83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff - Episode 280: The Downfall Of The NWO

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

On this episode of 83 Weeks, Eric and Conrad explore what lead to the downfall of one of the most influential factions in professional wrestling history...the NWO! Eric shares his thoughts on when he felt the product started to get diluted, how and how the demise could have been avoided, and how he would have liked the story of the NWO to end. All that plus so much more on this incredible edition of 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff. 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 GAMETIME - Snag the tickets without the stress with Gametime. Download the Gametime app, create an account, and use code WEEKS for $20 off your first purchase (terms apply). Download Gametime today. Last minute tickets. Lowest Price. Guaranteed. PROWRESTLING CRATE - ProWrestlingCrate.com is a monthly subscription box for the die-hard wrestling fans. Plans start at $9.95 and ship worldwide. Visit prowrestlingcrate.com.  STARRCAST VI - STARRCAST VI - Don't miss a moment of the fun and excitement planned for Starrcast VI! Starrcast VI is coming home to Chicago this Labor Day weekend September 1st through the 3rd. Grab your bracelets and bundles now at STARRCAST.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. 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

Hey guys, Eric Bischoff here to talk to you about my friends over at save with conrad.com. Are you looking to get out of debt? Conrad and his team can make that happen faster than me firing the hockey talk man. Wow. And you know that controversy creates cash, right? Do you know what doesn't create cash? Credit card debt. Save with Conrad can help you consolidate high-interest credit cards and all of your other debt into one low monthly payment.

They can even help you get the cash card. you need for home improvements or anything else. They've helped 83 weeks listeners say 500, 600, 700, even $800 a month. Seriously, your paper's going to go down faster than nitral ratings in 2000. Ouch! And how about this? No house payments for two months. That's right.

No house payments for two months. And unlike the dirt sheets, man, the reviews do not lie, with over 1,000. five-star reviews. Find out for yourself how much Conrad and his team can save you by checking out Savewithconrad.com today. Be grateful you did. NMLS number 65084 Equal Healthy Lended. Woo! weeks with Eric Bischoff. Eric, what's going on, man? How are you? Buddy, I'm doing great. Got up early this morning, watched the sun arise with my dog, talk to God. Everything's good, man. Couldn't be better. Well, I am pumped to be here with you today. We're going to be talking about the downfall of the NWO. You know, we often talk about the good

times and the weird times and the silly times. This is probably not going to be that much fun today. But boy, I sure did have a lot of fun last week. I saw incredible feedback. I saw a lot of people saying they thought last week could have been one of the best 83 weeks episodes ever. And it was all fantasy booking. And man, we had some people talking about the whole, hey, what if Sting was in the rafters and how should we have kicked it off? Should it have been with a diamond cutter? Should it have been with a Goldberg spear? Should it have been with Sting pointing a bat? What about that whole, hey, you may have bought WCW, but you didn't buy the NWO. And then we even carried that conversation over from last Monday to last Tuesday.

Because we just debuted a new show over on ad-free shows called Tuesdays with the taskmaster. And in doing so, I asked him hypothetically in an alternate universe, The Undertaker had a similar backstory to what Scott Hall and Kevin Nash had. What if he was the third man? And boy, Kevin just loved that idea. Of course, wrestling was much better having happened, way it did with with Hulk Hogan but last week was different man fantasy booking what was the

feedback you got same and I was you know anybody that listens to this podcast or has been listening for the last five years has probably heard me say more than a hundred times that I really don't like even thinking about fantasy booking I don't know why I don't like hypotheticals fantasy booking is just whatever I just it's not my thing but it seems to be the audiences thing. So as I learn from Ted Turner, you know, perhaps I don't necessarily do shows that I like. I need to do shows that other people like. And clearly they love the idea of fantasy booking and looking back with a what if kind of perspective. So maybe we should do more of those down the road. But yeah, all the feedback was very, very positive. Yeah, the fantasy booking,

man. I don't know how much of that we've done on the show, but it was a fun exercise. and I had fun with it today maybe not so fun talking about the downfall of the NWO of course there's a lot going on in current wrestling as well but I think today we'll just stick to the nostalgia and let's talk about long term I mean there's no doubt that the NWO was really the catalyst for wrestling's greatest boom You've admitted that perhaps you wish you had a more definitive, better ending to that story. People who were critical of the NWO, guys like Rick Flair, they would say, hey man, it changed the business. You know, it made heels cool.

You neutered all the baby faces because now the baby faces were just perceived as being uncool. And even one of the guys who was rubbing shoulders with you backstage putting all this together, Sullivan says, man, the bloodline is probably the greatest story in wrestling history, because while we got over heels in the NWO, we never really made a baby face. And you could argue. Oh, I just like, I got to jump in here, Conrad. I, you know, I, I, I love Kevin Sullivan. He's a very good friend, nothing but respect for Kevin, but I, I disagree with him on

that. And I think Diamond Dales page would disagree with that. Hmm. I think Goldberg would disagree with that. I think Sting would disagree with that. I think there's a number of people. that could argue that point and justifiably so I wanted to ask do you think long term is there any negative to the NWO like you know people who weren't fans of it like

Flair I mean I and I can't believe when he said it but I understand why he said it but I would still probably tend to disagree that in the long run it was a net negative for WCW I don't know if I agree with that but do you think there was anything that was negative about the NWO Maybe the, I know he's talking about creatively from a character standpoint. He feels like you killed off all the baby faces. And, and you just made a list as why you disagree. I mean, when you think back to the NWO, you're a couple cocktails deep.

Your mind's just wandering into places you don't normally. And you're thinking, what if? Is there any big regret with the NWO? Well, there's, I guess you could qualify it as a regret. I try not to regret much in my life, just learn from it. move on and beat myself up over it. But, you know, looking back again, kind of going into the fantasy booking or hypothetical scenario, if the circumstances were different, I would have it would have been nice to have a more definitive plan. Right. Especially, you know, yes, I wish that

they would have been a better long-term plan, a more definitive plan. I wish that. I, I wish that. that we would have managed the growth and the success better. Because the NWO, look, and again, I'm going to try real hard not to, you know, be redundant and say things that I've said before. But again, anybody that's listened to me for any length of time knows that I have said many times. It's easier to create momentum than it is to sustain it. And the NWO era and experience is probably the reason I feel that way more than any other. I put so much time and effort and thought creatively into launching what became the NWO, the premise, the storyline for the first three, four, five, six months.

and not to make excuses, because this is not an excuse, it's just a reality, for me anyway. I didn't anticipate the success. I didn't anticipate how big and how powerful the NWO as a storyline would eventually become. And as a result, at least partially, I think once we got into it, any thought of putting an end to it or coming to a conclusion in that storyline,

a final act, if you will, was the farthest thing from my mind. It was more like, holy smokes, we've created this monster. How do we leverage it? How do we make it bigger? How do we make it stronger? What do we do with the success that we did not anticipate? had it been any other type of storyline or angle, whatever you want to call it, we probably would have immediately or almost immediately been thinking,

okay, let's play this thing out, let's see where this goes. How do we want it to end? What's the conclusion? What's the goal? Right. But because of the rapids, it was meteoric. It wasn't just rapid success. It was an explosion that nobody saw coming.

And I think that kind of took me off track. a lot of us. So yeah, I would have loved to have a more definitive plan. I would have liked to have a better third act, final scene, if you will. That's not a regret, but that's something I definitely learned for sure. Let's talk about where we are. I mean, WCW was yet to turn a profit for many, many years. With the creation on Nitro, we're able to show it.

And then with 1996 rolls around, my goodness, on your birthday, it all changes. And this momentum you talked about leads to record TV ratings, the 83-week streak on and on and on. And really, I think when you think about the glory years, is it just 96 and 97, 98's when you enjoy your greatest financial success, I think. But what's the glory years of the NWO to you from when to win, if you had to say? I think the weeks leading up to the Hulk Hogan turn, the anticipation that we built, who's the third man, the fact that we definitively, in a very successful and powerful way, created questions with who's the third man? angle.

That was an exciting time. And again, it was early on. We didn't know. We had no idea how successful it would become. But that period of time from, say, oh, I don't know, April of 96, when things started really coming together in my head, and then bringing Scott Hall in, and then shortly there after bringing Kevin Nashian and creating the, who's the third man. story. That's pretty freaking cool. Pretty cool. It's a tie, though. It's a close one because

the period of time going into Nitro was equally as exciting. There was a lot of pressure. There was a lot of unknown. We had no idea if we would be embarrassed going head to head with WWE or if we'd really be competitive. And launching a prime time show to go head to head with the monster that's the kind of pressure i dig that was pretty cool too so i don't know i guess it would depend on what mood i'm in any particular moment let's um let's talk about you know how how big of a moment this is you know to see the success that wc wc has and you've got to feel like man nothing can stop us like it becomes the new norm and you've sort of talked to about this from a money standpoint that once you get used to making a lot of money and you get

used to that lifestyle like it's this big goal right and then when you get there I'm not going to say you take it for granted but you kind of just keep used to it and it feels like maybe that was some of the the trappings of success and maybe that same principle applies to the NWO so hey well we don't really have anything for Vincent or Mike Rotundo or Big Bubba Rogers well let's just put the NWO shirt on them. Do you think that's part of the trap you fell into, maybe? Not for that reason. Not at all.

I think, again, because the NWO was such a juggernaut and it was so powerful that the idea, good or bad, obviously bad in the eyes of a lot of people and in mind at this point, you know, looking back and learning from the experience. That was an example of growing, wow, we've got this golden goose. Let's figure out a way for it to lay more eggs, you know, without the kind of thought that should have gone into it, frankly. We grew too big, too fast, and tried to exploit that success, not because we were used to the money or we got comfortable with our success. It was because I wanted more of it. And I didn't give the expansion of the NWO.

the same amount of creative horsepower that I gave to the inception of it, if that makes sense. The idea, what if we create this storyline, what if Scott Hall comes down and then Kevin Nash and I get power bombed off the stage and oh my gosh, and we turn this thing around and Hulk Hogan's going to put a lot of time and thought into that, like probably 18 or 20 hours a day for three or four months. But then once the success, again, not the initial success, that was awesome. But in the weeks and months after that, it was more about growing it and less about managing it.

That's probably the best way I can say it. Is the thinking in having some of the other guys join the NWO, some of the names like I mentioned, is are we doing that as a storytelling device because it makes sense because you know they two all worked once for events or is that just part of it and also too we're going to need some guys to take some bumps and sell for some wcw guys we don't necessarily want to be dispensing of hulk hogan and scott hall and kevin nash and randy savage every week so we need some guys for wcw to get their wins against is that part of the strategy and and making a group bigger like this? I think that would be a great question for Kevin Sullivan, because he was a little bit

more into the detail of that than I was. I was more of the big picture, big idea kind of input into this. And I think if that was Kevin's work, as a part of the process, my thinking, I don't recall thinking that or having those discussions, but likely could have. But if that was a Kevin's Sullivan thought process, it was a good one. It makes sense, doesn't it? Yep. I think for me to be, and I'm trying really hard to be as honest with myself and therefore people listening as I can, I think for me, it was more about, hey, we've got this talent.

There's equity in this talent. People know who this talent is. This talent's been on TV a lot. It's been involved in a lot of big stories over the last. five or eight years, how do we get them over? What's the quickest way to get this talent over so that they have more value? And because the NWO was so hot, my thought process probably was more along the lines of, holy crap, this is working great, let's bring in some of these guys that need to get over that we brought in that really don't have a lot of, I want to say value.

That's not a kind way of saying it, but they're underutilized at this point. why not bring them into the NWO and let them get that rub and hopefully get them over more? Because the NWO was so over, it is a little bit like any other big star and you have an opportunity to bring in somebody who's not a big star and let them get the rub, whether they win or lose, they're going to get that rub. They're in close enough proximity that it matters. that was probably more my thinking than, yeah, well, these guys can take some losses. But I think I would feel more comfortable with the idea that, hey, let's build this thing up.

So we can tell stories and we can have losses and NWOs can take some hits. So we can build stories off of that. That's a more logical reason for it, but I don't necessarily think that was my reason for it. I've always been curious, you know, the success of the NWO, I mean, it's unlike anything we've ever seen. And I get why you would think this. Hey, we'll have a NWO Saturday night and we'll have matches with no fans and a ref under a mask. I mean, we're trying new stuff. And we try the sold out pay-per-view. And it feels like after everything the NWO has touched has turned to gold, this will work. And then maybe that one didn't. Is that really the first miss of

the NWO where you're like, man, everything we do just works. And that pay-per-view, I mean, don't get me wrong. It wasn't a total failure, but it probably didn't meet your expectations. Is that the first miss you would classify for the NWO in your opinion? I don't, you know, I know that sold out gets a lot of heat. You know, that's the kind of narrative over the years because it didn't perform well financially. But there was a lot of reasons for that. There was more than I would say a lot.

There was more than one reason for that. Saturday Night Show in the middle of nowhere, other stuff, yeah. Well, in time of the year. Yeah. You know, that's a tough time of year for any pay-per-view. Yes. You're, you're, you're in WrestleMania proximity that time of year. That's where all the focus and attention is.

So there was a number of reasons why sold out didn't perform up to expectations, hopes, I should say. But I don't look at sold out as a failure. I liked the idea of sold out. I still do. Yeah. When I think about the rationale behind presenting the show the way that I did, I still like the idea conceptually. Could it have been executed better, of course?

Anything that we watch can be better the next day. There's always ways to make things better. But the conceit, the idea, I still think it was a good one. It was strategic, but it was also creatively so different than anything else we were doing on pay-per-view at the time. And I still believe to this day that if you're driving 12 pay-per-views a year, you better be really good at figuring out how to give each of them a personality and sold-out had a personality. It was different. It kind of shattered the norm of what paper views are supposed to look like.

And that was my goal, you know, and you said it, you know, everything, everything, the NW. Touch turned a goal and it was working, but you can't sit back and just go, okay, we're here. We're just going to keep doing this. You've got to push the envelope. And you're going to, I don't know anybody that pushes the envelope that doesn't stumble and hit a couple roadblocks along the way or speed bumps. In this case, it was a big speed bump for different reasons. but I don't I I I to this day I disagree with the idea that NWO was a failure excuse me sold out was a failure I don't agree with that we tried a fun idea right before Star K 97 the NWO is going to take over Nitro and as a concept that seems good on paper I think we both agree in execution way too many lulls way too much downtime not nearly enough action did you consider the NWO Nitro a win?

as well? Or with the benefit of hindsight, would you have done something differently there? It was a step. You know, and that's one thing I think people that have never really tried to, who've never created anything or been in a position to, you know, your job is to come up with ideas strategy. Your job is a creative job. It's easy for people that have never been in that position to make assessments or have opinions that aren't based on any kind of reality. You know, do I, as a part of what the concept for the NWO was, which is taking over WCW, that was the personality of the NW. We're here to take over. It was anarchy meets professional wrestling.

That's what the NW was. So the fact that the NW took over the show and it was sloppy or there was lulls or it wasn't as tight or execution. as well or as intense necessarily. I get all that criticism, and it's valid criticism, but it also served its purpose. That night wasn't about getting the highest rating we could get. That night was about continuing to build the theme, the personality, the brand of the NWO.

And brand building is not quite the same as producing a show. when you're building a brand you'll make a sacrifice or two you'll try some things some of it's going to work as we just talked about so it's going to work someone's going to work really well like the NWO it was antithetical to the formula for professional wrestling and people like Rick Flair they just didn't get it put the baby faces under heels well when you have a match and I'm not picking on a Rick Flair here but it's going to sound like it but from the Rick Flair perspective well let's just keep that same formula we've always used which hasn't been working very well.

It hadn't ever worked in WCW. So let's just keep doing that. As opposed to, yeah, let's try something that's radically different than ever, that's ever been done before, a formula, if you will, with regard to the NWO, where the heels are getting over and they're just smashing baby faces right and left.

The baby faces are underneath. If you look at a wrestling match, and you've got a heel in a baby face, and the heel is just pounding the hell out of that baby face, and the baby face is fighting from underneath. And it doesn't look like there's any way that that baby face is ever going to make a comeback. And then all of a sudden, the baby face makes a comeback. And holy crap, it works.

Well, that formula, if you extend that out over a six-month or 12-month period, was the formula that we were using for the NWO. The baby faces did eventually get over. Bill Goldberg, Sting, my God. We still got the same gimmick he had as a result. result of the NW storyline, DDP, who turned into a megastar because of the NWO storyline. Ray Mysterio arguably helped get him, helped him get over by getting the heat on him and the sympathy on him that we got on him when Kevin Nash, Lahn darted him into the back of a trailer

in the scene that nobody had ever witnessed before. I never seen that kind of backstage action in a wrestling program before. All of those things kind of fit together. and helped get a lot of people over baby faces. But it didn't happen over a two-week window or three-week window or a 12-minute match. The idea was that we were going to crush WCW. We were going to put WCW at the point where it didn't look like WCW was going to be able to survive and then make their comeback.

So if you look at the NWO and where the NWO was positioned at WCW and you look at the baby faces and WCW as a whole in this case is the baby. If you look at the NWO is the heel and WCW is the baby face, yes, the idea, if you look at that 12 or 18 month window where it was really on fire was like a 12 minute match where the heel had control of the match for 10 of those 12 minutes. That was the idea. So I'm not sure if that answered your question or not because I actually forgot the question. Well, I'll tell you what, there's never a question when you're trying to get your winger meat real, real hard, Blue Chew can help.

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Visit Bluatu.com for more details and important safety information. We want to thank Blu for sponsoring today's podcast. Hey, so you mentioned Ray Mysterio a little earlier. We're going to see lots of different versions of the NWO. Of course, ECW tried there on a little parody with the Blue Manny and Nova and Stevie Richards and even inside our own tent here. WCW creates the Latino world order. And once upon a time, we split it off for real and we have the wolf pack, the red and black. Do you think in hindsight, there were too many different variations of this? Did you water it down? Or if you

had it to do over again, would you do it the same way? Yeah, I think we watered it down. And that goes kind of goes back to what I learned. Yeah, as I discussed earlier. definitely watered it down. However, I still dig to the stay, the idea of the Latino world order. It's still selling. And obviously so does WWE.

Yeah. Is it still around? It's amazing that they've brought it back. And apparently it was selling really, really hot like that Puerto Rico shows. I understand it. I mean, it was like 1997 again.

And speaking in 97, I think a lot of people assumed, that when this big matchup finally happens, and Lord knows we've beat this to death. Starcade 97, one of our most infamous episodes in 83 weeks history, go out of your way to check it out. But now I do want to ask, do you think some fans, and in hindsight,

should we have considered, like, when Sting beats Hulk Hogan, that's the end of the NWO? I think a lot of people believed this is going to be a typical storyline, and most storylines are what three months six months nine months maybe a year at this point this is well over a year and it felt like hey if sting can beat the top guy he can beat hill coke and he can take the big gold belt that might spell the end of the NWO we know

that was not it if you had it to do over again would you have ended it there or was there too much meat left on the bone do you think well financially it was too much meat on the bone 98 was our most successful year financially yeah there's no question about that so So, yeah, do we, and that's, you know, that kind of goes back to, again, the beginning of the show so far, is, let me answer the question two ways. Yes. That could have and should have been the end of the NWO as we knew it then. However, you can't do that. Financially, we couldn't do that.

It was too successful. licensing deals were coming to us right and left. EA Sports wrote us a, I don't know if it was $8 million or $10 million check, advance on royalties for a video game. How do you put an end to it with that kind of business knocking on your door three times a week? That's where we were. And that was probably one of the reasons.

And again, I didn't anticipate it. Nobody did. Nobody that's telling the truth did. But once you reach that level of success, now you're not just managing creative. You're managing business. And business was too good to put an end to it. It was a double-edged sword. And it drew blood.

That's what I want to ask about because, you know, we've talked about Michael Hayes quote to me once before. But he would always say, Connie, you leave when you're on top. that way you've always got a place to come back to and that made sense like when it's at its peak when it's at its hottest even though most people would would argue or debate and i guess there's two schools of thought on the business side it's like hey if it ain't broke don't fix it you know this thing's printing money let's keep that going but on the other hand if you can leave them wanting more you can keep the product hot and maybe you can come back later and it'll still be

hot i mean that's what michael hayes would talk about the attitude of the freebirds and the territory eras was when you got them at a fever pitch and they're super hot that's the time to leave because you can always come back as opposed to slowly but surely maybe lose a little bit of that stature like if you were booking the bloodline now with the benefit of hindsight of the way the NWO did what do you think about his strategy of you shut it down while it's on top I understand that strategy, and I think that was a great strategy for professional wrestlers during the territory era where they had to travel from territory to territory in order to have a 365 day a year job. That makes a lot of sense from a wrestler's perspective. From a corporate business perspective, I would say that it doesn't make any sense.

If Michael Hayes would have been in and the Freebirds would have been in a territory and in that territory, and in that territory, people would have kept knocking on their hotel room door at the airport, Marriott, saying, wait a minute, I know you guys are supposed to leave the next month, but here's a check for $10 million if you stick around a little longer, and then you've got three more people waiting down the hall to make the same offer. I doubt that the free birds or anybody else would have made that decision. Two different things. They are.

Two different strategies, I guess. No, look, in 97, again, I don't want to be redundant. 97, we hadn't even begun to realize the financial success that the NWO was going to achieve in 98. And it just every day, deals kept coming our way. Let's go to the bloodline. If you take Michael, Michael Hayes' strategy and nothing but respect for Michael, we're friends, and he's just, he's brilliant. You don't hear a lot of talk about Michael Hayes. You know, and all the things that are going on in WWE, very rarely here, Michael Hayes is a brilliant mind.

But let me tell you something, Michael Hayes is a brilliant mind. Yes. When he comes to things that happen in the ring or characters, I don't know what he's like when it comes to long-term storytelling or planning because I never worked with him in that regard. But I worked with him relatively closely in WWE when a story is presented. and then it's it's analyzed it does we wwe sometimes or Vince McMahon did at least perform an autopsy on an idea before he even gave birth to it and Michael was one of those guys that would sit quietly back in a room listen to everybody and then raise his hand in a very polite and professional way give his point of view Michael's brilliant but would Michael Hayes

in the bloodline storyline right now? Would he have ended it six months ago or three months ago and argue would it have ended with Cody Rhodes winning and the bloodline disappearing? I'm pretty sure the answer to that is no, because there's too much value in it, even though that might have been the plan originally. You can't do it. I couldn't do it. How do I explain that to Harvey Schiller or to Ted Turner? I take this thing that was a, that was printing money and there was more money on the horizon in 97 and say yeah but you know let's just put it into it maybe we'll bring it back a year or two from now that wouldn't have been a smart move with all due respect to Michael Michael Michael wasn't in my shoes right it's a different thing

and didn't have to didn't have to deliver to the bottom line the way I did I had to make a business decision it may have been a bad one I'll admit that but it was the decision I made at the time based on the factors in the situation at that time. The merch has never really been priority for WCW until the NWO. And boy, you guys start moving it in droves. And I think that merch opportunity is probably what led you to make the decision in the spring of 98 to split it up into two groups. We got the NWO black and white or NWO Hollywood.

And then we've got the Wolfpack. And I've sort of joked on here that hey once everybody in wrestling had the NWO shirt what else is there to sell them well how about a color variant the only thing cooler may be than a black and white shirt is a black and red shirt is that all there was to it I mean obviously you like the storytelling devices as well but the merch opportunity can't be overstated I mean this was a game changer for WCW to have merch this high really for the first time ever WCW never never sold merchandise until the NWO yeah

Yes, I should take that back because people hang on every word I say and then troll me afterwards. Did WCW sell merchandise at arenas? Yes. It was abysmal. Abysmal. It wasn't worth the time and the expense of loading things onto a truck and then driving 300 miles and setting up in an arena and hoping it would sell. You lost money. You lost money when you had to fill the truck up.

with gas. That's how successful WCW merchandise was before NWO. It's not that we didn't want it. It's just we didn't have anybody that was over enough to drive it. The NWO changed that. Now, it wasn't driven by, the idea of splitting NWO up into Wolfpack or LWO or whatever, it was not driven by merchandise considerations. It was driven by story and driven by the fact that it was so over, all boats rose with the higher tide that the NWO created. NWO was a tsunami. It wasn't a high tide.

It was a frickin tsunami. And splitting it up was more about the storytelling device, as you pointed out, than it was merchandise. Merchandise was a byproduct. merchandise was ancillary to the to the creative let's uh let's talk about something jiff jarrant says he recently said on his podcast one of his mantras in business somebody asked on a ask jeff anything what's a business principle that you rely on that served you well that you can share that you learn through the wrestling business he thought for a minute and he said if you

confuse them you lose them do you think at times the nw of story line with the hokey pokey of the different members and the splitting of the different groups and all that do you think it got confusing at some point maybe we lost the original plot point i don't think no i would disagree with that i don't think it got it did get diluted and watered and the story you know probably became less apparent to people i don't think people were confused i just don't think people thought it was good i don't think the characters that we brought into the n w well were compelling characters i think the the addition of so many of the people that we brought into NWO for whatever reasons at the time made sense.

If you look back at it, those were not compelling characters. It was like, wow, we've got a great movie script here. We've got an amazing actor attached to this or actress. So we've got our A-lister here. Let's bring in a bunch of people or co-stars, if you will, additional cast members. Let's just bring them in because we've got. this huge story. We got Tom Cruise in our movie. Let's just bring in a bunch of B listeners and see if we can help get them over. That was the mistake. Those additional

characters weren't compelling. It was bad casting. Mostly, my bad, probably Kevin's a little bit, is we didn't cast appropriately. We didn't bring characters in that really added value to the NWO. We brought too many characters in where the NWO, where the NWO, well is adding value or attempting to add value to characters that just weren't right for that story or that movie if you will. Something's sounding dusty. If you will.

Well, let's talk about the summer in 98 because this is where it starts to get a little tough. Behind the scenes, how much was there to that whole Kevin Nash and Hulk Hogan, don't see creative the same way? Oh, was that real? How real did it get? Yeah, I think it was.

Well, I don't think it was. I know it was. I remember standing in between Hulk Hogan, Scott Hall, and Kevin Nash backstage and Casper, Wyoming, where I thought I was going to get, I thought I was going to get annihilated in the middle of a, of a trifective fight between those three. It was intense. They saw things differently. And in part, I don't know. I don't want to try to play psychiatrist here, but.

I think, again, Scott and Kevin came into WCW at a time when, to be very honest, and I might piss Kevin off when I say this. I doubt it. I think you'll understand why I'm saying it. Scott and Kevin came into WCW looking for a great place to land that didn't require them to be on the road for 300 days a year where they made a great amount of money that was guaranteed so they didn't have to worry for month to month, what their payoffs were going be they could actually plan their lives and not have to be in the road as much that was their

motivation for coming to wcw and then they got to wcw and they were thrust right into one of the most successful angles in wrestling history to this day and that was exciting for everybody hulk hogan went from being yeah probably a 50-50 kind of character i mean half the audience was really excited to see him. The other half of the audience, not so much. He was losing steam prior to the NWO turn. He knew it. I knew it. The audience knew it. So you've got two guys who were coming in. There's just looking for a soft place to land and be able to have a life getting thrust into a storyline that made them more popular than they had ever been including their time in WWE. They were more over as a result of the NWO than they were ever

over as Diesel or Scott Hall. End of conversation. Nobody can debate that. And it was so new to Scott and Kevin. It was so new to Hall Cogan that they were all really grateful to have that opportunity to work together. And it was fun for them for a year or a year and a half. And then once the new car smell wore off, and like we talked about before, and I'm not saying

financially, but they got, they kind of took it for. granted, right, and got real comfortable. And when you get real comfortable and you don't collaborate, you're not having as much fun collaborating. It's not new anymore. It starts to take a toll. And there were other factors on all sides of the equation where people were distracted. Their personal lives were stressful. Scott had issues. Hulk had his own issues away from the ring, away from the arena. And again, a year, a year and a half later, now they're comfortable again. Now they're over again. Scott and Kevin are just looking for a great place or a soft place to land. Now they landed in a great place. And they start, I think,

we all, myself included, to a degree, took it for granted. And once that sets in, once that feeling, I guess it's subconscious, it is probably for me, you quit thinking about what you're doing the same way. And that's when the personal personalities come in, chemistry comes in, and people start looking out for themselves. That was certainly the case with Hulk Hogan, and it was certainly the case with Scott Hall and Kevin Nash. All of them were guilty.

all three of them were guilty in a sense of once they got comfortable again and now they're back in that position again chemistry becomes a bigger issue and the chemistry wasn't good at that time for a lot of reasons so yeah it was real there was real tension i wonder how much of that tension was born out of Hulk Hogan's epic beard i mean if you were going to bring back a beard like that where it's black but it's got blonde mustache i mean it's a foo man shoe like nobody has seen in many many years but you can bring it back with manscaped they got this new beardheader pro kit that even the holster would be jealous of manscaped is here to help you level up that game this is fantastic stuff use our promo code 83 weeks at manscape dot com you'll get 20% off

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let's get back to it. The summer in 98, we see Hogan dropped the title to Goldberg. Wolfpack is really establishing themselves with some WCW stall warts like Luger and Sting. they were never a part of the black and white but they are here now with the wolf pack Stevie Ray is going to step up on the Hollywood black and white side and make himself a more major member and then all of a sudden we introduce the ultimate warrior into the company do you think things would have been that storyline could have been different than the whole red and black and the red and white when we bring warrior in it's less about that but he does start his own o w n one warrior nation

i don't know to me in hindsight that's a misstep what say you yeah that was a big missed up it was a big misstep it was a big misstep it's funny people talk about the fingerpico do and sting you know and hogan and 97 whatever's that's the reason why goldberg and hogan and On free TV, that's the down, that's the reason for the downfall. WCW. It's so much just bullshit. But I think if there was one thing, it's never one thing. One of the things that I think really exacerbated the dilution of the NWS story

was bringing Warrior in, took the focus off. Because you're bringing a warrior in, you've got to put a lot of attention on that. that's you're going back you got backstory you're trying you're trying to recreate or expand on and that took so much focus off what we're doing at that time and of course you know warrior was really great at coming up ideas with ideas that we get warrior over and and i went along with it so did Kevin Sullivan well did my decision ultimately not Kevin's and it was a mistake There's not a, there's no way you can look at that and say it wasn't. But I think it wasn't because Warrior came out and took a 12-minute promo and turned it into a 30-minute television show that bored the audience to death and ruined his entrance into WCW, his debut.

More importantly, we took our eye off the ball creatively. That was a big mistake. at the worst possible time, the worst time. It's, uh, I mean, in any other time it might have worked here. I don't know if it really did work. I mean, listen, if Warriors jumping over in 95, whew, that could have been something hot. In 98, well, we wanted to see the NWO. Uh, we also got the finger poke of doom.

You just alluded to it. That happens in early 99. And we sort of put the NWOs back to. together. It's like the elite, we're back together again. I mean, was that enough of, hey, we're trying these different experiments. We're sort of losing some steam. Let's just hit the reset button with all of this. I mean, it worked. I think we learned, you know, we finally after getting deeper and deeper into the water, once the water level reached our nose, we could no longer tread water anymore. We had to find a way to swim out. And I think

going back to the original concept a little more bizarre way of trying to get out of the hole we dug ourselves into let's uh let's talk about the NWO I mean as a whole I guess it's like three years and I mean that is quite the accomplishment and I think there was always a debate of you know when the right time to end any storyline as we sort of alluded to that earlier and we saw Russo try to relaunch it in late 99 even the day WWE tried to relaunch it in 2002, it's really hard. I understand it as a one-off for nostalgia, but it's really hard to bring back an old idea and make it hot again from a

sustainable effort standpoint. As a one-off, maybe that makes sense, but that does seem really difficult. Hey, well, we'll just capture lightning in a bottle the second time. That's easier said than done,

right? Well, it's much easier so they're done. I mean, one of the ways, and this kind of goes back, to Michael Hayes' strategy. If that was going to be the plan, and again, something I've learned.

It's not something I knew then. You learn from your successes and you learn from your failures or your mistakes in this case. But if you're going to embrace that strategy and say, okay, let's bring it back. It's got to go away for a while. You've got to let the absence makes the heart growth factor kick in. It's not nostalgia if you just saw it a week ago or a month ago or in this case, a year go. That's not nostalgia. That's desperation, frankly.

So could it have worked if the NWF there would have been a definitive end to it and a year or two years later, if that would have been the plan going in and you had a great way to reintroduce it after a significant amount of time went by so it did feel nostalgic? It's like looking at a 19, it's like looking at a 2021 Mercedes and think, wow, that's a classic car. No, it's not. You can go buy one at the dealership tomorrow. It's not a classic till it's a classic. It's not nostalgia until it's been away for a while and it reminds you of something.

And not enough time it passed, particularly because of the slop that existed with it creatively within the NWO from, say, early 99 on. It was a mess. late 98 even it was kind of messy in late 98 and it got messier in 1999 well to try to bring it back a couple months later it's not nostalgia you're not harnessing that emotion in people you're just desperately trying to bring something back without giving it a lot of thought same was true at wwe i'm not picking on russo here we talked about this i think was the last week whatever week before i lost track of time but you know the the n w o invasion of wwe was ill conceived. That's being kind. It sucked. That's being accurate.

And what Vince did, what Russo did was, uh, that was more desperation than it was anything else. Let's take a look at where the by rates are from 1998 to 1999. I mean, we talked about the fact that you really hit gold in 96. You've got all the momentum in 97, but 98 is really the high watermark. It uncensored. The March paper view, uncensored 98 does 325,000 buys in 99. It's down to 270. Fast forward to May, Slambury, 98, had 250,000 buys. By May of 99, we're down to 170. Great American bash the next month. We were at 262,000 buys in June of 98. A year later, 160,000 buys. the biggest drop off and this is an anomaly and we'll explain it was bash at the beach

july 1998 was loaded with nba stars too goldberger just won the title but that's not what everybody remembers they remember dennis rodman and carl malone in the main event five hundred and twenty five thousand buys we have nothing that can get close to that at bash at the beach in july of 99 it's a hundred and fifty five thousand buys august of ninety eight we did 322,000 buys for Roadwild, only 200,000 bought it in August of 99. That trend continues. September 98, we had fall brawl with 240,000 buys a year later, we're down to 110. But perhaps the biggest story of them all is Starcade. And you have, you shocked me, but it makes sense. I always assumed, and I think a lot of our listeners probably once upon a time,

always assumed that Starcade was the big WCW show and you said nay nay it was Halloween havoc we know what a great success Starcade 1997 was over 700,000 buys 98 is when the streak ends with Goldberg and Kevin Nash it's not quite the story but still super strong 450,000 buys but a year later by December of 99 after we did 700,000 and 97 450 and 450 and 90s. in 99, we're down to 120,000 for Starcade. I mean, this is, uh, the rise of the NWO is something we've never seen before, but it's that old cliche, what goes up, must come down. What can we learn looking at these pay-per-view numbers year over year like this,

Eric? Well, in order to learn, you have to understand every, you have to have context. Right. So again, for those who have never been in. in the business and I know I criticize particularly day belts or more than anybody because he deserves it more than anybody but people who have strong opinions about what it takes to get someone over how television is supposed to be produced or how a wrestling company is supposed to be run look you don't have to be uh an ex-nifel player to be a good NFL analyst not saying that

as long as you talk about things that you know and you have full context of Unfortunately, a lot of the narrative that was creative, created, has been created around 9, and still exists around late 98, early 1999, is it, oh, it was the finger poker doom, oh, it was this, oh, it was that. It was none of those things. It was a little bit of all of them, but it was minimal, had minimal impact on WCW's situation. The biggest, the biggest, the most pressure we had on WCW came from. three, possibly four different fronts. One was, let's not forget, because of what we did to WWE, we dismantled their business plan.

We forced them to change from a teen and preteen product to an adult-themed product to try to capture the 1849 demo that we had dominated and almost put them out of business with. When WWE did that in Vince McMahon fashion, they didn't kind of do it. They did it big. There were things going on inside of that ring and on primetime television on Monday Night Raw

that you couldn't do today. Even though we're more liberal today, in many ways, there are things that you just couldn't do today that you were seeing every single week in WWE in order to try to claw back that 18 to 49-year-old demo, and in some cases establish it for the first time at WWE. So they became very, very aggressive in targeting our demo and very successful.

While at the same time in WCW and Turner Broadcasting, there was significant pressure on us to shy away from that type of content and to put limits on us and as, I've covered this before, as I was directed by Turner Management to make the show family friendly. So I was forced to abandon a formula that had got us to the dance from 95, 96, 97, 98. Now all of a sudden, I'm going to go back to the formula that didn't work for WCW for so long. That was a big one. And people that weren't a part of that, people that weren't in Turner Broadcasting or in

WCW, they don't understand that. They can't. I'm not criticizing them. It's not because they're not intelligent enough. They just weren't there to see it. And therefore, it doesn't get discussed. And when I discuss it, it's obvious. I'll make excuses.

Fuck you. I'm not making any excuses. It is what it is. And when you talk to people, like to cheat them like you have. When you read Guy Evans' book, when you really, really. dig into what was going on in Turner Broadcasting, not just WCW, but what was going on and Turner Broadcasting and how that affected WCW, you would recognize that that was a significant battle and a brand new front to that battle. I never had to fought with Turner fight with

Turner executives before that. I didn't have my budget, you know, in 1998, the most successful financial year we had in the middle of that, I was getting my, budgets cut, that were approved the year before, that affected our plans going forward. And that's just one example. So now you've got the WWE. You've got a brand new front there because now they're engaging in a type of creative warfare that we had never seen and didn't expect. And they came on strong that took a significant chunk of our audience.

That was one battle. The other battle was Turner. The internal battles going on with internal. not just with WCW, but with a lot of divisions within Turner as a result of the merger that we've talked about to death. I don't even want to talk about it anymore. Read Guy Evans' book. But that was a new front.

That's the reason why, one of the reasons why, creative got diluted, execution got diluted. Oh, let's throw a brand new primetime television show. We had to produce that nobody else wanted to pay for. so I just said, fucking, I'll do it. Ted wants it, I'll pay for it. A stupid of a decision was that. I understand why I made it. If you're going to go to battle and you want somebody that you know is going to enjoy being in the trenches and embrace the fight, I'm your guy.

I'm that guy. And when Ted said, I want it and everybody else said, I can't do it, I said, I will. That was a mistake on my part. So it was the pressure of thunder. It was the internal pressure, probably most of all, that really affected me, creative, and everybody else in WCW, not just talent. That's the context that I would hope that people that really want to understand

what happened to WCW at least take a look at to try to understand the context. Let's do some questions here, Eric. Instagram, a wrestling historian, says, given hindsight booking, would you have disbanded the new world order following Hollywood Hogan's defeat at Starcade 97? Thanks in advance. We sort of talked about this earlier. I understand why you made the decision you did. But do you think if that would have been the end of the story, at least for a little while,

you could have brought it back later with the benefit of hindsight. Would you consider that now or no? I don't know. Again, you know, when I knew we were going to do this show, I said, look, don't, don't get emotional. Don't react. Don't get defensive. I have to tell myself that all the time. Don't get defensive because I still have a tendency to put my fists up and want to fight about shit.

But I can't honestly answer that question because it's so hypothetical that I have to really think about the context of the situation. I don't think so, dude. I just don't. You know, and you'd have to be in my shoes at that point in time. For all the reasons we talked about a few moments ago, with regard to the money that was coming in, the opportunities that were coming in, the phone calls I was getting,

you know, having an opportunity to do a primetime special on NBC because of all the success that the NWO created, it was just not kind of right, it would be like, you know, if it was four years, three years ago, whenever the mortgage business was at its peak and refis are going crazy.

You're going, wow, we're really having a lot of success. I think I'm going to fire all my staff. I'm going to let all my loan officers go. I'm just going to cut. I mean, just me and two other people. We're just going to run it like that. Yeah. You wouldn't do that.

No, never, never. And that's the position I was in. So to answer the question as best I can, I would say no. I wouldn't have done it. Well, what that begs the question to is, Eric, is what is the proper end to the NWO? Like if you had to go back and rebook it and come up with something, thing like what what would that proper end have been and I want you the proper end would have been the original concept of bringing of having to do a second show in giving NWO its own branded show

and giving WCW its own branded show and having that conflict between the two quote unquote wrestling organizations much like Smackdown and Rock tried to do right they haven't really been successful with it they've tried it for years to try to create that intercompanyl intercompetal in our company rivalry and trying to make it feel like two separate brands and not letting talent cross over all of those things and by the way wwe hasn't been successful in having two different shows don't misunderstand me here folks do not misunderstand me wwe's been incredibly successful building two different brands but not the way they started out doing it right it's it's different now and i think that if the original idea that was born

out of, okay, Ted wants a second show, had we been able to execute that properly, that would have been the right thing to do. The idea of just ending the NWO, because it's a storyline, I don't think, it would not have been a good business decision. Using the success of the NWO and expanding upon it and creating a sense of a real rivalry between two brands would have been the ideal way to end it. well i think but continue it right i get what you're saying that's that's the finish you wanted uh is is to spin it off into a separate brand and that would have meant maybe twice as many shows

maybe twice as many ticket sales and i'm sure the n w o shows would have been selling like high cakes and that's the case for w w tickets these days they're selling out everywhere but game time can hook you up that's what they do buying tickets to your favorite of shouldn't be stressful. And that's for a lot more than just wrestling. You can get all your sports, music, comedy, theater, and you can do this the same day as the event. How about that for a last minute?

What I like about these guys is they eliminate the guesswork. First of all, getting good seats can be stressful. When do they go on sale? What time? How do I know if it's a good seat? If I take a look at this seat map, how do I know if that's a good seat? Well, what's cool about game time?

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press order. What's it going to look like? Is it a good view? And oh, by the way, it's going to be the best price too? And you can do it the same day as the event. Game time should be your go-to. They send their tickets directly to your phone. You don't even have to dig through your email. Just two taps, bam, in your phone, ready to roll. Snag the tickets without the stress with game time. Just download the GameTime app, create an account, and use the code weeks for $20 off off. Again, create an account and redeem code weeks for $20 off. Download game time today. Last minute tickets, lowest price guaranteed. Hey, by the way, I use Game Time to buy two Eagles tickets and see the Minneapolis is St. Paul. I can't remember now. I did it the other day on

the plane. But absolutely, I can't wait to see the Eagles. One of my favorite bands of all time. Such great music. They announced their farewell tour. It's a final tour. And I took a look at their schedule. And I said, where am I going to be in November? Wait a minute. November's Thanksgiving. I'm going to be in Minneapolis. If I go in a week early, I've got two tickets waiting for me over at uh game time i can bring my wife and go see the eagles and it's exactly what we're doing and i did i went on to i said okay which ticket do i want it's the eagles man i'm going to buy the best ticket i can buy whatever that is whatever i can afford to that moment i'm going to buy that ticket and uh got two great tickets going to go see the eagles november 17th let's uh let's plan to see you at

the eagles be sure to use game time i think you'll be glad you did but i also want to give a shout out to everyone hanging out in our life chat when you sign up for ad free shows.com not only you get to see great new shows that are exclusive to ad free shows like tuesdays with the taskmaster that'll never be in your podcast feed it's not its own separate standalone podcast it's included with all the other bonus content over at ad free shows.com also included is your ability to attend our live tapings and we've got a whole bunch of folks watching live with us this morning eric and they are eating us up with questions about the NWO.

Adam Arpin has a great one. You've said previously when you initially thought up the NWO invasion angle, you thought it might have about a six-month run. If that's the case, it would have ended around StarCade 96. Do you have any recollection as to how you would have ended the angle

at that time? Now, as a reminder, we had the big showdown at Halloween Havoc. And that's with a heel Hollywood Hogan and a baby face, slim gym truck riding macho man randy savage at the conclusion of that paper view rowdy piper comes back and and we see rowdy roddy piper and holk hogan in nashville right up the road from me at starcade 96 obviously by that point it's so hot you're never taking your

foot off the gas but originally when you first sort of hatch this idea and we'll say we know for sure that hogan's in we'll call it july of 96 If you really thought, okay, I want this thing to go six months. What would the perfect blow off have been at Starcade 96? I realize those plans changed. But if that was true, would it have still been Piper? Would it have been Sting? Would you have done something else?

No, it would have had to have been Sting. Yeah. Or possibly Rick Flair. But that would have been the only way to end that at that point in time. But trust me, three months in, any idea of ending it in six months were gone. absolutely. That may have been the original idea of, oh, let's see. And it wasn't like, okay, let's do, I didn't initially say, okay, this is a six-month storyline. It was, here's the idea, here's the concept, let's launch it. We knew, you know, I knew that at some point it was going to have to come to an end. I didn't have the end of the NWO in mind when I launched the NWO. This is what I'm trying to say. But had I, and had for some reason, I decided, that I don't need to make all this money in 1998. I'll figure something else out.

I don't care that people are calling me and wanting to give me money. I'm just going to put an end to it because I said I would. And that was the original plan. It would have had to have been with Sting. More likely Sting, possibly, possibly Rick Flair. And probably even if it was thinking it would have involved Rickler. Here's a fun question. This one comes to us from Joe Morris.

When do you think the NWO was truly losing? losing steam. I'm watching through WCW during this time period and I'm at December 98, but I feel it would really lose steam from the finger point of doom. Everybody always points to the finger poke of doom. You probably have a different take though Eric. When did you start to notice? Man, this just ain't as hot as it was. Do you remember that moment? Well, no, because while creatively I would say that the NWO started feeling less exciting for me as a creator or producer, both I guess in this case.

For me, it would have been early mid-98 because that's when the energy started to dissipate internally. That's when the collaborations, the collaboration, everything, so much of the success of the NWO, So it wasn't because of me or Kevin Sullivan or Hulk Hogan or Kevin Nash or Scott Hall or Sting or anybody else. It was the result of everybody working together and collaborating and having fun in the process. That stopped around second quarter of 98 and it began to be more work and less fun because now we're managing personalities and chemistry. Once you start managing personalities and chemistry, you're putting a lot of time and energy into something that isn't productive, that isn't positive, it isn't fun.

No creative energy comes out of managing personality issues. That's like putting out a fire. Putting out fires isn't fun. And that's when that started happening. Now, the opposite side of that coin is the money was coming in more than it ever had. So it wasn't like we could look at our financials that go, hmm, if we analyze the financials over the last 60 days, it suggests that this idea is not working.

It was the opposite of that. Despite the Hogan Sting finish that everybody thought was the downfall of WCW, 98 was the most successful year we had after that finish that everybody hated. I'm not trying to justify the finish, by the way. I hated it, too, in retrospect. or even in the middle of it, but from a financial perspective, we were stronger than we ever were. So there was like two different inputs. One was, how much fun is this? That's the wrong way to say it. How productive is our creative? How positive is our creative? How effective is the

collaborative nature of our creative? We were losing steam way before anybody else thought we were. but at the same time we were making more money than ever so that was kind of like the dual messaging that created a little bit of a conflict for me quite honestly erika i'm going to ask a question here that's going to get you hot but i'm on your side darrell says did eric have any involvement or was even aware of how the japanese version of the nw o ended i bring this up because anytime i see a criticism of you online it's always some smart ass saying oh he stole one idea from Japan and that's all he's ever done. And I always want to ask those folks who say that,

hey, what was your favorite part about that invasion angle in Japan? Because nobody knows it. Nobody knows what it is. Nobody references. They just want to disdain. That's Dave Meltzer-ish. I don't know if he's responsible personally for it,

but that's where that narrative. Oh, he didn't. He didn't really do that. Somebody else did that. You know, Vince McMahon. Oh, that's not really Eric Bishop. That's Ted Turner. You know, people who just never saw it coming, people who were in my position and failed miserably, you know, people who disagreed with what I was doing because they felt like it was the wrong way to build a wrestling business creatively, whatever, never wanted to admit that this is a fucking great idea and it worked really well.

It's always, yeah, but he didn't really do that. He didn't really come up with that idea because it makes them feel better. about themselves by minimizing somebody else. I had no fucking clue what invasion angle existed in Japan. And if you put $10 million in cash in front of me today and said, That's what I wanted to ask you about because there's a narrative out there that you attended a new Japan show at the Tokyo Dome on April 29th, 1996. As a reminder, Scott Hall comes down those steps May 27th.

So this would have been right about four weeks ahead of time. A month ahead of time. We're talking April 29th, 1996. It's at the Tokyo Dome show. It is taped for TV. There's 65,000 fans in attendance. And man, this card is loaded up. So much great talent on it.

How about this one? A near 20 minute match for the junior heavyweight title match with great Sasa K beating Jush and Thunder Liger. Randy Savage is on this picking up a win over Tenzan. Umasahiro Chono beats Lex Lugar. How about a six-man tag match with Power Warrior and the Road Warriors taking on Scott Norton and the Steiner brothers? You think that was some meat chopping going on there? How about Great Muda and Jensation Zaki, Tenru and Fujunami?

But the main event featured Takata, who I guess was the UWFI champ, losing to Hashimoto in the main event of a New Japan show. So the name of the show is battle formation at the Tokyo Dome. There is WCW talent represented here. Do you remember being at that show? If it was in, what did you say it was in Tokyo? Tokyo Dome, yes. I may have been.

I think we were over there in the spring and there was a series of events I went to. Tokyo being one, Fukuoka being another in the southern part of Japan. So I likely was, but that's not the point, whether I was there or not. I ain't a fucking clue what the storylines were going into that. Right.

I wasn't watching their, weekly television. I didn't sit down with somebody from the creative side of Japan and say, okay, what's the angle here? What's the story? How did you build that? I'd show up the day before an event. I would take care of business. I spent most of my time with Mr. Baizhou, who is the business side of New Japan. And then I spent a lot of time with Masa Saida, who was New Japan's representative who brought in American talent. That was the extent of my conversations, and it was more social, with the exception of Baisho, it was more social than business. But I certainly never sat down and said, wait, how is this work? What are you guys doing here that I'm not

doing? What could I lift from you guys? That is the most obvious narrative from the least educated people that watch professional wrestling and comment on it or write about it. Because it's absolutely false. I had no idea. I didn't, here's the truth. And I think this goes to to the question more specifically. When it came to talent and storylines, one of the biggest issues I had to overcome, going back to reestablishing a relationship with New Japan after Bill Watts screwed him over famously

and New Japan didn't want anything to do with WCWR Turner Broadcasting, I had to fix that. And part of fixing that was, look, we'll send our talent over to you. You book them. I'm not going to tell you how to book them. I'm not going to put any limits on them. I'm not going to tell you you can't beat somebody. Now, if it's somebody like a Sting or a Hulk Hogan or Rick Flair who's involved in a program,

I might say, not now, maybe in two months, we can book that because they're in a middle of a storyline and an angle. And I just didn't want them flying back and forth to Japan in the middle of something that we're doing because our schedule was pretty tight. our pay-per-views were once a month. I couldn't afford to lose them. I'm just talking about time-wise and television-wise. And you have to consider risk of injury.

I couldn't put a lot of our top talent, send them over to Japan. I could care if they got beaten Japan or not. That wasn't an issue. Maybe one-tenth of one percent of the people in the United States paid attention to what the storylines were or what was going on in Japan. that wasn't my issue and that was the same thing with New Japan so my point is in answering this trying to answer this is that the relationship that I had with New Japan was such is give me a list of the people that you want to book a couple months in advance for whatever big events you've got

coming up I'll make sure that they're available if I can sometimes I can't but once I say okay, you can take these four guys. And by the way, New Japan was going to pay their airfare and pay their salaries for the period of time they were over there, whether it was a week or a month or two months or whatever it was. That was a way for me to defer some of my expenses in getting New Japan to pay for some of our talent for a period of time. But once I sent them over, I didn't care.

I wasn't concerned with how they were going to be booked. I knew that they were, you know, New Japan wasn't going to intention. do things that would hurt our talent, but if they had to lose a match, they had to lose a match. It's a story, folks. It's not real life. This is a fake gunfight, not a real one. No one's going to die. I hope not. And the same was true for Japan. So the idea, no, I didn't know what was going on in Japan. It wasn't part of my concern. The idea with the NWO being over in Japan was simply a merchandise opportunity. That's all it was for me.

I wasn't concerned with how they did it because their world, their audience, their culture was so much different than mine that I wasn't going to try to impose an American wrestling creative philosophy on the Japanese office. It wouldn't have never worked. So, no, I wasn't paying attention. I wasn't aware. There was no dialogue with, between me and Masa Saido would have been the person I would have talked to about

that type of thing if I would have needed to. But once I said, they're clear to go. I trusted them to do what was right for the Japanese market. And the same was true with New Japan. Once we established some trust, which took a while, but that was the nature of that relationship. So to answer the question, no, I did not know what was going on, nor did I care. We'll do a few more questions here.

Uh, the Rosencoaster wants to know, would there have been a place for the NW concept in the new WCW with Fusion before the WWF purchase? So if you would have got your hands on it, do you found a way to keep the NW thing going somehow, some way? No, no, for, for the same reason that I said with regard to Russo trying to bring him back in 99 or 2000 or whatever he did, uh, no, I would the idea with the new, with WCW 2.0 was to have it completely. fresh new brand and I wouldn't have gone no I may have down the road but initially no there

was no thought in my head about hey if we buy this thing I'm going to bring the NWO back absolutely not I would have thought against it Dave Leslie says why did we never get a true wolf pack slash Hollywood war I recall hearing quote no one wanted to see Hogan versus Nash but then we got it at Road Wild 99 but with no NWO context the split was interesting and we're seeing a similar storyline with the bloodline now and it's great why don't you think we ever saw that heads up on a pay-per-view that could have worked because our creative was completely fractured in the toilet okay that's I mean that's the honest answer so little thought especially long-term thought so little thought so little thought

went into what we were doing it was almost week to week booking at that point and it was incoherent week to week booking at the same time uh sam rosenthal has an interesting question this is more of a philosophy question for you eric do you think all teams or factions need to break up eventually i mean just as a rule do you think that has to happen no nothing has to happen there's no law it's it's it's a question that can you can you keep it together? Can you keep it compelling? If you can keep it compelling, let it live forever.

If it's printing money or even moderately successful, move it down the card and keep it going until such time you need to heat it back up again. If you can, the problem with factions is very few of them make any sense. There's no reason behind them. There's no message. There's no brand behind them. They're just all wearing the same t-shirts and come up with their own little gang signs or they rip off somebody else's um yes bullet club i'm talking to you there's no there's

nothing there that makes it what's the bullet club don't tell me who's in it yeah tell me what it is it's it's a it's a rip off of the nw yeah but i'm i know cosplay nw but in any faction that you point to why are they there what's their goal that's funny isn't it it all comes back down the storytelling. Backstory and motivation. What's the backstory? Why are they here? Why do they come together? And what's their goal once they do? It's that simple, folks. You can't just put a bunch of guys together that like each other, put them all on the same t-shirt, have them go out and throw some gang signs like the NWO did and started and expected to get over. Actually, the four horsemen did with this thing, right? Which they picked up from, what is it, Notre Dame?

for the original four horse well i think it was they stole the idea from the from notre dame do you know that god do you know that it wasn't even an original idea it was a full it was a one shot deal they only came up with one idea and they stole that from college football what the fuck um now if you can keep it alive keep it alive it's just about it's just about story uh brandon says

you don't have to go into a faction saying okay we're gonna start this we're going to put some effort of this we're going to end it maybe you will maybe you won't uh deano says do you believe ted turner would have appeared in an n w segment if he was asked like imagine if the n w invaded his office and that could have been fun yes ted was now depends on when 96 97 yes by 98 ted was under water ted was so focused on the merger yeah and that was such a big thing thing that there was no getting to Ted during that time not for me anyway well i'll tell you what you can get pro wrestling crate.com this episode is brought to you in part by pro wrestling crate

um monthly mystery crates for die hard wrestling fans if you're looking for exclusive wrestling collectibles every month can i recommend that you sign up for pro wrestling crate dot com boxes ship worldwide and they include brand new merch from a eW wrestlers and w Legends. Every premium box includes two t-shirts, one micro-brawler figure, one autographed 8 by 10, and one lapel pen, and more. The plans start at just $9.95. They really are the perfect gift for any wrestling fan. Check it out today at pro wrestling crate.com. That's pro wrestling crate.com. I think you're going to dig it. Uh, WWE says, hey, the NWA made cheating cool, but after a while, everything became a run-in and predictable.

Do you think the NW. RFF could have been an angle that was better fleshed out to give the heels more opportunities and victories? Sure. Absolutely. You know, that's, again, one of those things you look back and you go, okay, how could I have improved that? That would have worked.

Yeah. You can, you just, you know, there's nothing that I can look back upon that I, whether it was in WC. or anywhere else there's nothing I can go back and look at creatively like oh that was absolutely perfect there's no way that could have been better and that's one example of something that could have been better in end up or during that time uh Greg wants to know after Starcade 97 was there ever any thought given to Brett taking Hogan spot in the NWO and setting up a long-term feud that's something I never heard before what if you know Brett is now putting the boots to

Hogan, you couldn't get the job done. And maybe the rest of the group says, hey, Hogan, you lost. You're out. Brett's in. That could have been pretty cool.

What do you think of that? Taking personalities out of the equation and just looking at the characters in the story, that easily could have been a pretty exciting story to tell. I don't know that the chemistry and the personalities would have worked because that's a part of it. Could it have? Sure. if everybody wanted to play nice. And we're excited about doing it.

You know, contractually, it could, okay, let's just, you know, take the Hulk Hogan creative control element out of it. But yeah, easily could have worked. It could have been really good if the chemistry would have been right. And the chemistry wasn't right. I'm glad you mentioned creative control. Jimmy has a question here. Do you regret giving Hulk creative control?

In my opinion, I think you miscategorize the finger point. My disappointment wasn't the act itself. It was that Holt gave the belt back. We saw that movie already. That's why we gravitated to WWE afterwards. They gave us new heroes. So let's just go back to the original question. Do you regret in hindsight giving Hogan creative control or was that the only way to get him?

I absolutely do not regret it. It wasn't an issue with the exception of one incident that we all know about. any other for that period of time that's like saying do I regret bringing Hulk Hogan into WCW couldn't absolutely not

and the fact that Hulk really only used his creative control invoked that clause one time in the six years that I worked with him absolutely not and I think

the listener is reading way too much into that situation The finger, creative control had nothing to do with the fingerpoken do. And nothing to do with it. You think it does because some dipshit said it did that wasn't there, that wasn't in the business, because he heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody who heard it from somebody. It wasn't true.

Now, you could shit all over the idea and I'd probably be lying up and do it with you. It didn't work, but it wasn't because of Hogan's creative control. here's another one Brad Stanton wants to know is there anyone that you thought was a good fit for the NWO that never joined no no we've kind of covered that before you know again it's hypothetical and I saw one of your posts and I think it's probably because of the conversation you had with Kevin the other day yeah in a in a fantasy world Yeah, Undertaker coming in, it would have been great. Could have been really huge. It's not real, folks. Just like, you know, everybody that was running around with a fantasy of winning that $1 billion lottery last week, they all had fantasies, but it wasn't real, except

for one person in California, but it wasn't real. No, I, I, no. Brendan says, on Eric's first night in TNA, we saw allusions to the NWO with Hogan Hall and Waltman and the eventual reforming of the quote unquote band. Eric has said that he was brought in to oversee creative that involved Hulk. Wasn't Eric concerned that this would be, as he says, less than? Yes. Yeah.

I knew it was going to. I wasn't concerned. I was absolutely convinced. Take out concern put in convinced. It was going to be, TNA was less than. The television show was produced in front of 450 or 500 people on a soundstage. You're less than before any bell rings. You're less than before you turn a lights on.

Absolutely it was going to be less than. But that was the environment I was playing in. Adam Leeson wants to know. Is Eric surprised that the NW merch is still one of the WB's biggest sellers to this day? Surprise no. Flattered, yes. but no I'm not surprised NWO changed the entire industry for the better

regardless of what people who are detractors say who are affected by it creatively there is not one other significant storyline that I think anybody can honestly point to objectively that had a significant of an impact on the wrestling business than the NWO did. And it, look, the Monday Night Wars were created the minute we went head-to-head against WWE, right?

That started in September of 95. And I've seen a lot of people take credit for it. I'm not going to name names because some of them are friends of mine, but the real war started in September, September 14th, I think it was, or whatever it was, 95, 11th, can't remember, but that war, and we were competitive with WWE immediately. Now, first night out, we were, you know, they were preempted, so that doesn't count. But if you go back and, as some people who are dirt sheet writers who try to come off as analysts now

are throwing terms around like metrics, because they heard somebody else say it, if you go back and look at the metrics in the history, go back and look at WCWCW, ratings compared to WWF, WWE, prior to the NWO. We were competitive immediately. One week they'd win. Next week, we'd win. We'd win two weeks. They'd win a week.

They'd win two weeks. We'd win a week. No. There's a few more and then we'll pump the breaks on this. I want to mention Zole Lopez over in the group chat. He has a great question. about merch. He says, have you ran into any odd NWO merch while doing signings at Comic Cons? And if so, what was it? What's the weirdest piece of NWO? Nothing odd. I've seen a lot of,

especially lately, I see stuff like, oh, that's kind of cool. I mean, W.W.E's doing a great job of redesigning new NWO merchandise without taking away from the original brand. Yeah. But they've, they're coming out with some cool stuff, quality, quality merch. So, It doesn't surprise me, going back to the question earlier, doesn't surprise me that it's a top seller. It's a powerful brand that represents an amazing period of time during professional wrestling history. I wouldn't call it the peak of professional wrestling history. I think Vince McMahon going national and kind of walking right over the graves of the territory system, that was probably the biggest movement in professional wrestling in the last 40 years.

or so, 50 years, but NWO in the Monday Night Wars that resulted from it were probably right behind that. And yeah, NW, I mean, WWE's doing a great job with that merch, man. Great question here from Gavin.

Would it have worked for Hollywood to set a mandate that if someone lost, they were out of the NWO and you could use that storytelling device to pair the group back down to Hogan, Holland Nash, before our final blow off six man where wcw gets rid of them this thing all did start with a six man he was the mystery guy i could see that and you know off the top of my head i would think that would

probably be guys like goldberg and ddp and sting across the ring from these cats but what do you think of that idea that hey if you lose you're out that's a pretty good idea huh i do think that's a good idea yeah it's one of those things that you know where were you when i needed you well jonathan woodridge has a great question here woolridge sorry when the nw o went stale is that the point where you finally regretted firing gregganya he had the recipe to save the n w o but he was gone that's a tongue and cheat question of course yeah fun question greg ganyu is is as worthless as tits on a boar hog okay uh in rike absolutely worthless great question here what are the similarities

and differences between the NWO and the bloodline and why is the bloodline storyline having more meat in the story? Is it the real family angle? Is it the civil war going on now within the bloodline the beginning to a similar way that the NWO black and white and wolf pack feud? How can WWE avoid jumping the shark? They already have. Really? Doing it. Doing it as you as you watch it every week. There was a lot of questions wrapped up in the one question there but break it down just for a second um the bloodline the reason of bloodline and i've said this from for the last several months probably last five or six months the bloodline storyline in my opinion is the best storyline that's ever been produced for rustling

absolutely believe that the reason for it there's a lot of reasons for it but one of the reasons that I see from my perspective, I'm not in the room while it's being created or planned going forward. But for me, it's the detail and the discipline. How many times have you heard me say great television is nothing more but a bunch of little details strung together at a very, very great way. Yeah. And the Bloodline storyline is a very detailed and disciplined arc. that builds other talent along the way look at the usos now compared to the usos 24 months ago yeah i mean now that doesn't happen by accident it doesn't happen just because the usos decided they they realized you know wow i know how to get over i'm going to go out and try this tonight

they're getting over because of the discipline the detail and the amazingly well-structured storyline that the bloodline represents that's what didn't happen in nw o right nw o was a was a better big idea, in my opinion. I don't think the bloodline will have the impact on the wrestling industry that the NWO had. Not because it's not a better storyline, it is, but because of the timing, because of what was going on in wrestling at that time. But as a story, it's a much, much better story because it has the detail in the discipline that the NWO story did not have.

let's uh let's put a bow on this week's episode man we sort of talked about the downfall of the NWO the ends the outs the good the bad the ugly but you heard it straight from eric's mouth if you had it to do over again we would have seen it through and i guess you would have had a NWO nitro and a WCW thunder and we would have created two brands sort of like raw and smackdown and that just didn't happen not the way it should have yeah We had two shows, but by that time, we had our guts taken out and creative wasn't there as a result. A lot of other issues, but 98, man, the best of times, the worst of times. We're going to keep breaking it down for the rest of the year.

But next week, we'll talk about Sting's 1999. And we're going to talk about all that Sting was doing in 99 up until Eric does a little audios. By the way, we'd love if you would come check out ad free shows. I don't like can you join us and be a part of our live studio audience, but you get all kinds of great bonus content. And if you can't get enough of WCW, boy, this is the place to be. We got Tuesdays with the taskmaster. We got a Monday mailbag with Nick Patrick.

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and the whole cast of characters are going to be there. You want to be there with us at September 1st through September 3rd. I'm going to do pictures and autographs and meet and greets, but a ton of panel discussions. Stuff you can't see anywhere else. It's AEW weekend. They're in town for all. out make it a whole weekend with us you can book a hotel package right now and stay at our

official hotel so if you want to join in on the festivities you just get on the elevator and go downstairs boom and you're in wrestling utopia so it'll be friday night all day saturday and all day sunday and of course their big paper review is on sunday night starcast dot com has some of the best all out tickets you can get yeah even ringside and of course you can also pick up your bracelets so you can attend all the panel discussions all access to all events that's s d a r r c a s t dot com if you can't make it to chicago it will be streamed on premier streaming this year as well so be sure to check that out uh that's it for us today eric i never know what to expect when we sit down and click record on these you know

sometimes it's going to be fun sometimes it's going to be painful what'd you think about our downfall of the nw o episode i think it was a great kind of analytical look at it you know I think we covered some great, great angles on it. I try to be as honest as I could about it. We had some great questions from the fans. So I enjoyed it. We enjoyed it too. And I can't wait to see you again next week, man.

I hope everyone has a great week. And we'll be back before you know it with another episode of Strictly Business here on the program. As you're listening to this, I'm coming back from Iowa. Eric's coming back from Baltimore. And the beat goes on. We'll see you next week right here on 83 weeks with Eric Bischon. Hey guys, need to call a quick time out here. I wanted to tell your listeners what I've been telling my listeners over at OU

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