reed to a match at the bash.

Yep. David is challenging a sixth grader. We're talking about arm fart pits. This is a different WCW. Crash TV, bro. Oh, goodness. I mean, you talk about playing to the lowest common denominator. Yeah. That is playing to the lowest common denominator. And if that isn't a reflection of Vince Russo's understanding of or appreciation for professional wrestling as a business, I don't know what is. And look, we've all done, I'm not, I'm not righteous here. It's not that I haven't done stupid shit, but the degree to which, and the volume of stupid shit creatively that Vince Russo is doing during this period of time, if that isn't a true

reflection of someone that, A, doesn't really understand the wrestling audience at all, not even a little bit, Vince Rousseau was living out his own pre and post-pubescent view of what professional wrestling is. And we all had to suffer through that. This is just horrible. I mean, this is really, look, like I said, I don't want to. want to come off like, oh, I never made any mistakes or I never did anything that was tasteless or I have. And I recognize them when I did them and went, okay, I don't want to do that again. But this is just consistently horrible, juvenile. I want to call it frat humor, but even, you know, frat humor is usually perpetuated by 19, 20, 21 year olds. This is like 13 and 14

year olds who are just living a weird sexually frustrated fantasy. It's bizarre. Well, it was bizarre the way we played hot potato with the title. We're going to switch it again. This time Nash wins the world title in a three way with Jarrett and Scott Steiner. Of course, there's going to be women getting kidnapped and referee bumps and Tank Abbott because why wouldn't there be? And Nitro in Salt Lake City, we've got Vince Rousseau and David Flair holding Reed and Beth Flair hostage. Kevin Nash is going to hand the world title back to Rick Flair and say, you never lost it. So that makes the fourth title change in WCW in three weeks.

Jarrett comes out and challenges Flair to a title match. And Flair says, I want the night off. But of course he wants the night off. And then of course, once he finds out that his wife and son are being held hostage, he accepts. and the match is back on.

Meanwhile, Goldberg's going to challenge Tank Abbott to a match on June 5th in Atlanta. Vampiro is going to try to burn Funk with Pyro. Eventually Sting's going to make the save once Funk has been completely doused in gasoline. Vampiro's got a blowtorch. He's threatening to set the entire parking lot on fire, but they stop him. What's with the blow torches? Another blow torch. A lot of fire here.

A lot of fire here. apparently there's a little smoke to the fire though because lex and liz they say that's enough they refused to do the planned angles that were set up for them with these thunder tapings and they're sent home allegedly luger was supposed to do a run-in and attack palumbo which would cause the dq in chronic's tag title loss to palumbo and stasiak in the case of elizabeth there's a good deal of sympathy in her direction because they wanted her to be a wrestler and do a wrestling match with Kimberly at the pay-per-view, and she's never even trained to be a wrestler. Of course, there's a lot less sympathy for Lugar, who didn't like the way he was being booked in the program with Palumbo, who clearly isn't ready. But then again, Lugar was once in Palumbo shoes, and he was pushed long before he was ready. My goodness.

What do you remember of Lex Lugar and Liz saying, nope, not going to do that, and you guys having to show them the door? I didn't blame him a bit. completely understood it didn't interfere didn't try to talk anybody i didn't talk to lex or or liz about i didn't try to calm him down i sympathized with i empathized with them i didn't want to be there either so couldn't blame them they weren't wrong well the much hyped return of goldberg and it's goldberg versus tank abbott his first match on tv in a long long time does a 2.90 rating. The show that night does a 2.86. Raw does a 5.95. And then you actually

bring up on this show that Luger and Elizabeth aren't there. Rousseau was going to challenge John Rocker, who's, you know, making a lot of news. He's the baseball pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, who was pretty controversial at the time. I don't know, man. This is weird. We even see Rousseau beating Rick Flair in a cage match. I can't believe this is real. But it happens in 9.5. and a half minutes. Flair is, uh, I don't even know what to say, man. You want to talk about a loyal soldier here wrestling in a cage match against Vince Rousseau? I mean, why don't you throw the flag on this? Oh, I don't know. I should have. I just, this is so freaky ridiculous

I don't know how I let this happen I mean this should I should have walked out with Lex and Liz I should have driven him back to the hotel with this one Meltzer would say for some reason I can't figure out

the blood immobilizes everyone except the heels which it doesn't affect it appeared the blood was supposed to drop much sooner thereby not making the figure four spots so ludicrous and that David was supposed to pull Russo out of the path of the bluts only Rick would have to sell it but neither happened David put the figure four on Rick and Russo covered him for the pen

this is all just bad it is what it is um the go home thunder the mama luks are now the hardcore champion I know that sounds silly but it's only silly because you gave it to them you'd beat Terry Funk for the hardcore title which we've talked about in the archives. You're the hardcore champion having beaten Terry Funk on the same show where Vince Rousseau was beating Rick Flair. This all actually happened. And then you just give the title to the mama lukes. What's the deal, Eric? You too good to put a guy over? You can't help make the mama lukes? Why don't you count the stars, pal? I don't want to get my ass kicked. Well, there's that. And yeah. Yeah. You kidding me? Damage this face potentially?

no way i'll just hand it over i had no desire to defend that hardcore title i didn't want to be on the road defending that title well i didn't want that pressure of that burden the pressure of the burden i can hear i can hear wailing in the background and let me just tell you every good incident where you hear from a wayland started for the night that started with blue chew blue chew is unique online service that delivers the same active ingredients as viagra sealis and levitra but in chewable and at a fraction of the cost. Blue Chew is going to make you hard. How hard?

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Just pay $5 shipping. That's bluechew.com. The promo code is 83 weeks and you'll receive your very first month free. Visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. And we want to thank Blue Chew for sponsoring today's program. Tank Abbott is looking for somebody to pound and they show a 12 year kid in the audience and they alerted us that it was John Michael Chivani, Tony's son. Tony hops the rail and the kid threw a drink at Mike at Tony Abbott's, I'll get it right, Tank Abbott's

face. Nash comes out to save Chivani's life and they went all of 13 seconds before Rick interfered for the DQ and Scott made the save. How about that involving Chivani's kid in the program? Made him a star. Come on. What's he doing? What's, what's, what's, what's, What's he doing now? I think he's doing, no, that's a, I thought he was doing the brewery, but I think that's a different one. Yeah,

because I talked to Tony about his kids about a year or so ago. We were driving together somewhere. You know his son, one of his sons works with him in AEW. Oh, really? Yeah, because he was at Fox,

wasn't he in New York? That's right. In production in New York. Yeah, that's kind of cool. You know what I found out the other day? Just to change the subject, because this is just actually turning me inside,

out having to talk about this disaster of a show is Randy Anderson's. Remember the scene where I fired Randy and then his kids came out? Yes. And I said, tell you, Daddy, he's so fired. Yes. His son is an actor. Really? Randy Anderson's son is currently an actor. What? And I'm going to interview him. I'm going to find. him and interview him on a special edition of 83 weeks. I want to do a special edition, and I may do it on strictly business because the business of the wrestling business is often a family business, right? And I want to interview Teal Piper, who I ran across a couple months ago here in Florida.

I want to talk to Teal, and I want to talk to Randy Anderson's son about what it was like. growing up with a parent as a professional wrestler and how it influenced their decision to become one. And look, we've seen it before. We know the story. I mean, you look at Dusty Rhodes and Dustin Rhodes and Cody Rhodes, obviously. You know, there have been a lot of, you know, Garrett Bishop, obviously, my son, there's been a lot of father, son combinations and that's been in existence, but I want to talk about what it was like growing up as a kid in that world and what that world looked like from a child's perspective. I think it would be very interesting.

So somewhere soon, probably in June, we'll do an unstrictly business. We're going to do the business of the business of the family wrestling business. There you go. Just a tease. We're finally here at the show, Great American Bash 2000. We do $75,000 buys. $75,000 is actually an improvement. It's up $23,000 from Slambury a month prior.

But a year ago, the Great American Bash had Kevin Nash defending his title against Randy Savage and Rick Flair taking on Roddy Piper. Maybe most famously, though, the no limit soldiers wrestling the West Texas rednecks. That did 160,000 buys. So year over year, we go from 160 to 75. And, of course, the big surprise is going to be Goldberg. We'll talk about that when we get there. First up, it's Lieutenant Loco, that's Chavo, retaining the cruiserway title over Disco Inferno, who is frequently called the hip-hop inferno during the match.

They go four minutes and 57 seconds. Yeah. Mouth to mouth is going to be there because Pops is laying there for dead. Major guns is going to deliver the mouth to mouth. he awakens from the dead one of the few wrestling moves uh on the show reverses her gets on top and then he's pulled off man this uh this is a little wild that we've got this old cat out here playing captain or he general huge erection's dad and we're doing mouth to mouth to mouth i mean this is that was the highlight of this guy's life i bet well it's a good day i'd say that uh next up

we got Chronic beating the Mama Luke's in nine minutes and 20 seconds. Vito's going to wrestle early in the match wearing the hardcore title, which is kind of fun. It only gets one star. Um, they're, they're going ahead and setting themselves up to be the number one contenders for Stasiak and Palumbo's tag team titles. But chronic, I mean, it's written in the observer that even after just a few months on TV, you were a big fan. Is that right? You were a big fan of chronic saw upside i had a lot of respect for him i i i didn't think he was like ready to come out of the cannon and be the face of the company or anything like that but i was very happy to work with him and and i was on my chronic clark and adams brian clark and

and ron adams oh no i was believable credible yeah professional easy to work with Decent second. Oh, wait a minute. I see Whalen here. Okay, I think it's time for his debut. Time for the run-in? Here he is, ladies and gentlemen. Come here, Waylon. Making his worldwide television debut. Hold on. Come here, Boy, Jay. Is he going to do it? Is he going to do it? It's a false finish. Hold on.

All right, here comes. Drum roll, please. there he is look at that look at there way jay look at that wave welcome to 83 weeks whalen say hi okay we're done well there you go riveting audio here uh but we got we got three generations of bishop shelf now how about that nicely done mike awesome is going to beat diamond dallas page nine minutes and 41 seconds it's an ambulance match. Canyon is going to be the next guy to turn. That makes it three pay-per-view shows in a row where DDP's best friend or wife has turned on him,

two and a quarter stars. I mean, my goodness, dude. Arquette, Kimberly, now Canyon. My man has no friends. You said it, though. He is the new sting. Next up, GI Bro is going to pin Sean Stasiak in 14 minutes of a boot camp match.

Yep, we're gimmicked up here. Booker T. probably should have just been Booker T. Shane Douglas is going to wrestle the wall. They go eight minutes and 12 seconds in a tables match. And, Conrad, I know you got a, I know you got a busy day today. And obviously our hands are full.

But is there any doubt? Can anybody not understand why I hate gimmick matches as much as I do. Yes. This is just disgusting. It's too much of it. Too much of it.

I mean, how about this too? Douglas asked for it to be a best of five tables match. And the announcers explained it was really a best of nine. And then it turns out no, Douglas was right. It's a best of five. So the announcers don't even really know what it is.

But now instead of putting a guy through a table one time, you got to put him through five tables. eventually Douglas hits wall with a foreign object wall falls backwards through three tables and he loses but it's not enough to have one table it needs to be five tables as if that's not enough Scott Steiner is going to win an asylum match over Rick Steiner and tank out but yet another gimmick match uh I don't know how we do this but maybe maybe this is what we've all been leading to Hulk Hogan and Billy Kidman they go 11 minutes and 39 seconds Hulk Hogan gets the win which means he earns a title shot at Bash at the Beach 2000.

We all know what's going to happen there. And Meltzer would say even though the match was lousy, Hogan was the first guy on the card to get a really big crowd reaction. Star and a quarter. Listen, lots of people have been critical of this angle and the execution. But clearly Hogan gave Kidman a lot. But ultimately, when the title shot was on the line and you hear the crowd, you got to go with Hogan.

That's the story we're telling, right? it would have been a disservice to Billy Kidman. I mean, it would have, Hogan would have survived it because he's Hulk Hogan, but to push Billy down the audience's throat at that point would have been ludicrous. Nothing against Billy Kidman at that point in time. Phenomenal talent.

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with your razor. Just be sure to add them to your cart. That's 100 free blades when you head to H-E-N-S-O-N-S-H-A-V-I-N-G dot com slash 83 weeks and use the code 83 weeks. Next up, something interesting. Rick Flair is going to beat David Flair. Rick's title, or Rick's career rather, is on the line. So if Rick loses, he has to retire. Rick thankfully wins. But you probably knew that was going to happen because he comes out with his entire family. His wife, Beth is here. Reed is here. Even both of his daughters, Megan and Ashley. And Meltzer would say it was looking sad when Rick went to do his flip in the corner and couldn't even get the full flip. But aside from that, Rick showed his unbelievable ability

since this was far and away the best match of David's career. Rick's going to hit or Rick's going to get hit with a baseball bat by Vince Russo. They handcuffed him. him. They're using the figure four for leverage. Reed Flair hops the rail. Russo pie faces the little boy. Reed gives Randy or Russo a low blow rather. Gets the handcuff key. Charles Robinson unlocks Rick. Ashley jumps Russo. That's right. Charlotte Flair jumps Russo. Locks him up with the handcuffs. This is crazy silliness. And afterwards, Russo is going to challenge Rick to a match with Rick's Carrera on the line again on Nitro, two and a half stars, involving the whole family, though.

What do you think? Too much, too much. Ugh. I, I, uh, silly. I, it's, oh, my God. Yeah, yeah, as if that's not enough, we've got an inferno match still to go. Vampiro and Sting.

somebody's going to get lit on fucking fire. Yep, that's what we're going to do. The match starts in the ring with Vampiro pouring liquid all over Sting, which they're pretending as gasoline. He climbs up the ladder to the top. Sting takes a stuntman bump about 10 feet onto padding. He gets right up and climbs back up the ladder. And eventually they get to the top of the screen,

do some thunder and lightning effects. The lights go out. They switch to a stunt double. You can see the stunt double. on the sting mask some of the fans are even able to see the switch the stuntman is then set on fire and jumps off the top it's going to fall 30 feet onto a heavily padded stage they douse him with the fire extinguisher it wasn't so much because he was on fire but because when he landed his wig came off and people could see it wasn't really sting the announcers are trying to sell it

like someone died and uh yeah negative two stars what are we even doing and this is just stupid it is and this was this and again this is probably a discussion for another show but after going through the couple months that I worked with Russo trying to write the ship so to speak trying to find a path that would work for WCW and a way out of this craziness was the reason that Hulk and I had been talking about Bash at the Beach, having there be a controversial finish, hadn't fleshed it out yet, but a controversial finish where Hogan would get the belt, take the belt, leave the building in disgust and not come back until October so that we could construct a tournament that would add some sensibility or credibility to our story

arc going into Halloween havoc, and that's where the real conflict came in, was in July at Bashia at the beach as a result of this pay-per-view and all of the nonsense that we had seen leading up to it. The goal was to create something clean, understandable, basic wrestling storytelling is what we were going for. I had to get Hogan out of the mix. He had to be gone long enough to matter so that when he came back with the audience thinking oh my gosh, Halk Hogan's gone, he's never coming back, he stole the WCW title,

WCW is going to have to create a new title because Hogan took the original one and created a terminate to name a new world heavyweight champion. Two heels, I think we kind of thought this through after this pay-per-view, but in the week or two to follow, we thought it best to have two heels,

end up in that tournament in the finals so that when Hulk Hogan showed up and said, uh-uh, uh-uh, that's not the title, this is the title. And if you're going to beat anybody, you're going to have to beat me for it. That was the idea for the Halloween habit coming out of the July pay-per-view. So the reset, even though we had tried the new blood reset and all that, it was a mess. It wasn't working. The real reset was supposed to begin at Bash at the Beach in July 2000. Oh, man. What a mess. What could have been? Let's talk about our main event. Jeff Jarrett's going to retain the WCW title. He's going to beat Kevin Nash in 17 minutes and 22 seconds. Lots of interference. Lots of silliness. You got disco out here. Uh, you got Conan and Guerrero out here. You got the cat out here. You got Charles Robinson and Rick Steiner and Ray Mysterio. And eventually Goldberg runs in for the save. He's waiting forever in the Nash points at Jarrett.

and which guaranteed, of course, that the spear was not going to Jarrett. It was going to Kevin Nash. That's right. Goldberg has turned heel. Jeff Jarrett scores the pen. Goldberg, Russo, and Bischoff are all hugging as the show goes off the air. Star and a quarter. Listen, I understand that, you know, once upon a time what set business on fire was Hogan turning

a heel. But did anybody want to see a heel, Goldberg? We were desperate. And I, you know, I was very much involved in convincing Bill Goldberg to do this. I wasn't by myself, but I did support it. And I remember talking to Bill about it because Bill, Bill at that time, he wasn't against doing it. He just was not comfortable doing it because he didn't feel it. You know, Bill Goldberg only knew at this point a two and a half year career, right?

Right. I don't know when he started, but he had been in a business for a whole couple of years, less than 36 months. So he didn't have a sense of when something was right in terms of timing or wrong. And because he was insecure about it, it took a little nurturing to get him on board. And I remember talking to Bill that night.

I had a motorhome there that I was using as an office and brought Bill into the mother home and sat down and talked to him and obviously not putting up a fight wasn't resisting doing it but it clearly was not comfortable doing it and i think one of the reasons again was that we needed believable heels we needed credible believable badass heels and i don't think it was a bad decision i think the timing sucked the execution might not have been the best but i think the idea at that point of turning goldberg had we not seen a plethora. I love the word. I just love being able to use the word plethora. It's one of those words that just gives me goosebumps when I say it. Had we not had a plethora of turns that made

absolutely no sense, I think Bill Goldberg Turning Hill would have made more sense. Because it certainly did on paper. It's what we needed to go forward. It's written in the observer. There are people in the company that have actually been convinced that Scott Steiner has more drawing, as a baby face than Goldberg, even though the difference in their respective television ratings are like night and day over the last two years. Although at this point, probably every aspect of booking is over analyzed because of the problems from long-term perception of the company, particularly by teenagers that see it as old man's wrestling and are just as damaging as the lack of continuity in the booking. That's Meltzer's summation. And he even says that the heel turn was

probably too early in Goldberg's career and certainly in his return to television here. But where did you land on Scott Steiner? Did you think Scott Steiner had more potential as a babyface run at this point than Goldberg? No. I don't know who Meltzer was referring to, but it wasn't me. And that's nothing against Scott Steiner. But I just didn't see that at that time. I just didn't see it.

Well, I got to admit, this is a challenge to take a look at this area. of WCW and people were forecasting in the observer how much money could be lost and they were talking in WCW as if internally the number was 36 million most thought it might wind up at 50 to 60 million but the worst case scenario was that they were headed to lose 80 million I know you're focused on trying to turn the ship around ratings wise Eric but were you at all or was WCW at all at this point trying to get into cost-cutting mode or just growing revenues? They had been in cost-cutting mode since third quarter of 1998. Turner Broadcasting literally cut our budget was even before that.

It was halfway through 1998 is when Turner started cutting a budget that had already been approved a year previous. And we had been over delivering on. We were generating more revenue than we even projected at 1997 when we submitted the budget. We were getting even better ratings than we projected in 1997 when we submitted the budget, which was subsequently approved in late 1997 and is what we were living off of in 1998. But about in the middle of 1988, end of second quarter, I believe, for sure, by the beginning of third quarter, that budget was dramatically slashed, dramatically slashed. And we were put on a hiring freeze, not so much for talent, but for employees, administration.

So now that process started in 98 and was only getting worse. And by the way, there's enough haters out there, enough people that listen to the show just so they can disagree with what I have to say or call me out on it. Feel free to take a shot. I dare you. Go back and read Guy Evans' book before you do that so you don't look like a complete asshole. But a lot of the losses that the narrative that's still out there, somebody just wrote not too long ago I saw on my social media feed, somebody we all know that I'm not going to mention his name. He said, under Eric Bischoff, you know, last year WCW lost $65 million. No, we didn't. WCW was the victim of intercompany allocations because Turner Broadcasting knew.

By 2000, they didn't want WCW on the books. There were enough Turner execs, and anybody that has worked at WCW during the early 90s and before Nitro knew that WCW had been on the chopping block at Turner Broadcasting for a talk to Tony Chivani about it. He just commented on it not too long ago. WCW was on its deathbed when I got there. And primarily it was because of lack of revenue, lack of business. Turner liked it because it did drive ratings and he looked at it as a promotional platform for

other programming on Turner Broadcasting. You can read that in Ted's autobiography, or biography, I should say, Porter Bib, look it up, Google it, two B's, Porter, Bibb, B, I, B, B, B, B, B, B, B, read the book. And then read Guy Evans book. But when Turner, AOL Time Warner, knew that they wanted WCW off its books in one way, shape, or form, they started dumping losses from other companies, within Turner into WCW because they knew they were going to, it was going to go away anyway. That's where that $65 million came from. Not that we weren't losing money. We were losing money.

There's no question about that. But the extent to which it was reported we were losing money had a lot more to do with intercompany allocations and dumping, cleaning up a lot of other divisions books because the company knew that WCW was going to go away. Well, this show is not going to go away. we'll be back next week you get all these shows early in ad free if you join us over at ad free shows.com of course you could have also been a part of our live studio audience like we had today mattie and bobby and josh and bryant and matt adam the whole gang was here greatly

appreciate the coach and kyle and denovius and jimmy and everybody showing up uh you get to be a part of everything we do here on ad free shows over to ad free shows.com including the brand new series the false finish i recently just sat down with one half of TNA's greatest tag team, America's Most Wanted, and Chris Harris told us his story, and I was as proud of this as anything I've done in the wrestling space. Go check it out and try it for free one week on me. It's ad-freeshows.com.

By the way, if your business targets me in 25 to 54 years old, no better place to advertise than right here on 83 weeks. Advertise with Eric.com can hook you up. Love to have your social interaction on Twitter. We're at 83 weeks on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. at 83 weeks over on twitter eric is at e bischoff on instagram he is at the real eric bischoff and the easiest cheapest best way to support the show is to like us and subscribe on youtube it's 83 weeks on youtube.com that's 83 week on 83 weeks on youtube.com tons of new merch and swag over

at box of gimmicks.com as well and eric i never know what to expect when we sit down and we talk about all this silliness from way back when but wcw in 2000 man it was It was a roller coaster, to say the least, no? No, roller coaster implies that there's ups and downs. This was just all downhill. This is more like it was a cliff that everybody was falling off of. Well, we will see you guys next week, right here on 83 weeks. And we'll try to keep Eric away from the cliff.

And hey, man, thanks for bringing way, Jay today. Made his television debut, if you will, his YouTube debut. He's got a bright future. We'll see you guys next week. right here on 83 weeks with Eric Bischoff. Fight Plus is the ultimate digital platform for live sports and entertainment, and they're now offering a free seven-day trial at tryfight.com. Fight Plus is packed with a premium live events schedule over a thousand hours of live action every year in a library of more than

4,000 hours on demand, plus exclusive content you can't get anywhere else. Fight is a great partner of ours. They support us, so let's support things. Give that free seven-day trial a shot, and you'll be a member for life. That's tryfight.com. T-R-Y-F-I-T-E dot com. Hey guys, Double J. Jeff Jarrett. Need to call a timeout real quick here. I wanted to tell your listeners what I've been telling my world listeners for a while now.

It's about all the incredible things happening over on at-freeshows.com. Through strength, support, and faith, one half of TNAs America's most wanted Chris Harris has persevered, and wrestling is still a big part of his life. And on a brand new series, The False Finish, Chris Harris tells us the story of his amazing journey in his own words. I was thinking to myself then when that came about, you know, it's hard going through what I went through and not think, you know, would that have happened had I not had a sober head?

I mean, you know, I have God looking out for me. You know, would something like that have happened in any other circumstances? because Scott DeMore, I mean, I kept in touch with him. He knew about it all. And he was so proud of me for doing it. So maybe that had a little piece of it. Maybe that's why the opportunity was there. But just a lot of really great things have happened in the past a couple of years.

And I'm just so thankful and I'm grateful for being in the place I am now. Hey, that's just a small taste of what At Free Shows has waiting for you, including a brand new perk, getting to join in. on the live recordings of the shows with four levels to choose from see for yourself while ad-free shows is the best value in wrestling today sign up now at atfreeshoes.com that's right sign up today at ad-freeshows.com