83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff - Episode 324: The Astrodome Nitro WCW Nitro 05.31.99

Episode Date: May 31, 2024

On this episode of 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff, Eric and Conrad are back with a fun look back at one of the weirdest, wildest and what some would say worse episodes on Monday Nitro. The guys take us all the way back to May 31st 1999 for a Monday Nitro featuring Randy Savage facing off against a fake Kevin Nash, DDP and Bam Bam Bigalow winning the WCW tag belts, Sting fighting Rick Steiner in a steel cage, and so much more. Eric shares his experience working in the company at the time and navigating through all this chaos. Watch along with us and fire up Peacock Season 5 Episode 21 PRIZE PICKS - Go to https://www.prizepicks.com/83WEEKS and use code 83WEEKS for a first deposit match up to $100! ROCKET MONEY - Cancel your unwanted subscriptions – and manage your money the easy way – by going to https://www.rocketmoney.com/83WEEKS MANSCAPED - Get your dad a Father's Day gift that will have your mom thanking you. Get 20% Off and Free Shipping with the code 83WEEKS at https://www.manscaped.com/  MANDO - Give the man in your life the gift of Aluminum-free, whole body deodorant. New customers get $5 off a Starter Pack with our exclusive code. That equates to over 40% off your Starter Pack. Shop Mando’s Father’s Day bundle with code 83WEEKS at https://shopmando.com/  BLUECHEW - Try BlueChew FREE when you use our promo code 83WEEKS at checkout--just pay $5 shipping. That’s https://bluechew.com/, promo code 83WEEKS to receive your first month FREE SAVE WITH CONRAD - Stop throwing your money on rent! Get into a house with NO MONEY DOWN and roughly the same monthly payment at https://www.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 https://www.podcastheat.com/advertise now and find out more about advertising with 83 Weeks. Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCqQc7Pa1u4plPXq-d1pHqQ/join BECOME A 83 WEEK MEMBER NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@83weeks/membership Get all of your 83 Weeks merchandise at https://boxofgimmicks.com/collections/83-weeks 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 https://www.patreon.com/adfreeshows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, hey, it's Garnreda Thompson, and you're listening to 83 weeks. And, of course, we couldn't do it without the Hall of Famer, your friend and mine, Eric Pischoff. Eric, what's going on, man? How are you? I'm doing great. Doing great. Looking forward to a wonderful weekend.

Summer's finally here. Friends family rolling in, tourists all over the place. The energy here in Cody, Wyoming has been elevated by about 300%. The nightly rodeo starts tonight, I believe. So we're going to have a rodeo every single night in a big rodeo over the fourth of five. People come in from all over the world for that rodeo. It's a big, big one. It's televised.

PBR comes out and televises it. So, man, there's so much good stuff going on in the summer here in Cody, Wyoming. Hope to see any of our fans that listen, watch us over to. 83 weeks.com wherever you get your dose you're coming through Cody Wyoming man get me up send me one of them messages on Twix DM whatever they're called let me know if you're town we'll go grab a burger how about that little open invite for mad free shows.com and we hope you guys are doing all the word new at free shows.com including we've

a brand new announcement that I can reveal right here right now Eric have some breaking news for our live studio audience we've started our own little stable over at ad free shows.com we've got exclusive content that you can't get anywhere else from folks like the taskmaster Kevin Sullivan a member of wrestling royalty Mr. David Crockett and even a horseman the total package Lex Lugar but what's better than having one horseman Eric having two let's check it out Hey everyone, it's W.W.E. Hall of Famer Tully Blanchard. Here to tell you about my brand new series coming to ad-freeshows.com this June. Join me each and every month for Tullyvision as Conrad Thompson and I break down some of my most memorable matches with stories and insight that I've never shared before.

And what better way to kick it off than with my famous I Quit match against Magnum T.A. from Starcate 85. Feuds with Dusty Roads and Wago McDaniel. War Games matches, the horsemen, the brainbusters. We'll be looking back at all on Tullyvision starting this June exclusively on ad-free shows.com. Hey, well, that's the first I heard of this. I'm going to check that out. I'm going to check that out. You know, I missed, I got to meet Magnum TA, obviously, when I went to work for WCW,

and we became friends and still are to this day. We cross paths fairly often out on the trail, so to speak. But I was never really able to watch him in his prime before his accident. So I love hearing stories about Magnum. He doesn't really talk about himself much when you're with him. But I'm going to mark that one down. That's a must watch for me. We hope everyone will check it out at ad-free shows.com where you get all of that,

plus our regular podcast early and ad-free. It's all that ad-free shows.com. Over the weekend, this past weekend, you and I were live a bunch. We went live on Saturday to talk about Queen and King of the Ring. We went live late on Sunday to talk about AEW double or nothing. You've also had a wise choices this week, and there's a lot of stuff happening in 83 weeks.com. What's the feedback you've seen about our coverage of the live events? It's been very, very positive.

Of course, you know, I expressed my opinion. I don't hold back and neither do some of the people that react, which is great. And some of them, you know, the people that disagree with me are just downright, vicious and ugly, which is really great. because I cut and paste those puppies and use them for contents and have fun with it. So please keep that shit coming. Do not hold back. Let your inner anger out. But yeah, it's been really positive and fun for me.

And the more I do, the more I love doing it, which is, I guess, at some point, going to be an issue because there's only, you know, you can only take so much of this place. But I love doing it. You know, what we're doing over at Wise Choice is breaking down, you know, everybody's been talking about story, this, story that, is their story, is there too much story? Do the stories suck? All that crap. And there's a big debate.

Everybody's got an opinion, which is fine. But what we're doing over at Wise Choice is talking to, you know, guys like Tom DeShane, Harvard graduate in English and literature, written books about Shakespeare's characters and all of Shakespeare's rights, award-winning books. Oh, by the way, he's also an amazing wrestling fan that can break down a match from 190, I don't know, pick a name out of the hat, 87, and break down that match from a story component,

kind of perspective. He's a huge wrestling fan. But we're just taking all this stuff, and we're kind of trying to, I guess, get agreement at least, what is a storyline for wrestling? And how does a storyline work? What's the structure? What the beats you've got to hit?

You know, how do you look at a story structure and spread it out over the amount of time you wanted to play out over? And we're taking looks from different angles, from guys like Tom to Shane, also basing it on the writings of a guy by the name of Joseph Campbell, who wrote the book The Man with a Thousand Faces, which ended up becoming the hero's journey. But, you know, traditional storytelling applied to the unique wrestling product. That's just an example of one of the things we're doing over there. Oh, and I do occasionally rant and fern.

fucking rave when appropriate i try to manage that but uh if something's happening you know in the news or in any given moment and it catches by attention and i feel feisty yeah i'll jump on and we'll have a blast so stop on by say hi check it out if you haven't already it's 83 weeks dot com and right now eric we're going to do something we haven't done in a little while i guess maybe we did one last month but we had such a blast with it that we saw a lot of requests hey do more watchalongs so that's actually what we're doing today and we want you to pull your peacock out and uh load it up man we're going to go to season five episode 21 of uh monday nitro going to be watching a memorial day nitro from 1999 25 years ago

it's season five episode 21 and here we are unbelievably having a monday nightro the same day as the funeral for Owen Hart, so we're in late May of 99. You're probably in like absolute hell in Turner at this point, right? What was the month? At the end of May, it was the beginning, I mean,

probably within a week or 10 days of this date is, I thought things were bad leading up to this point that we're at in 1999. I was losing it and just borderline out of control in terms of trying to fight what I felt was the inevitable from the corporate side of Turner, trying to call people out. I mean, Conrad, I was calling out naming names publicly of people with internal broadcasting at the highest levels on the executive committee. I was embarrassing them, attempting to embarrass them in meetings because I was forcing a fight that I hoped, and I believed 100% at the time, because history at that point had proven me right and backed me up. But I was challenging people that I knew were setting me up for failure or setting W, I didn't look at it personally, setting WCW up for failure. I just, I knew it.

I started seeing it 98 by May of 99, I thought I was in the bowels of Turner financial hell only to find out it gets worse right about this time. So yeah, when you talk about it being a horrible time, it's probably one of the darkest periods of my life, to be honest with you. I can't wait to watch and celebrate such a dark, terrible time of your life. Oh, gosh. I'm on my birthday, too. Yeah, I guess it's like you're floating around in the pool, down on the beach house.

You can celebrate your birthday. Life's good for Mr. Thompson. And life was good for Mr. Bishop, quite a few years leading up to this point. But man, can you imagine floating around that pool with all that anger and frustration? And shoot, no, take the fun out of everything. Yeah, I guess we should mention as we're recording this, we're recording a little earlier than we might normally.

Today is your birthday. Oh, shucks. I wasn't going to bring it up. You told us the other night when we were finishing up the AEW pay-per-view recap that we did, that you did your annual celebratory birthday pedicure that Bruce Pritchard guilted you into a few years ago, and you had a little fun and painted your nails,

and my goodness, are you doing anything today on your actual birthday, right here uh no i'm going to wrap this up uh laurie and i are going to just go into town and literally there's a there's a hotel right on the corner called the irma hotel buffalo bill cody built it i think in 1909 or something named it after his daughter and it's kind of the centerpiece of town and it looks exactly the way it did back that inside it's a little bit obviously but it's still the same structure and it has a big giant porch that wraps around two sides of the building on the corner. And it's kind of where everybody hangs out when the weather's nice on the weekend and

just people watch and all that kind of stuff. So we're going to probably go do that. And then I'm going to get home and pack because I've got three or four days in L.A. that I'm doing some stuff. So I'm going to be gone. So I'm going to pack everything tonight and drive up to buildings tonight so that I can leave first thing tomorrow morning and have some fun in L.A. well i know everybody's going to wonder how that's going to go so we'll stay tuned to see uh all these new developments perhaps but in the meantime nothing big don't read too much into it because you'll be let down when i finally tell you but it but it'll be fun i'm looking forward to doing it let's put it well i'm looking forward to watching this old nitro you said

that it was uh maybe the worst of times well i did i wish i maybe would have thought of that before we're watching it but uh we'll try not to get eric too depressed oh you could give me depressed right now, Mr. Thompson, you could not get me depressed no matter what you showed me. I've dealt with all this shit. I'm good with it, brother. Let it fly. Let's do it. Season 5, episode 21, that's season 5, episode 21. I'll give us a countdown. And when I say play, you'll press play. We hope if you're watching along with us, you'll go ahead and mute your

playback on the actual show. We'll do some alternate commentary for you here. And we'll get started in three, two, one play and you see we've got that redesign logo that we all hate so much flying in to start the show and man we're off to the races here we see raven walking into the back of the building here bam bam big a logo to attack him knocks the cameraman down in the process and there's ddp it looks like we're going to do a little jersey triad action here I got to tell you Eric I I like the way that started where the cameraman took the bump. That added some realism to it.

Oh, it didn't it ever. I mean, you talk about, you know, they refer to it as ENG or electronic news gathering kind of a shot where you're basically, if you imagine you're running up to a car crash, you know, if you're a newsperson or you're a fire of some sort, and you're literally jogging with the camera so you get that kind of jittery, you know, unconventional look as opposed to the camera on a tripod lock look and it does make it feel more real it makes it feel more urgent like there's actually actioning happening and it's a little bit chaotic and uncontrolled which is exactly the feeling you're trying to to remote with that kind of a shot i love i love that work

when you can anytime you can use eng instead of you know lockdown shots i much much prefer for that very recent. Well, to remind everybody that we said it at the top of the show, but this show is happening the same day as the funeral for Owen Hart. And obviously, that's a big deal for everyone in professional wrestling. Did you ever see the, uh, the tribute to Owen that episode of Monday Night Raw? Have you ever seen that one? Yes.

Well, I mean, it's not a fun thing to think about having to do a tribute show. What did you think of tribute shows like that for fallen wrestlers? I, if they're hard for me. Now, I think the only one that I was a part of was Eddie Guerrero. That was hard for me. Yeah. And I was in the back, you know, I probably couldn't even see me on camera very well.

my choice because I knew what was going to happen. I cry at Disney movies. These things are tough for me. And it was one of the reasons it was so hard is not just the devastating loss of somebody like Eddie that was a friend and a coworker, a peer. But from where I stood in the back, knowing the people that were in the very front

were the people that were closest to Eddie. and just trying to imagine how they felt actually made it all worse because I had relationships with those people. And I could, if I couldn't feel what they were actually feeling, I came close enough that it was so hard just being there. I think, though, it's what someone like Eddie would want and appreciate and be grateful for because someone like Eddie or anybody that's in that situation would understand that it's also for the family and the fans

and the friends as much as anything else. So I think they're appropriate, but personally, for obvious reasons, I hope I'm never part of another one. I know I will be, but I hope that I'm not. we're seeing some shots here of tank abbott and it's reported in the observer that he signed a three-year deal what was your experience like dealing with tank habit are you calling him is he calling you and as far as just the the actual contract process is it easy to deal with he was awesome i don't know what kind of i don't know how people think about tank abit he's one of the coolest

dudes. I mean, he went through some shit like we all do. But man, you talk about a guy that's come out of it. I've got a book that he wrote. He sent me. And to be really honest, I haven't gotten through it. I started it. Sat for a couple months, started it again kind of thing. And I'm going to finish it because it's a dense book. But this cat is special. He's a good human being. And if you get a chance to meet Tank out on the circuit, out on the trail, go out of your way and have a conversation with him. He's a great storyteller. He's a wonderful human being. And he's been through some shit. So check him out. I enjoyed work. Even that before I even got to know him. I did his deal. He didn't have an agent or attorney. I don't

think. I remember dealing with the tank face-to-face. Layed back, chill, respectful, didn't have a super high opinion of himself. He was going to walk in and become the next, you know, Rick Flair or Stone Cold Steve Boston or Hulk Hogan. He just wanted to get in there. And he's one of those guys that just likes contact. He grew up with it. I can kind of relate to it. Not to suggest that I was ever on his level. But when you grow up, probably much like growing up in Alabama with football. Yeah. You learn to love the contact. Yeah. As much as you love the game, itself and that's the way take was he i liked him and i and i've learned to respect him and

like him even more now we got the nitro girls doing their thing here by the way this show is coming to you live from the astro dome yeah the freaking astrodome it is a huge show uh obviously we've got a lot of folks there 15 000 for fans the gate here is an incredible 438000 $175. Now, as amazing as this is, to have 15,000 fans for a live television show. That'd be a big deal if it was

in AEW, if it was in the WWV. I mean, then now forever, 15,000 for TV is huge. However, just six months prior, there was a Monday nitro in this same building. Yeah, they ran multiple nitros at the Astrodome.

Now, that one was December, 7th, 1998, before Goldberg's undefeated streak was over, the main event was Goldberg defending that title against Bam Bam Bigelow. And that show drew over 32,000 fans. And that is just unfathomable. I mean, here I am so genuinely impressed that we've got 15,000 people at a television show. And then to think, boy, it was more than double that just six months ago. I mean, that's got to be a real feather in your cap man 32,000 for TV. That's unbelievable, but it also shows you that momentum's a real thing where in six months, it's less than half of that. Yeah. And, you know, I don't want to talk too much about what's going on over in AEW, but there's always

these parallels, you know, where is AEW at in its, you know, trajectory from day one, approximately five years ago to today. And there's always somewhere along the line, say, well, this is, you know, this is where WCW was at this point. Here's where he's. EW is. So there's always that parallel in comparison, some of it for obvious reasons, some of it just because people like to do that kind of shit. But this was without question, this period of time was without question was a not quite a nose dive, but somewhere between a nose dive in a horrible glide path, somewhere in the middle. And to think that as bad as things were, and they were in WCW from a,

overall management perspective, from a creative perspective, from a morale perspective, from a ratings perspective, there was not one way you could look at WCW in 1999 and find a ray of bright light unless you turned yourself inside out and into a pretzel trying to reanalyze data. But nobody was doing that. There was no effort on anybody's part to find the positive news in anything. Quite the contrary. but to think that you could still do, you know, $400,000 in 1999 was probably around, I don't know, five, six, seven hundred thousand now. I don't know.

I can't do the math. But to think as horrible as things were, people were still giving the brand a chance. They hadn't given up completely, but man, were they on their way? and there was still there was still potential at this time still some light at the end of the tunnel but it wouldn't be long before that was gone Eddie Guerrero is back on the show here they're actually going to be talking about his auto accident

this is him returning of course around the turn of the year you know like around New Year's Eve he had just a horrible car accident you see the pictures that they're showing there of his Porsche. A lot of people felt like he was lucky just to even survive this. And now he's back on the show here. He's going to be joining the New Color Commentary.

And of course, when the accident actually happened, they were doing an angle saying that he was injured by the NWO. But now, of course, we're telling the real story that he was in this car accident. How excited were you to see Eddie Guerrero back and looking healthy and ready to work? on a personal level just I was really really happy I was grateful because there you know

there there was a period of time when we weren't sure we're going to get it back that he'd be able to come back or get through it at all so yeah very very happy to have him back you know on a personal level I always always loved Eddie love working with Eddie got a kick out of hanging out with him professionally you know that could be a roller coaster you know, partly because of him and partly because of me. We both, we had these personalities that neither one of us were afraid to be very honest about where we, where we were coming from. And I respected that and Eddie.

I welcome that. I'd rather know the truth about what somebody's thinking that bullshit that generally you get. And there was no bullshit with Eddie, you know, he was straightforward and somewhat emotional from time to time. And so was I. So that part of it. could be touch you know could be touchy but the rest of it man being around him being with him having a beer with him you know after the show i had great memories of it he was happy to have

him back there comes chastity with hack the former sandman from ecw uh he was also a subject for the dark side of the ring series that's on vice and i guess now is a perfectly good time for us to mention that we're actually going to be having some fun over at Three Weeks.com with the creators of that fabulous series. Who killed WCW? I know you participated in that, Eric, and I know that we're going to have some opportunities to break down those episodes and have some special guests.

It's all happening at 83 weeks.com. I know you've had a chance to see episode one. What did you think of what you've seen so far? Well, I'm going to save all that to wise choices, because I'm going to do a breakdown after each one of these. Here's the truth. I was contacted to be a part of the project in full transparency. I wasn't interested initially.

And the reason is it had been covering Nitro and WCW had been done so many times. There was so much false narrative out there, and it's been there for so long. It's never going to go away. And the story had been told, particularly by WWE and others. And it's like, well, what else are we going to talk about? I knew there was another story, but I didn't know that that's what Rock, Duane Johnson, Seven Bucks Productions, Brian Goertz, Vice. I didn't know that's what they were interested in.

I thought we're going to get another standard. Oh, here we go. I've seen it all before. And then once I heard the angle of attack, I went, hmm, this is a little bit like Guy Evans' book. Talking about a lot of information that people never knew, including me, by the way. Big situations, you know, big missing pieces in my mind that I knew had to be occurring, but I couldn't imagine where or who. And then years, years later, we're reading Guy Evans' book, and he did interview. used with some of these people.

So there's a whole different perspective out there. I'm not suggesting people buy into one or the other, but there's a different perspective. We're going to break that down after each episode of Who Killed, WCW, over on the Dark Side of the Ring, Vice. 83 Weeks.com is where you'll be able to check that out each and every week. And right now we're seeing Kidman take on hack. And Eddie Guerrero is doing color,

commentary and Meltzer would say Eddie was not very good on color. He would also point out that when we last saw Eddie at the very end of the year and the very, actually I guess the beginning of this year here in 99, Eddie Guerrero had been this asshole heel, but now he's a quote unquote timid baby face according to Dave Meltzer. I really did think as much as I enjoyed Eddie's work as a baby face in the WWE. I thought his best work. I thought his best work in WCW was as a heel. Wouldn't you agree with that? Absolutely.

Eddie embraced the heat. He wasn't a wrestler playing a heel. He was a professional wrestler embracing his character. And I think he was more comfortable as a heel. He was great as a baby face. But I don't know. Other people that knew Eddie better than I did

would be able to better comment on this. But I always got the impression that and he preferred being a heel. It was more fun. Who wouldn't? You know, baby face is hard, really hard work. You've got to be on. Look at Cody Rose and, you know, he's the champ.

He's a face of the company and all the things that come along with it, including the money and the opportunity and the travel and the experiences. But it's also a ton of work because Cody is out there representing the company in a million different ways that none of us ever see on television or paper do it's his business and it's a full time and a half business and it's work whereas being a heel you don't get a lot of the you don't make the money you don't get the accolades and experiences which are the most important I think for me anyway the memories and the experiences you don't get as a heel that you do get as a baby face but you pay the price it's not free

we've got tank abbott and his band of merry men coming in down to the ringside area and we know that uh well we're going to be seeing bryan knobs and well this is the hardcore wrestling era of wcw hey there's something that was coming out in the newsletters at the time i wanted to ask you about quote woman bodybuilder trish stratus has received feelers now from both the w f and wcw i got to tell you that sort of flew off the page to me i didn't know that She ever had a real conversation with anybody in WCW. Do you recall any conversation about or with Trish? I didn't know it either until just now.

Wow. But it doesn't mean it didn't happen. Could have been Terry Taylor. You know, there was always people sending in tapes. There were talent looking for opportunities, selling in tapes, you know, 8 by 10s, resumes, whatever. There were always stacks of the, in the booking room, writer's room. So could very easily have happened.

I just wasn't aware of it. Hey, there's another note here. I guess this was kind of being discussed a lot at the time. That ECW might about to be landing a national television deal. We know that they would actually announce that they're going to be going on TN. They're going to do a one-hour weekly show. I don't think it's actually going to debut until the end of August. But here we are, and at the end of May, people are saying, hey, this is really going to happen.

Now, you're pretty much the entire time you had been competing and running WCW against. the WWE, they were growing this little independent promotion in Philadelphia called ECW, and they had some syndicated TV around the country and some of the major markets. But maybe you feel differently about them now that you hear they're about to be on national television, or does that even on your radar at the time? It's the last thing on my mind. With no disrespect to ECW or Paul or anybody else, where ECW was at this particular time, because they were getting an opportunity that is growth.

So there's nothing to, you know, for me to, to throw stones at for any reason. It would be stupid. But there was so much other stuff going on that was way more important to me in that period of time that I didn't really even, if I knew it, I didn't even register it. It didn't matter to me. Again, because the building was on fire. I'm not worried about, you know, who's planting a tree out in my front lawn. I'm worried about keeping the house from burning down.

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That's all we play. And I said, wow, that's awesome, man. So what do you like about prize picks? dude these NBA playoffs there's nothing like them with prize picks he started doing the commercial for me he is a real fan of what prize picks is doing and I think you will

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Dylan in the back. What do you think of JJ as a television character here as the figurehead commissioner for WCW at times? He did it really well. He didn't come on too strong. He didn't look forced. It was a very natural role for him because it wasn't really too far off some of his administrative duties that he actually did full time in WCW. So it was kind of an extension of who he really was. It was also a callback to being a manager for the four horsemen. There was a relationship there. So I mean, it was a complete completely logical casting, if you will. We should mention that during that little segment, Flair was announcing that the elbow off the top rope is now banned. And you may recall recently, we did a little watch along of a

nitro and we saw him, uh, him being Randy Savage flying off onto Charles Robinson. Boy, that was a serious circumstance for Charles Robinson. But still, this is all story. We've banned the elbow off the top rope a kind of fun little wrinkle there hey let's talk about some real stuff because it's it's in the observer quote new japan sagaguchi and masasaito came to the u.s this week to meet with eric bischoff they want wcw to send bigger names like goldberg or they'll switch to doing business with the wf that's bullshit that is so much but we've learned we've learned a lot about dave haven't we so that never happened. They never

ever happened. My relationship my relationship with New Japan was so solid in 1999 that I could have used it for leverage if I was in the middle of negotiating with WCW or if I needed

it's not my style to leverage relationships by the way professionally or personally but if I wanted to because our business with New Japan was significant. Ted although I didn't know it at the time, that Ted's influence really didn't matter. I thought it still did, which is why I was picking fights with people who were much higher up the food chain than I was,

because I believe that it would force a confrontation between me and whoever I had an issue with and Ted, because it had happened in the past that way. I just didn't know that Ted was being diluted within his own company. But I could have used it. In fact, Masa Saido and Mr. Baizha, who is their business affairs kind of general manager, came to visit Lori and I in Hawaii later on in 1999 because Lori and I renewed our vows on Waikiki that year. And Masa and his wife, Miki, and Mr. Baizio and his wife came in and we're part of our ceremony. that's the real relationship between us and new japan not the figment of the distorted mind and

perspective of dave no sir of course we're watching a diamond dallas page come down to the ring here with his old buddy bam bam bigelow um i do want to bring up something that was in the observer about the nitro prior to this i guess this is where the wheels started to come off maybe in the locker room as well. You were talking about how miserable you were in WCW at the time and so many others were. Well, here is the report from Nitro the week prior, according to the observer. There was considerable legit heat between Bischoff and a lot of the wrestlers for legit deviating from the script on Monday and promos where they openly knocked the direction of the company and holding the young guys back. In particular, Disco Inferno, Buff Bagwell, Hugh Morris,

and Dean Malenko. Bishaw. and Malenko had a heated confrontation after a live angle where Malenko said, you have to show where you're over 45 on your driver's license in order to get a push in WCW. Do you remember this confrontation with Dean? What can you tell us about this? I've never had a confrontation with Dean, ever. I've had discussions with Dean that probably never exceeded the level of emotion that's

taking place between you and I right now. It was serious conversations, but never a heated confrontation. That's the kind of bullshit that gets me hot. That's the kind of bullshit that inspires me and motivates me to call him out, him being Dave Meltzer. Every single time I see him spew bullshit because he creates a perception that isn't true amongst the most vulnerable wrestling fans out there who think that Dave Meltzer knows what the fuck he's talking about.

And this was a perfect example. I have never, ever, I've never even heard Dean Malinko raise his voice to anybody else, more or less me. And I would never raise my voice to Dean Malenko, ever, because you don't have to speak to Dean Malenko that way to have a serious conversation and a productive one. just more bullshit, more bullshit from Dave Nelson. Oh, goodness gracious, I didn't expect. Well, you ask the question.

It's not like I want to talk about him, but I know why we are because we're looking for context here. And Dave, as much as he's full of shit in so many ways as it relates to the business of the wrestling business and what works and what doesn't work or what's working and what's not working. The fact is, from an historical perspective, and what happened when and where into who and some of the immediate data, including attendance and gates and things like that. There is not a better resource. So I'm not knocking that aspect of using him as a resource, but it's the editorial that comes with that shit stain that really gets under my skin. And this is the example. And I think it's important that wrestling fans that want to engage, whether it be in social media, whether it being a chat room,

You know, whatever, if you're going to engage and be a part of the conversation, at least have a basic understanding of what's real and what's not real. And if your only source is someone like Dave Munster, then you have such a dysfunctional view of what the business is really all about. Read Dave, but also go read others. Go over to Dave Shear, Mike Johnson, a PWI, you know, get a different perspective. Sean Ross Sapp, yeah, he's got your. virtually half-ass character for crying out loud he's entertaining as fuck but guess what a lot of

his information is well sourced it's real information and the perspective that comes with it is a unique one you don't have to agree with them i don't agree with everything sean rossap says i agree with a lot of it jim cornet another example yeah he's probably in you know my age group and oh he's old man yelling at the clouds he's an old man yelling at the clouds it's got a wealth of experience perspective under his belt. You may not like the way he says, some of the things he said. I may not like it, all right? But I respect the hell out of his perspective.

So I point Dave out in terms of the way he editorializes, even to this day, which is becoming so transparent. I think a lot of people recognizing what Dave is really all about. But learn and experience and taking different perspectives, whether it's from Cornett or Bruce Pritchard or telebrancher, television, you know, listen to those perspectives because you'll find that they often contrast with some of the current narrative you have by so-called experts. I got to talk about this supposed fight you had with Melenko because the following week, Meltzer would write, I believe the Malenko comments in Bischoff yelling at him at the

May 24th, Nitro may not have been a shoot. Hogan came back on the 24th and suggested doing an old versus new angle, largely because he wants to shoot on the new guys who are never drawing money. Of course, in WCW scheme of things, guys like Nash who were 40 are the young team. The old team will be Paige, Hogan, Savage, Piper, Flair, Bigelow. Of course, this will probably fall apart quickly enough on its own anyway. Flare based on his performance this Thursday and Monday, for the first time I can recall is just going through the motions without any passion

and has considered quitting again. So lots of news and notes about WCW at the time. But a week after he says, hey, it was a pretty heated confrontation. Then he's suggesting maybe it was you trying to work the boys. How often? I mean, I know you tried to do that a little bit with the Pilman stuff, but it was there another time where you did, you can recall. No, no, none of it happened, Conrad.

None of the picture that Dave painted in that commentary ever occurred. There was, first of all, it didn't occur in the first place. There was no heated confrontation. So right off the bat, it's a lie. It's a distortion. First of all, Dave wasn't in the building. What the fuck does he know? He doesn't know anything.

The only thing he knows is what somebody else told him. And somebody probably fed him that just to watch Dave write it and get a reaction. It's the same stuff. that the, you know, the talent would pull on each other in a locker room. It's fucking rib. That's the kind of crap that Dave Meltzer. To this day, still, Prince. He wasn't in the building.

Last week, he was talking about, you know, the fans at the MGM where, you know, they were hot from the beginning to the end. He was in, he was in his fucking apartment in San Jose. He wasn't in the building. And we talked to people who were in the building and said it was deader than Kelsey's nuts through a lot of the periods of time that Dave said they were just they were on fire so the distortion is is my issue first it never the confrontation he did confrontation never fucking happened and now I guess to cover his ass perhaps or somebody told him he was full of shit

hey Dave I can't believe you're pregnant of that somebody pulled the rib out of you whatever he comes back says oh he's working the boys wasn't fucking working anybody at that time you kidding me I could have cared fucking less what the boys were thinking at that point in time. I had a bigger fire to put out than what the boys in the back, as Vince Russo always used to like to call them. I refer to them as talent. But, yeah, I could give two shits in May of 1999 about working anybody. You ain't got to get hot about it, bro.

I'm not hot. I'm making it fucking above. abundantly clear, there's a difference. Sound pretty heated to me. Imagine you're a business owner relying on a dozen different software programs. Each one disconnected, more expensive, and more complicated than the last. It can be incredibly stressful, right? Now, picture Odu.

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He's going to start singing. Here comes Conan, cutting a badass promo. He's got Ray Mysterio, unmasked beside him. This is the beginning of the birth of the West Texas Rednecks. This is, I don't think anybody expected this to be a hit, but boy, it became a cult classic. Did it know it? It's awesome. I don't care what anybody says.

You don't like it. Don't watch it. I think the idea was cool. It was timely. It was not meant to be disrespectful to anybody. It was taking two areas of pop culture in music and having them clash in a storyline. And if you've got a problem with that, well I don't know fuck off but I like this I thought it was great I think it could have been a hundred times better in so many ways because I think it really had a lot more potential than we were able to achieve with it but I loved it I thought it was great man we see the uh the slim gym bumpers there we got to talk about some other news that's happening on the other channel I guess it's come out here that the WWF has signed a deal for

Smackdown to become a part of the UPN lineup. Do you remember what your reaction was that they were they too were adding a second show? I mean, you had gone through that with all the success of Nitro, now a new station. You know, that was a TNT show. Well, TBS wanted in on the action. So you were sort of forced into creating thunder. And now the WWF, they've got a successful show on USA with Monday Night Raw. And now they've got another opportunity for a second show. with Smackdown on UPN, you know what those challenges were with that second show.

When you hear your competition is going down that same trail, what did you think? I was relieved because I felt like that might create a distraction and a dilution of resources, all the same issues that I had to deal with prior, you know,

with Thunder, as you just pointed out, I went through it. I knew the impact that it had on me. I knew the impact that it had on me. I knew the impact that it had on Nitro. I knew that the impact that it had on talent. There was a lot of implications in adding that Thunder show that are not obvious on the screen

or even in the narrative from people, you know, that were covering wrestling at the time. A lot of implications. And because WWE at that time had been on such a role with when they adopted, when the attitude era really was a reflection of what we had. had been doing a Nitro, and Vince changed his business model and said, okay, we're going to quit going for teens and preteens because that's been our market. We need to go after WCW's audience, which is 18 to 49. That's what created Mr. McMahon. That's what created the attitude era is the need to compete from the 18 to 49 demo that I had already captured from a wrestling

perspective. And they did it well. They did it aggressively. They focused. They were willing to do things they, meaning WWE, do things that WCW was not only not willing to do and capable of doing in some cases. Vince was a man's a one-man man, man. He could do whatever the hell he wants. I was working for a public company that didn't have the latitude that Vince had. He could take chances that I couldn't take. And he exploited that difference. He took it full advantage of the fact that he could go as far as he wanted to go in order to capture that portion of my audience and take it and he did and i thought that smackdown would put vince and in wwee as a result into a similar position that i was with smackdown in that or that i was with thunder in that

it takes creative horsepower you're going to have to split your creative teams or at least split the focus of your creative teams of nothing else. You've got the burden of an additional production schedule now that's going to affect not only talent, but it's going to affect your crew as well. It's going to put strain on people. They're taking on 100% more work for crying out loud. That's a lot of pressure. That has a significant impact on your infrastructure. So I'm thinking, all right, he's going to take all this on. It's going to distract from raw, it's going to distract from raw. It's going to dilute raw.

It's going to do the same things to raw that thunder did to nitro. And I looked at that as breathing room, if that makes sense. I thought, okay, my opponent is gassed, is about to get gassed. My opponent is about to back into the corner and start dropping his hands because he's gassed. That would be my opportunity to mount some kind of a, of a comeback business wise creatively that's how i looked at well i don't know how we looked at this but we've got van hammer wrestling evan courageous i think kevin nash is helping with a lot of the booking and i almost wish we should all just tweet him right now and ask him why he thought

this was something we needed in our lives van hammer and i can i say something right now because it's relevant especially with the comment that you just made You know, a lot of the commentary about who killed WCW took to, we've all heard the WWE narrative a million times and the talent that worked there that repeated that narrative a million times. And the Dave Meltzer, you know, narrative, which I don't even need to address again. We've done that. There's all this narrative out there.

And a lot of it is coming from wrestling talents who were in WCW. Here's the truth. And I, you know, I've made it clear in the series. The wrestling talent that have had these real strong views and all the WWE versions of what happened at WCW and all that didn't have a fucking clue. They were nowhere near the business of WCW's business. They were nowhere near the things that were going on internally

at Turner Corporate across all the divisions. They were nowhere near the impact that that had, on WCW and what we were facing. They didn't know, they knew them, they knew them things were messed up, but they had no idea why, but it didn't prevent that talent or people like Dave Beltzer and others to have this inside perspective, which they were making up. The only exception when I say, for the most part, talent were fucking clueless. They didn't know, no matter who they are.

Some of my best friends have made statements in the past. about what was going on inside WCW. I'm going to go, dude, you don't know. You weren't there. I didn't even discuss it with you. Not only were you not there because you were off running around wrestling and working out and getting tan,

doing the things you needed to do, keeping your body healthy, I was running a business that you had no visibility in. You had no insight in. Cool, I don't care. But there were exceptions to that. There were exceptions to that. One of them was Kevin Nash.

Kevin and I had a relationship where I did share things with Kevin that I didn't share with a lot of other talent, hardly any other talent. Diamond Dallas Page was another one. Hulk Hogan was another. But Hulk Hogan wasn't, he didn't relate to it. And I wasn't around him as much as I was around Diamond Dallas Page and Kevin Nash.

Kevin and Nash and I just bonded. Two Detroit guys grew up basically in the same neighborhood. I didn't know each other at the time, different ages, obviously, but same neighborhood, same culture, same way of grown up, and we bonded. And I did share a lot of things with Kevin. So when you hear me make that statement about talent being fucking clueless, 90% of them were when they're commenting about what went wrong in WCW, with the exception of, like I said, DDP, Kevin Nash, Hulk to a degree,

and maybe a few others, but very, very few, very few. we're watching a heck of a nitro here but i mean we we said at the top of the show we got 15 000 fans here but there is a downward trend and i wanted to take this a minute and talk about that in april of 1998 so the prior year he were averaging 7,018 fans in april of 99 you're only down 2% to 6,876 but because the business was so hot, you raised your ticket prices. So your average gate in April of 98 is $135,3233. Here, though, in April of 99, you're actually up. So again, attendance is down 2%. But the gate revenue is up 19.8% to 162,069 bucks. And your average rating? Okay, that's down a little bit. It's not disastrous. Take a look

of this. In April of 98, your average rating was 4.69. Here in April of 99, it's a 4.16. Put it down 11. But you're still pulling force. That's remarkable, Eric. I mean, okay, there's a few less fans showing up, but we're making 19% more money. It's easy to not necessarily panic when you hear some of this news. Well, and again, the news was being, so distorted at that time. If you looked at the real numbers, as you pointed out, we were up. And by the way, that average of 6,500 or whatever attendance, that's TV and house shows. Yes.

So we were still drawing in house shows as well, non-televised events. AEW doesn't even do those. They can barely get 3,500 or 4,000 people to a TV taping. And they're supposedly hot, not as hot as they were. according to some but so that's the comparison and it is frustrating to hear you know we're in april 1990 or may of 1999 you just went through the numbers for april compared them to 1998 which was one of our record years by the way yeah we're down two percent or whatever it is from a record fucking year yes it's kind of weird isn't it to to think that in a matter of four months

I'm gone. Not even four. It may, June, July, August. Yeah, four months. I'm gone. Less than four months. I left on September 11th, September 10th, 1999. We're talking about May something here.

With the kind of numbers that you're talking about is if people don't think there wasn't an agenda to make WCW disappear from Turner Broadcasting, please watch the series on Vice. Please read Guy Evans book. And please keep your nose out of David Meltzer's dirt sheet. We were just running through some of the numbers. Well, I'd love to run through some of the numbers with you. Thanks to our friends over at Rocket Money. Here's the deal.

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Cancel your unwanted subscriptions by going right now to rocketmoney.com slash 83 weeks. That's rocketmoney.com slash 83 weeks. Rocketmoney.com slash 83 weeks. back on nitro we've got rowdy rottie piper doing a big promo in the ring here and he's going to bring out dean malinko and malinko's not going to say much until rick fleer comes out i guess this is where they start building the whole old versus new stuff and malinko's going to start talking about how people like rick flair need to step aside and melzer would say it's kind of funny seeing piper agree with him so after all that

malinko walked out and flare jumped piper but piper made us come back and beat flare up this is a year before the whole millionaires versus new blood angle do you remember this being a hogan idea this sort of younger talent versus older talent or is this just the way wrestling's always been you're always getting the veteran talent to put over the younger talent first of all i mean you made that comment some previous uh dame elzer category where this was like hogan went to somebody to want to get a match with kidman or whoever it was again completely false the talent wanted to kind of the talent want you that younger talent that group of talent we were talking about wanted to work with a guy like Hulk Hogan

we went to Hulk and said Hulk this is the direction we're going here's why we're going to go in this direction here's some ideas that we have in mind what do you think he hem Tihad he wanted to think it through try to understand the why of it all once he understood the why of it all, he was fully on board. He didn't believe, I say he was fully on board. He was fully cooperative. In his heart, he didn't believe it was the right thing to do, but he was willing to be wrong. So that's the real situation as opposed to, you know, the whatever one, wherever else you heard it. But yeah, that's how that, you know, the idea, it's a natural story, right? I mean,

that story is as old as storytelling itself. Yeah. The young and the old transition, right? That's not an original thought process by anybody. But it was happening naturally. And we all thought, we all, those of us in the creative side of things, for the most part, everybody agreed that, okay, if we could figure out a way to do it well, let's do that because it is real.

It's not an artificial made-up story out of somebody's head that has no relationship to reality. This is a human condition that can be really entertaining. Let's do that. We're seeing Dean Malenko doing his best promo work here. I like the idea of trying to get him involved with some of the more headline talent. You know, he won the as silly as this sounds, but he was number one in the PWI 500 in 1997. And a lot of people started to really talk about this cruiserweight division as being innovative. And he's maybe the glue of that where, you know, if they had people who were working a Japanese style or they had people who were working a lucha style, Dean Malenko could have a great match with any of those guys.

And his style of wrestling started to gain a little more attention. And it was a stark contrast to the style that may be headlined to the WWF or the Polkogan era, the Ultimate Warrior era, or what have you. Did you think that there was ever going to be big money and a performer like Dean Malenko? Or was he always just going to be a valuable team member, but maybe not glitzy enough to be a headliner in WCW? Why big money, you know, it probably means the same thing to you as it means to me, which would be, you know, kind of that main event level status. Yes. Because Dean Malenko was making big money, even in the Cruiserweight division,

depending on what's your definition of big money. And he was well into six figures, probably, you know, compared to WWE, he was probably in the upper third of their financial roster, so to speak. So he was making good money. But I think your real question is, did I see him in that kind of main event's role someday? And I would be dishonest if I said, oh, no, I saw him. He always had that potential. That would be dishonest.

No, I didn't see him in that role. I didn't see him in that role. but I saw him as being incredibly valuable in just about any other role all the way up and to the main event and I don't know I think that's that's a pretty successful career achievement for a guy like Dean Malinko no doubt let's talk a little bit about um where we are with Brett hard you know we've talked about this a little bit in the archives over at 83 weeks.com. We mentioned at the top of the show that this show

actually happened. This Monday night we're watching from the Astrodome here on May 31st. This is actually the day that Owen was laid to rest. Hulk Hogan was going to attend that funeral as with Chris Cherokee, Chris Benoit, and woman. I'm sure you had no problem with any of those folks attending, but man, how do you approach a major loss like this

where so many of the folks in your locker room are close to him and you've even got his own brother as a member of the locker room. How was your, how did you decide to handle that? With as much grace as I possibly could and still fulfill my obligations to the network I work for. I guess with my experience, 30-some-odd years, probably 25 years at that point or whatever it was. One thing I've gotten pretty good at is accepting whatever reality I'm faced with and just finding a way to make it work. Or making chicken salad out of chicken shit. It applies to a lot of things in life, man, not just wrestling. And I guess because of the amount of wrestling I've had to produce and so much.

of it live and the different personalities and situations and catastrophes and unfortunately, yes, up including death, all of those things teach you over time that no matter how bad a situation is, you can find a way to work around it. No matter what it is, you can find a way to work around it. And it's best if you do it willingly and embrace it as an opportunity to, not to get heavy, but have grace. or just have empathy, whatever, whatever, just be a nice person about it and make a lot, give people room, whether they had to go to the funeral, whether it disrupted, creative,

whether, whatever, whatever, it doesn't matter. None of that shit matters. In a situation like that, nothing matters. Give people the time to get through it on their own and then we'll pick it back up again. It's bad. I know that we, there's no way for me to ask. this without a feeling like we're trying to pile on somebody in particular I'm not trying to do that I am genuinely asking the WCW have any conversation at a

corporate level from an office level however you want to call that about what WCW would have done had a tragedy like what happened with Owen happened with WCW because at the time the biggest discussion and debate was should advance have canceled the show and just called the show off. I think everybody with the benefit of hindsight has a different answer. You fortunately didn't have to make such a call. But did you have conversations about that after the fact? Sure. Sure. Many. Many. I mean, I tried to, in order to check myself, I tried. to really ask myself, honestly, what would you have done?

Because it could happen. I mean, that incident is shocking and devastating and horrible as it was, and you may hope it will never happen again. But guess what happened with Mark Bagwell and WCW not too long ago based on this point? Yeah. He turned out okay, but another half an inch either way, and he might not have walked away from that. So, because of the incident with Owen, and especially under the circumstances, live television, all that, I had to do an audit.

He said, what would you do, Eric? And my honest answer to myself, I don't know if I articulated to anybody else, maybe I did. I agreed with what Vince did. As cold as that sounds, I likely would have done the same thing. So yeah, debated that internally, talked about it with others. Because I was really curious what I would do

under those circumstances. So you feel like you would have done that. Are you saying I would have, still done the show and carried on with the show based on the information that you think he had at the time or I'm just trying to add context because I don't know it was just hard for me to imagine you saying that you would have continued the show if you knew he had passed away well again I don't know what he knew and we're all going to project and suggest we do know what he knew when I say we all not you and I obviously but I don't know if I'm in the

middle of the show, I see what I saw happen. I know there's a risk. Again, I don't know if Vince knew that Owen had passed or not. I don't know that. I don't know that anybody else does either. But unless I knew, and even then I'm not sure, it's hard for me now to put myself in that position again, it would have been devastating. I don't know if I'd have been capable of doing it, by the way. I don't know how I would have realized. I don't know how I would have reacted under the pressure in terms of my ability to function and communicate and get everybody else on board because now I now I'm not just making a decision to go on with the show it's not just my decision there's a whole lot of other people that that are involved from talent some even

in production jean oregon Bobby heenan whole roster of guys in a locker room that had a personal relationships. It's not about whether I want to do it, I would make that decision or not. It's okay, if I make that decision, how am I going to effectively rally everybody else that may not agree with me? That's the decision as much as is it the ethical or moral thing to do. That's one decision. The bigger decision is whether or not you're capable of doing the rest of it to execute. And I'd like to think I could pull it off, but I don't know. Back then, I don't know. I was a different person, different experiences. Lack of the experience I have now when trying to think about what I do. I'm a different person now than I was then. So I'm not

100% sure. But based on what I knew at the time, I probably would have tried to continue the show. And here's why. For those of you who thought or would think that it was just a selfish, cold thing I know what I would want as a talent absolutely and that's all I got to work with everybody else has a different opinion what would I want to happen

I honestly without question would want the show to go on because that would be a sign of respect to me not everybody feels that way that's how I would feel and that's all I got to work with in making a situation

making a decision like that back then it's all the tools i had let me ask you you know you've got sting obviously doing similar stunts you know from the top of the arena and repelling down and things like that were there conversations or concerns about sting doing something in the rafters given what we just saw happen with owen absolutely from steve boarden who played the character Singh himself. Steve had strong questions, doubts, moral issues. By this time, Sting had fully embraced a strong connection to his faith. He had issues. I want to be sure he was doing the right thing for himself. same situation. I had to check myself to make sure that I was doing the right thing all the way

around for everybody the right thing. A lot of talent, again, a lot of people that were in my locker room that had spent a lot of time in the WWE locker room with Owen. And I never met one of those people that didn't speak about Owen in just the most respectful, loving way. There's nobody that would bad mouth don't want. Everybody loved him, that knew him. So same thing, you know, everybody, everybody had issues with it. And we just talked through it. I talked through it.

It started from the top down saying, how do you feel? Let's, let's dig in and figure this out. Because if he, if Steve Borden would have said, you know, I just, I'm not comfortable doing it anymore. That's the end of the conversation. None of the rest of it mattered. How, what I wanted to do, what my choice is, you know, all the other elements of that of a decision like that doesn't matter. The talent doesn't want to do it. That's the end of the conversation.

But there was more to it than that. And Steve and I talked through it. And Steve agreed that he was comfortable. I had a lot of conversations with Ellis Edwards. who was our stunt guy. He set that stunt up. He created that stunt. He executed every one of them that Sting did in that Crow character era,

flawlessly. Not only with Sting, but with others. Sting, hauling DDP up from the ground is another one. So Ellis was instrumental in the conversation as to whether to move forward with that stunt or not. Once I got through those two conversations, and felt comfortable with them, then it was up to, then it was, now it's up to me. What do I want to do?

I made my decision. And then it went downhill from there, downhill meeting. Then I went down, then I, then I got the downstream conversations had to happen, talent, production, everybody else. Those conversations took place and we made the decision we made, good or bad. Take it back. if things would have wound up a little differently i mean we know that after the montreal screw job brett hart's going to come to wcw david boy smith is going to come to wcw jim knighthart is going to come to wcw rick rude is going to come to wccw owen hart never does ohen heart

winds up resigning staying with the w f do you think perhaps if owen would have came over to wcw i mean i don't think you would have been in the rafters certainly that might not have happened But do you think that Brett's WCW run could have been different as well if Owen would have joined him? Do you think maybe, you know, Brett would have had more fun and things turned out a little differently for Bratt and WCW had Owen been there? Undoubtedly. And I'm so firm in that because I met Brett Hart at the airport immediately after Owen was announced to have passed. Brett was in mid-air at that point in time. Brett was on his way to Los Angeles to meet me,

or I was at the airport to meet Brett on that flight. It was a later night flight. I think he got in around 10 or 11 or whatever it was. And now, I didn't know that the Air Canada was able to find a way to reach the captain on the flight that Brett Hart was on. on his way to L.A. to meet me. I didn't know that happened. This was long before cell phones and, you know,

Wi-Fi on your plane and the ability to, whatever, taxed and all that. None of that existed. So I went to the airport knowing what had happened, knowing that Brett was, or believing that Brett was going to come off the plane and not know, so I had to prepare myself to be the one to tell him. I'm just giving you the context. Brett got off the plane, and the minute I laid eyes on him, there was hardly anybody at the airport that night.

Again, it was a later night flight in the terminal. And I spotted Brett from, you know, halfway across the terminal, and I could tell he already knew. And from that point forward, that was a heavy bag to carry. That was some heavy luggage that Brett, carried with him all the time. So you asked me, do you think it would have been different? Absolutely would have been different.

I don't know how. Only Brett can answer that. But I know how bad the situation was and how much it hurt. Brett, only common sense would suggest that not having that baggage things would have been different. Right. So, yeah, I'm 100% sure. things we just saw a conan tagging with ray mysterio junior to take on bobby dumpum junior and kirk henning they had a lot of fun conan and mysterio are going to pick up the win in

just under five minutes i want to ask one more thing about brett heart and then we'll move along here you know we talked about this before kevin nash had been on the tonight show throwing out this open challenge he's wanting to go after brett hart he's saying that you know he's uh not been a supporter of our federation blah, blah, blah, and he's throwing out a challenge here. And we know that Brett was supposed to be there. And you just sort of ran through how you're getting word to the pilot. And well, all the silly wrestling stuff goes out the window when this real life stuff happens with Owen.

But I think that this match that we were teasing here, Red Heart and Kevin Nash, was supposed to happen maybe at the Astrodome here. So maybe that's another reason, you know, while a lot of the critics are ready to pile on and say, Oh, they're less than half of where they were last time. Well, they had Bam Ben Bigelow and Goldberg, but the undefeated streak for the world title on deck there that have been promoted to headline. And you were probably building towards Brett and Kevin Nash here,

but it's obviously out the window. Not trying to make excuses, just trying to add context. You did have a big plan here. It just got real. Life got in the way. Yeah. Like I said, I mean, Brett was on his way to sit down with Jay Leno.

the Tonight Show, which at that time, people say whatever they want, you know, people that weren't around back then don't realize how big of a platform, you know, Jay Leno's Tonight Show was. It was probably the best opportunity on television to get the word out to our audience, the 18 to 49 year old audience and above. And Brett was on his way to do that, to launch this. And yeah, things could have been different, right? Easy to point fingers, you've never been in the business easy to to have solutions and in astute observations about something you've never experienced happens we got randy savage out here cutting a promo he's bigger than ever medusa is doing a run in here and they're going to announce randy savage

versus kevin nash for later in the show we uh we've also got a crazy match coming up next that maybe you never thought you'd see on nitrail certainly not in 1999 but David Flair is about to wrestle Eric Watts this is a crazy story of course we've put Rick Flair in a position of power he's trying to abuse that power push his son just like with Eric Watts we said that once before on TV so now we're actually bringing

Eric Watts in Tori Wilson of course is going to be a part of the presentation of course Arne Anderson is going to be involved I mean we're basically doing a spoof of nepotism What do you think of that creative on the surface, Eric? I have mixed emotions about it. My first emotion, the predominant one is I kind of dig it because it's real. I mean, it's just, it's almost like a, it's like a testosterone-based version of self-deprecating humor.

That's the best way I can frame it. it's it's you know people can relate to it they understand it they've seen it at work they've seen it at school they've seen it in their community I mean nepotism is everywhere look at the United Kingdom like that kings and queens and shit right so it's a part of life and I think if you find an interesting way to exploit that again human condition i think that's a base it could be the premise the basis the foundation of a really good story well we see canyon laying down in the back and let me give you the foundation

of a very good story you got to be ready and i'm talking about ready for father's day and if you haven't purchased a father's day gift yet give me a blink and we thought so well today's episode is brought to you by Manscaped, the leaders in below the waist grooming. Make your pops a day here. Maybe he's had a bush since the 70s. Well, that's okay. Our friends at Manscape can take care. They have crafted the total package for his special day,

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That's 20% off with free shipping at Manscape.com. use the code 83 weeks never forget where you came from if you know what i mean happy father's day from manscaped man talking about father's day as we got eric watts wrestling david flair how about that for timing this is perfect no i don't know conrad i can't remember perhaps you have it in your notes there you remember um did eric come in just for this spot or was he he was still on a roster wasn't he yeah i mean he wasn't here a long time but he certainly was in and out um and i think he kind of got a a bad i felt like he always got a raw deal would you agree with that i mean a hundred a hundred percent yeah i actually

feel i feel bad that i wasn't a little more what's the word empathetic you know i didn't give him a little more attention and opportunity to kind of overcome the stigma. And that's what I mean. I mean, he, look, he was in a shit. He was, he was in a hole the first day he stepped into the company because the general attitude towards Bill Watson was not good. And then to bring in his son, which any wrestler is going to hate anyway, it's hard enough to maintain your role in the company without the Booker's son who's never really worked before coming in because you know what's going to happen. It's just a question of who's going to be affected by it, not if they're going to be affected by it. So that's the environment that Eric watched, or by the way, any second

generation or third generation wrestler, young wrestler who's breaking into the business, is going to have to face because it's a fact. And I think Eric probably experienced that on the highest level. because of Bill's reputation and relationship with just about everybody in WCW at that time other than probably Jim Ross. Watts had a couple of matches, I guess three in 1996 with WWE. He did a dark match with you guys in 1998, and then he was back in WCW come February of 99, coming back to do a worldwide taping, then Saturday night. Then he would find himself on a thunder, a house show, a tackling dummy.

for Bam Bam Bigelow on Nitro. He's going to stick around here from February until November before he's out of there, pops his head up for a couple of shows in ECW. And then, of course, we know later, he would show up in NWAT and A. But, man, it just didn't work out for Eric Watts. It didn't really work out for David Flair either. But David Flair accompanied to the ring here by Tori Wilson. And then in real life, his girlfriend, Stacey Keebler.

And there's that. he's like everywhere I go when we start talking about you know David Flares like man how'd you let him do that oh man you should have never put him on TV oh how could Rick Flair let him just get me be there fucking blah and I go yeah but it was okay you know that Stacey Heber thing

it was all right he did good he's making hundreds of thousands of dollars before he can legally even rent a car. But we abused him. And his girlfriend is Stacy Keebler. Oh, she went out with what's his name? Who's the famous actor? George Clooney.

Yeah. Yeah, she has to, I mean, come on. It worked out. Don't feel bad for David Flair. No, I hate him then, now, forever. How about that R. Anderson Spinebuster right there? Damn nation, it never gets old. But I don't think David really wanted to be in that role. I'm not convinced that he was convinced, he meaning David, that he really wanted to be in that role. I think he was doing it.

There were other motivations, personal ones probably. Maybe he wanted to get closer to his dad, maybe wanting to follow in his dad's footsteps, you know, from a selfish perspective. But I don't think he was 100% convinced. He put his toe in the water and he came just fine but it wasn't for him we got the father-son photo there of David Flair and his father Rick there's another father-son duo making some headlines that we should probably mention it's come out since we last recorded and we were together Eric that Mark Henry did not resign with AEW he's going to be departing the company his contract expired this past Tuesday on the

28th so the day after Memorial Day so On actual Memorial Day, Mark Henry went on Busted Open and announced, hey, that's it. I'm leaving AEW. And we've also seen his son, you know, now getting that scholarship. He's going to go to Oklahoma. Of course, I'm sure that's tough for Mark Henry. He's a big Texas guy. But I somehow have a sneaking suspicion that we've not heard the last of Mark Henry in the wrestling space.

What do he thinks next for Mark? Whatever Mark wants. He's an amazingly talented guy. I've really become pretty good friends with Mark, really over the last couple of years. I never really worked with him enough to matter to get to know him. But, you know, I see, again, see him out on the trail and spend as much time with him as I can. I've done a lot of interviews with him. I recently did an entirely different streaming project, and Mark happened to be a part of it.

And I dig the guy. He's smart. He's got a very, very good intuition and perspective, not just on wrestling, but life. He's pretty cool cat. And he's good. He can do whatever he wants to do. But if that means ending up in some role in WWE, he'll be great at it,

whatever it is, because he's a pro. Looking forward to it. I'm sure to work out great for him. Well, I want to give a shout out to Travis Medway, who gifted 583 weeks with Eric Bischoff. Whoa, Travis, thank you, brother. Greatly appreciate that. Check out our membership options over at 83 weeks.com. Be sure to hit the subscribe button, turn on the notifications bell.

If you like, I'll put on that. Can I jump in to comment? Please do, please do. As far as our memberships over at 83 weeks, you get a different content than you're getting anywhere else. I'll check in, you know, every day, every other day. I'll share whatever's going through my mind at the moment. But the other day, I have, this is being my wife, film. As we're in our kitchen, I'm with my nephew, Grayson, who is now a chef. He just graduated from the Culinary Institute of America. And we have a friend by the name of Deshaun. Actually, Deshaun and Grayson worked together

and are good friends. Anyway, Deshaun's family is from India. And Deshaun had a bunch of spices. and ghee and different types of Indian food that he brought over from a recent trip in India. And both of Sean and Grayson made Lori and I, because it was my birthday, my favorite Indian food, which happens to be butter chicken. And anyway, we put that on video and sends it off exclusively to members. So you also get some fun shit that's got nothing to do with wrestling. It's 83 Weeks.com is where you can check that out. And if you're liking what you're seeing, throw us a thumbs up.

If you're hating what you're seeing, throw us a thumbs down or just want to hear from you. Looking to get that feedback, drop us a comment. We are monitoring those comments. Travis also had this note for us. Happy birthday, Eric. Any chances of seeing you in Las Vegas next year for WrestleMania? Continued thanks for calling my friend Richard out. Have a great birthday.

Yeah, let's talk about that. WrestleMania next year is on Easter. I guess they're getting a boatload from Las Vegas to bring the show Easter weekend to Las Vegas. I'm happy for WWE. That's going to be a little different. You think you'll find your way out to Las Vegas on Easter weekend next year, Eric? I think there's a really good shot. I love going into Vegas during off-peak periods.

Like one of my favorite experiences in Las Vegas, not just mine, but Lories, my wife's. Mrs. B. Also my kids, Garrett Montana, I let each of them bring a friend, and we went to Thanksgiving, several years ago. We went to Las Vegas for Thanksgiving. There was nobody there. It's like we own the joint. And it's fun because, you know, you can get, I get just oversensitized, man. It's just too much after about three days, the noise, the lights, the smells, the sounds, all of it. just kicks my ass after about 48 hours. But on a weekend like Thanksgiving or Easter, it's way more fun. You just have easier access to everything. And it's not crowded and you don't get oversensitized. Bells and whistles and cigarette smoke and all the other that comes with Vegas.

So no, man, I dig it. And I can see us. In fact, Lori and I have done it. We did it not only for Thanksgiving, we did spend an Easter in Las Vegas. year same thing man great restaurants they're all open guess what you're only about 25% full they at that time so hell yeah in fact i'm going to put it on my calendar for crying out that sounds like a good time to me we got ernest the cap miller coming to the ring with sony oh no that sounds like they're on their way to your house for a barbecue right now hey get there are

they're coming out here in august both sunny and earners are coming out we're doing a charity uh golf and softball event We've also got the Ernest Miller character here. He's going to be wrestling Scott Norton. And that's an interesting matchup, to say the least. Let's do another question here from Donovius Mac. Happy birthday, Eric, Eric and Conrad. Is there any way we can get a live 83 weeks at the Mall of America

during SummerSlam weekend in 2026? Book it now. Hey, that's kind of interesting. They did announce that SummerSlam, 2026, will be a two-night night event Eric so not just a one night summer slam like russomania it'll be two nights and it's going to be in minneapolis hey we can have some fun at the uh mall of america that we can now man why did that not occur to me why am i not why am i not seeing this in my head before anybody else this is crazy good this is crazy fucking good

to get on this, Conrad. I agree. It's a good idea. So stay tuned, boys and girls. Thank you, Donovius. You're the man. This is why I love our members so much. And the people that follow us at free shows, 83 weeks.com. We got we got some smart mucker fathers over there thinking, thinking, even for us. If we do it, Donovius, we're going to have you introduce us and bring us on stage because it was your idea now. Yes, that's how that's done. I love it. Travis Middley says, hey, Eric, which of the following modern methods would have most advanced WCW

back in 1999? Twitter, boy, that's interesting to think about if Twitter was around for WCW. YouTube could have been interesting to see what the global audience thought. High definition. On demand.

Wow, DVRs instead. Or internet shopping. Now, that's interesting. Maybe you could just, you know, click your phone on the side, twice and bam the new NWO shirts on the way which one of those do you think would have been the biggest help for WCW in 1999 Twitter YouTube HD on demand or internet shopping I think maybe it's because I'm biased and I'm having so much fun on YouTube you know and I'm so late to the game I'm almost

embarrassed to talk about it but what the hell I've done other stupid shit or embarrassing shit I am so fired up about YouTube right now that none of these I options would have made any difference in the world individually, but I think if we would have combined coherent, structured storytelling with YouTube in particular, I think that would have been our quickest return on investment, because it would have allowed us to take our core content and recreate shorter versions in a different type of context and get multiple use and value, as well as exposing the products to an entirely different audience that may not already be watching,

which is called growing your audience. It's a rare thing outside of WWE today, but that would have been the biggest opportunity. We've got a big opportunity to see Ernest the Kat Miller here doing a little bit of a promo, and here comes Scott Norton. At this time here in WCW, you know, the NWO is not really the priority that maybe it once was and you've you've said before that if you had you know one major regret above all else you wish that there would have been a proper finish

to a story for the NWO have you ever sat down and thought about maybe working on what that could look like finishing the story of the NWO in very at various times for various lengths of time sometimes fleeting moments sometimes that mostly is a result of a conversation or question, if I'm on a panel or even just in a private conversation and it comes up, I don't think about it much beyond that. But if I did, it could be fascinating, especially, you know, what if scenario? What if there was just, what if, what if anything that my imagination that could have been possible during that period of time? Not just waving a magic wand. Undertaker coming on, none of that wild, wacky armchair quarterbacking bullshit.

But I mean, if I could somehow put myself in a place in a universe where everything that was possible to me then would be possible to me, would be available to me now, but with the added element of my experience after the fact. It'd be fun, but that right there is the most thought I've given to it, personally. Other people I've talked to have, but personally, that's as much actual depth of thought that I've given that subject. It'd be fun. Watching a fun match here, and next up we're going to have Randy Savage come out,

and he's going to bring a fake Kevin Nash wearing a dress. Ed Meltzer is going to write this. Anyway, since Savage can't work at all anymore, the women, because this is the era where Savage comes to the ring with a lot of ladies, the women take turns doing spots with transvestite Nash, that's what Dave wrote. Miss Madness did a cool Frankensteiner off the top, gorgeous George dropped an elbow on him with the middle, and then Savage did the elbow off the top. since the move was banned twice now in two weeks. The refed it and DQ Savage and instead counted the pen at 238. And that is worth mentioning in this same show

we would hear Rick Flair say, hey, the elbow off the top rope is banned. And yeah, here comes Randy Savage to do the move. What do you remember of this creative? Hey, we're going to have him challenge Kevin Nash, but later when quote unquote, Kevin Nash comes out, it's not Kevin Nash but a person in a wig this is kind of silly now it's all silly we're just

we're kind of we're grasping at straws I was in and out of creative mentally I may have been there physically for meetings and so forth and listening but mentally I was detached as I could possibly have been and still be considered part of the process and it was just Look, it was desperation. We were trying different things. We're working around different situations. But more importantly, we're just trying to do something that would get attention. And, you know, when you've said, I'll speak for me.

I always say, when you, meaning the world, but for me, anytime I'm trying to be creative or trying to solve a problem, whether it's creative or otherwise. When I'm under the wrong kind of pressure, I absolutely get horrible results because I think there's a good kind of pressure, the pressure to be the best you could be, the pressure to reach a goal, the pressure to achieve something positive. Those are all, I love that kind of pressure. I work really well under that kind of pressure. But when it's an adverse pressure, when you're on defense, when you're trying to put fires out, as opposed to building buildings. You're saving them from being burned down.

That's a whole different kind of energy and pressure. And it's really hard for me to be creative in that environment. And that really best describes what, not just me, but the entire staff, the creative staff, the production staff, my secretaries, at that point I had too. Because they had to relieve each other every two or three hours to get the fuck away from me. That's probably true. That's why I'm giggling.

It's probably it's true. But yeah, it was tough. It was tough. And it shows up on a screen, doesn't it? It's the difference between a coherent, exciting, well-structured, you know, some story that you anticipate next week. It's called episodic television. That's a fancy way of saying, just episodic television, well-structured story that you would anticipate.

that's what I mean by episodeic television and when you're on that role and you're hitting those beats and everything's flowing it's awesome but when it's not blows what did you think of this presentation of randy savage with not one not two but essentially three valets medusa in a business suit miss madness and a pageant dress we know she's going to go on to become molly holly and gorgeous george the real-life girlfriend of randy savage and as i understand it, his family secured the trademark for gorgeous George. And maybe that was a name that Lenny Pafo and a character that he was going to assume, try and pick up with the OG gorgeous George.

Instead, it goes to his lady friend, his valet. What do you think of this presentation with those three in tow? Not much. I mean, even looking at it now, just with my producers hat on and not my, you know, I was in charge back then and I had personal relationships with these people. just down, you know, if I came out of the fucking spaceship and sat down and analyzed this based on the experience I have now, it was overkill. If there's a reason to have a valet, if it's part of a story or if it's part of the presentation

for whatever reason, which I don't believe in, by the way, but if I did, then pick one and make it mean something, create a reason for it. create a relationship for it, create a backstory for it, create something for it, as opposed to just showing up as eye candy. The fuck is that? How one-dimensional could someone be in creating a character, in this case a new character with Randy? And yeah, you could bring in the shiny objects, not to be dismissive of the women involved,

but that's essentially what they were, bright, shiny, sexy objects. with no other relationship than that. Waste. It's a waste of talent with women. It's a waste of TV time because it's not going to matter. No one's going to care. They're not going to like you more or less. It's just, hey, pretty colorful, a little sexy.

It always works. It's TV. But yeah. What do you make of what we're watching right now? I'll be honest, I think I had blocked this out of my memory. I was consuming everything I could hear in May of 99, but I had no recollection until we're watching this show back here about Big Sexy and an evening gown, Miss Big Sexy and an evening gown, and high heels, or maybe not high heels, but heels.

What are we watching, Eric? I don't know. I'm confused. I'm embarrassed. And I'm half-assed to entertain. I hate to admit it, but it's kind of fucking hilarious now. But in the context of then, what the fuck?

As a reminder, you guys are head-to-head with Monday Night Raw in this era. Oh, I know this is coming. Oh, of course. On Monday Night Raw, they've got, what, Undertaker wrestling somebody, and I've got Kevin Nash and drag. The Undertaker's wrestling a somebody named Stone Cold Steve Austin. I didn't even know that. Triple H will be wrestling somebody named Mankind in a hardcore match.

Vince McMahon is also in singles action against the Undertaker. uh big shows wrestling mr ass beaver cleavage has mrs cleavage and they're going to pick up a win over christian jiff jarrett's going to wrestle the godfather with some hose for the intercontinental title road dogs working with big boss man the accolites are taking on ex pocket cane valvinus is with ken shamrock but you nailed it let me guess the undertaker's doing something with somebody yeah the biggest somebody of them all yeah mark of the quad molean illinois somehow getting a bigger show than the Astrodome. You know, I'd laugh at me, God, because I knew, I knew this is going to happen. I knew despite the fact that we were still put 15,000 people in the arena and drew a four or $500,000 house and had a four point something rating that was only down 2% from a record year, just a year before. I knew despite all that good shit, there was going to be a moment.

just like the one we're experiencing where you're running down what they're doing and I'm looking what I was doing and going what the fuck let me give you the numbers here on May 31st boy you have a the first hour do with 3.7 the second hour does a 3.1 the third hour does a 3.0 so your average is a 3.0. So your average is a 3.7. 3.3. It's actually. Meanwhile, Monday Night Raw does a 5.8 and a 6.7. So the composite rating is a 6.3. So it winds up a 3-3 to a 6-3.

So yes, the WWF is firmly in control. But that's not a bad rating. Boy, today, it'd be high-fives all around to get that. No. Today they would rename the network after you. Yeah. You did that on a wrestling show because that 3.3, we're talking on ratings then versus viewers now, that 3.3 was probably about 4, 4.5 million viewers on a conservative side. So, yeah, you delivered that every week for 52 weeks. They'd name the network after you. Sorry, Mr. Turner. Really appreciate everything you've done for the network. You've been awesome. We wish you well in your future endeavors. Enjoy that ranch out in Montana because now this is the

like fill in the blank network because you have a wrestling show that delivered four and a half million viewers at its low point. Eric, our producer, stupid-ass Dave Silva, he has just told us that he just realized now watching this show back for the third time. He was at this show. Even Dave tried to put it out of his mind, but he's forced to watch this. And now he's got PTSD. He remembers he went to Houston and went, what the fuck?

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Maximize your look with minimal effort. Go to ThriveCosmetics.com slash beauty for an exclusive offer of 20% off your first order. That's Thrive Cosmetics, C-A-U-S-E-M-E-T-I-C-S dot com. slash beauty. Bobby has a fun question here. He says, when the nitro set changed, what was done with the old set? Did they use it in any way since the new logo debuted?

I know it wound up being used or being purchased by the WWV. I think Ben Brown actually has those big diamond plate WCW letters that we all loved on the old set. But did you guys set that up at like the power plant or anything? Or did it just go to storage, do you think? I don't even know, man. I don't even know. I don't even know if WZW had a storage plant or storage area. I would imagine if we did anything with it,

we probably stuck it in the warehouse, which was also the power plant. He might, yes. I don't know for sure you had storage. Yeah, I knew you would know you would know better than I would. Well, I was just going to say, I know for sure you had storage because you personally kept JR from his appliances.

You fucked him around on the garage and his washing. you want to get to a man's mind you want to break a man down you want to go some sun sue motherfucking war on somebody you hold on to their fridge and refuse to give it back the mini fridge many oh that makes it worse yeah because the mini fridge you can take with you can carry it around with you put in your new apartment yeah do whatever you want you tell you hold on to a man's mini fridge you've gone to fucking war them's fighting words erin there you go uh uh eric green wants to know why the rotating third person at the announce table throughout the night did you have any preferences or have anyone that did better than

expected let's talk about that third seat because you would change that hour to hour because despite what announcers think of themselves not all of them some of them like tony chavani he knows jim ross he knows more is not better three hours of listening to the same three people carrying 90% of a narrative, a dialogue in a show is fucking boring. I don't care how good they are. You just get tired of it. Good color and play by play,

which I think is lacking with but very few exceptions. I think it is lacking so badly. I think it is the most easily, solved issue and could potentially have the greatest overall impact on one's product with just minor adjustments. It's a glaring, glaring Achilles heel that could be fixed with a fucking band-aid instead of surgery. And at the core of that comment in observation that I hold so dearly yet firmly is you need to rotate. just different voices,

different perspectives over a three-hour period. Otherwise, it turns into just noise, and it's distracting noise at best. When the audience starts tuning out the dialogue of a show, because there's two

narratives in a wrestling show. Well, basically, you have the spoken word, which is primarily your play-by-play of color guys, and occasionally you have promos in the ring or backstage. The rest of the dialogue is physical dialogue, which means your color and play-by-play guy has to tell the story, or at least that's what they should be doing.

But instead, what they're doing today, to draw parallel or to draw an analysis, what we're doing today is, for example, on the double or nothing pay-per-view that you and I watched and then reviewed, and I didn't even talk about this in review because, frankly, I was tired Austin wasn't on my game but you have three and this is tony too and as much as i love and respect tony and i do he's a much better play by play guy that i would ever have ever been if i would have stuck with throughout my entire career okay make a point of that that being said you had three guys all doing color commentary nobody was telling a fucking story the whole nine and a half or 12 hours of that pay-per-view or whatever it really was it just felt that long there was

no dialogue, no narrative about any of the reasons why, in a real story perspective, any of what we were seeing was actually happening, or what the implications of what we were seeing while they were all doing color commentary instead of play-by-play and commentary, there was no discussion throughout the entire 37 hours of that pay-per-view about the implications of where anybody goes from here in any meaningful way. Mind blown. So when I'm asked why three people, it's to keep the audience from tuning them out

and trying to keep it fresh by interchanging not just personalities, but perspectives and styles. We're watching an old school nitro here from 1999. What's been the most surprising thing? watching this back for you today, Aaron? The crowd. I fully expected because, you know, we talked about doing this last week and I knew it was coming.

And I, I can sit through anything if the crowd's lit up. Because the crowd, the crowd tells me whether I should be enjoying something or not. If the crowd's really reacting and I'm kind of ambivalent, it's like, well, maybe I'm not paying close to it. What am I missing here?

They're having fun. I want to have fun. Well, if they're having fun, I'm going to have fun. So fuck it. I'm going to have fun watching them have fun. I mean, that's kind of how I watch wrestling sometimes. And to see the crowd, not only this big of a crowd, which is definitely shocking, or May of 99, but to see the energy and some that we're getting from that crowd and some of these matches that I wouldn't expect. I'm having a fun time watching this show from way back when.

Of course, we've got Bobby Eaton working with Buff Bagwell here. Buff's going to pull it off. And I feel like Buff would love our sponsor today. Mando. If you haven't already, what are you waiting for? You got to try Mando. I think you're going to absolutely love it. And I want to remind everybody that my wife actually introduced me to this product actually in a different way. Lume for men. That's really what it is. It's loomie whole body deodorant. My wife has been using this for a while. And I've even seen some of the commercials on TV. Well, now they've got Lumi for men. It's the same clinically proven

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That's S-H-O-M-A-N-D-O.com. Seeing quite a show here, we've got Perry Saturn out cutting a promo right now. And we just saw Buff Bagwell pick up a win over Bobby Eaton. Now we're going to see Perry Saturn who's going to come in as a tag team champion here. And he's going to take on Diamond Dallas Page and Bam Bam Bigelow. So it's a two-on-one aspect here.

That's going to get some fans behind Perry Saturn. But they're going to go like 11 minutes and 44 seconds in a handicap match. That's pretty crazy. What did you think of the way Diamond Dallas Page was being used here in 99, Eric? After having such a successful 97 and 98, it does feel like at times he was a little lost. I mean, he wins the world title in 99, but now he's into this, like just a month later. things are changing quickly for ddp here yeah i i don't like it i'm looking at it now and i'm

liking it even less than i liked it then obviously i went with it didn't didn't put up a fight that's on me but i don't think page had reached his potential as the babyface page i mean it's too quick of a turn and just watching him walk out and watching the crowd react i can't hear them because I have it turned down for purposes of this, but I can tell by looking at the crowd, they're not buying this character the way they bought the babyface DDP. And I think he's shifting gears too quick. There's probably reasons for it. Desperation being at the top of the list more than likely. But it's not working. Didn't work there. And they clearly looking at it now. I'm looking at it differently now than I would have done, but even looking at it the way I look

get it now it's not working not as well as what he had previously you're going to turn somebody you're going to change somebody's character again why is it a strategic reason creatively you got wrestling you got an idea for a story you want to build great as a character as a baby face been tired been doing it too long and is no longer as effective much like Hulk Hogan was in 1995 94 after the new car smell wore off in wend WCW and you started getting a different kind of a reaction if not opposite reaction at least in a diminished reaction now it's time I don't think page had reached that time yet to to change his character it was a mistake we've we've had a lot of fun watching this old nitro from 1999 and as a reminder we've still got another match and more story coming up. Kevin Nash is going to come out in a big truck

and it's going to corner Randy Savage's limo. And then he's going to pour sewage through the sunroof onto him and the girls. And Meltzer would say this was something you'd expect from Steve Austin on a WWF show. It was a great idea, but somehow it looked cheesy because of the camera work. Nash then said the segment was sponsored by the sewage company.

That was funny as well. The following week, Eric, is when we do the now infamous Hummer angle the fans have been obsessed with for over 20 years. I got to tell you, though, when I'm seeing stuff like this, I kind of agree with Dave. It feels like a stone cold bit and a friend of mine, a really smart entrepreneur that I know, like, and trust and respect a great deal. He's hammered into me that sometimes in business, you can be better than, less than,

or different than. And when I see Kevin Nash running around with a big truck, putting doo-doo in a sunroof, It feels a little less than Stone Cold Steve Austin, who was doing it first with concrete trucks and beer trucks. So my Zambonies, I don't know. What say you? I have. Well, first of all, thank you. And secondly, you're, I mean, there's not a better illustration of what we both agree to be true when it comes to better than less than or different than.

This is so apparently, obviously, not apparently, obviously less than for. All the reasons you've already pointed out. And again, I hate to keep going back to this, but it's so important to me that people understand at least why I have the perspective I have. You don't have to agree with me. I hope that most people or some people don't because I enjoy a good debate because I learn shit sometimes when it's a good debate in different perspectives that are based in experience and observation. but we see this today. We're seeing, you know, we look at AEW when people talk about what's going wrong and why are they losing viewers and why are people not buying tickets.

It's because a lot of what we see today is 180 degree departure from what was stated to be the vision for the company five years ago when it started. And a lot of the scenes that we see and the elements that we see are indeed less than a lot of the things that we've seen in WWE. And in some cases, all the way back to WCW, going to the silly-ass Tony Khan elite storyline, which is basically a really piss-poor derivative of the NWO story, barely, just enough to make you go, yeah, maybe, because it was so poorly executed. It's not that coming up with original ways to present this product, I think is critical to its, not only its growth, but to its existence. That's what we need to see more of today. When I look at WWE, you know what I see, Conrad,

especially the pay-per-view you and I covered last week? I see a definite commitment to go back to the future with regard to the strongest elements of what's made professional wrestling work as a television product longer than almost any genre of television other than the news. It's going back to story and character.

It's going back to episodic TV in WWE. And what I see, and I've started watching TNA a little bit more now so that I can contribute and have an opinion, at least a valid one, honest one. But I've started to watch some T&A, and I see it there too. What we see in an EW is exactly the opposite of that. It's great athleticism, dangerous, dangerous stuff. I mean, Will Osprey came damn near close to be in a Marcus Bagwell story

within the first five minutes of last week's pay-per-view. Fucking ridiculous. I see AEW going in this extreme athleticism, technical expertise, because I'm seeing chain wrestling with some guys, like Will Osprey, and there are others. You know, the technical skills they have are fucking amazing. But the product itself isn't because they're abandoning the very basics of what makes wrestling work and what draws people to it.

and retains that audience. And I'm seeing it here. I'm seeing we made that same mistake here in 1999 with me in charge as president of the company. I fucked that shit up, which is why I have the opinions I have. I've been there and I've done that. And it's easier for me to see. Maybe that's why I don't really have a lot of people that agree with the things that I say or see because I see them differently than a lot of people.

I don't watch wrestling like everybody else watches wrestling. Most of the time, I don't. We're watching some interesting wrestling here. It's ADP and Ben Ben Bigelow taking on Perry Saturn in a handicap match. Somehow it's going to take the guys nearly 12 minutes to beat him. And let's remember less than a month ago, DDP beat Rick Flair, Hulk Hogan, um randy savage was there sting was there it's wild to think that he's beat all these guys in the

last month and boy perry saturn even with bam bam bigelow tough yeah and that's part of page right page is a giver and and i know page and perry were close you know page always had an affinity for people from the east coast that's where page grew up it's where he had a lot of his experiences. And he just related. It's why he was excited about working with Bambam for the very reason. I mean, I think they grew up in the same neighborhood. So Page was one of those guys that was capable of giving too much. And certainly the cases we watched with Perry Satter, nothing against Perry. But for all the reasons you stated, and to go from working with the Hogan's and the savages and the savages and,

the flares to, at this point, nothing against Perry Saturn, but where Perry was positioned in the eyes of the audience, not my eyes, but in the eyes of the audience, and they have to give up so much, didn't help Page at all, and actually didn't benefit Perry. Let's do a few questions here. Travis Medway says, as you got more combative with the network, where there are corporate individuals using the WWF ratings to, attack you and or go to work or go to war with you that's interesting i guess where you were you hearing about from your critics within turner the folks who didn't really want wrestling on the network anyway were they mentioning w w ratings to you at this point or was it more about the

bottom line and not necessarily about what competition was doing it had nothing to do with any they just not none of these executives that i knew based on direct information for people who are a part of the process at the time. Those people who were undermining WCW starting back in July of 98 or August of 98 would never say anything to my face. We would never have a conversation in an environment where other people could hear. They would do their business far away from me in my eyes.

They were doing things that I was not involved in, not aware of. until it affected me. I was not a part of the discussion to cut my budget right after being mandated to create a new show for TBS in primetime. I wasn't a part of that conference. Nobody asked me what my thoughts were. Hey, Eric, I know you're taking on this new network prime time show and you know, you're not getting a license for you or anything for it.

We're going to help you out with production, but the rest of it's all on you. But we're also kind of thinking about maybe reducing your buds, budget, you know, because we have these other divisions over here and we're positioning for this merger and we're trying to get our stock prices up. The only way we get our stock prices up, by the way, because I know you don't know anything about this shit is to increase our EBIT up amongst all of the divisions so that we can project earnings in a much more favorable way and raise our stock prices. So at the time of the merger, when it becomes official, all of us executives who have like a shit fucking ton of stock options like we're buying fucking islands and yachts and all kinds of shit but that's not going to happen unless we can kind of across the board show a much better interesting financial

picture at the time of the proposed merger that's what my life was I would find out all this shit after it had all been decided and then I had to operate accordingly Yeah, it was a fun time. But no, none of those people would ever say anything to my face, Travis. None of them would have the conversation in public. They would just take care of their shit backstage, so to speak. Bobby says, Eric and Conrad, do either of you have the intel on the whereabouts of the NW. Monster Truck?

I would love to have it in my driveway when the wife gets home. You guys did do some fun stuff. Any idea where any of those monster trucks wound up, Eric? Probably with the people that built them, you know, Mike Weber would know for sure because Mike was kind of the linchpin to those different relationships, Bigfoot and Grave Digger and all that. I don't know, but I would imagine either. They probably existed on the circuit until they were tired of them

and they may have been melted down and, I don't know, turned into something else. I don't know. Cool to have one, though. You see me driving around and like the Hulkkewagon. monster truck in Cody like I'd be in every parade I'd fulfill my wish I've always wanted to ride my horse in the parade Cody because it's like a big big damn deal the fourth of July parade in Cody Wyoming is a slice of Americana that you will not find well you'll find it in the

Rocky Mountain area in small towns like Cody but outside of the Rocky mountain area the kind of true cowboy culture the real shit not the fake Hollywood bullshit fourth of July My parades are the bomb. And I always wanted to ride my horse in a parade. Just like wave at the kids, throw them some candy, all that kind of parade shit. And I had my horse. I got my horse trained. I rode my horse in parades in Arizona.

I carried the flag. I was one of those guys in the horse parade carrying flag, like a rodeo queen. And I was going to do it here on Cody. Travel got in a way. My life got in away. And then I finally, you know, I wasn't able to ride my horse enough to do him justice. And he was a really good horse. His name was Lucky was a Palomino.

Missouri Fox Trotter, great horse. Wrote him a lot, put a lot of miles on the horse. But I finally let him go because I wasn't able to spend enough time with him to for the horse to live up to his potential. So I let him go. And I've never been in the parade. But if I had a Hulk Hogan monster truck, they would invite me. I'd be the Grand Marshal every year.

Kids would go wild. people would be odd it would be perfect we just saw the finish of the macho man randy savage segment of course with uh kevin nash and the lewis septic service plug at the end of the segment i have to admit that was pretty fun it did feel a little bit like a saturday night live skid we had a camera in the back of the limousine so we could actually see a live action shot of the ducky coming into the uh the cabin there and then of course we Once the truck pulls away, they all take turns spilling out of the door of the limousine. And then we see Kevin Nash driving the truck as he shuts the door.

We see the name of the company. And then they even show the reaction shot of those folks covered in Duke. And then the big full screen plug, like it was a Valvalene, you know, in program sponsorship. It was funny. I enjoyed it. but it did feel like WWF light. I mean, we've all sort of heard that Vince McMahon was really obsessed with toilet humor. And that sort of stunt felt like it was a page out of the Vince Rousseau playbook.

But Rousseau's not here. Who do you think was such a big advocate for what if we put a shit hose in the macho man's limousine? Kevin. Okay. And I think, look, here's a fact. A year before all this, maybe a year and a half, Kevin Nash pushed me, I say push me, convinced me to have a phone call with Vince Rousseau

back when Vince Rousseau was in creative at WWE because Rousseau and Nash stayed in contact to what degree I don't know. But they remained friends. They were friends. And Nash came to me, One day, it was at a nitro early in a day. And he said, hey, I really think he might have,

he might have brought somebody with him to kind of back him up and, you know, support him and, and convincing me that I should at least talk to to Rousseau. They came to me and said, look, we really think he'd be a great addition. We think he'd work well with him. This is, you know, somebody we think would be kind of cool to add to the team. And I did talk to Rousseau. It was the most awkward, probably. inappropriate waste of time to have a conversation like I should have had with

Rousseau on the idea of exploring working together. That should have been something that I did in my office or at home in a relaxed environment, not surrounded by, number one, the pressure of having to produce a live television show that day that I'm also performing in, but also being surrounded by people that were aware of who I was talking to. Because it's going to change the dynamic of the conversation. No matter how much I don't want to, it's going to. But I did have that conversation with Rousseau,

and I wasn't impressed, and probably because of the situation, and fairness to Vince Rousseau, wasn't impressed and never followed up on it. So it's, and I say all of that, to contextualize kind of frame of mind here, why perhaps Kevin was seeing some of the Rousseau-style television on WWE, they're kicking our ass,

Kevin's a smart guy, he sees what's working let's try it here that's how that happened it's kind of like catching a cold coach keith morrison is here with us live and he wants to know when you left play by play to do the n w o full time as a character did you miss doing play by play did you miss being a part of the broadcast team here for nitro eric absolutely actually play by play was the most fun as far as my on camera stuff i mean i there's different times and i had a blast you know There was some amazing stuff I got to do on camera. That was a blast.

Same in WCW. But overall, from sheer enjoyment of the process, I love doing play-by-play. I was never really that good at. I was adequate. I can do it. And in some ways, I had certain ways of approaching it that was perhaps beneficial than others.

But I was just pretty average, but I'd love doing it. Just because I wasn't the best at it, it didn't mean I didn't enjoy it. I did enjoy it. Because you're creating a story. You're creating characters. You're using, I get to use my imagination to create. I always thought, and Vernan, you taught me this. Absolutely, Virgaun, taught me this, is to imagine that you've got wrestling fans that are watching or listening because they're blind.

describe to them and make them excited audibly the same way you are visually. Now, I'm paraphrasing that because I'm saying it differently than Burr said it to me. But you get the point. And that's what a lot of the play-by-play announcers that I grew up listening to in AWA, that's what they did. So I kind of understood what Vern was trying to teach me. And that's how I approach it, which is why I enjoyed it so much, because it allowed me to tap into my imagination. I wasn't just calling the action.

I was using the guidance, the experience that was given to me by Vern when I was learning. The first time I ever did it, okay, here's the basics. And then throughout that entire process, I learned to use my imagination to create a narrative audibly that may not even exist. visually. And that's not to mean to, I'm going to tell a different story that the people are seeing, but use your imagination to make it more exciting, to make it more impactful, to make it mean something other than just saying it's happening and calling the action. That's the art of play-by-play that I think has been lost. It's not that the arch has been lost, it's just that the focus has changed.

and I think the style of play-by-play and color, which are almost indistinguishable in many cases, not all. That is the element of play-by-play in color that I think could be fixed so freaky easily because the talent that are currently not doing what they should be doing have done it for decades. You're not teaching them a new trick. Just shifting the focus and the intent

of that narrative to enhance what people are seeing and experiencing as opposed to just telling them what they're seeing and experiencing. All right. Sorry. I know I'm going off track in a lot of this shit today. I apologize. But that's what keeps it fun for me. So. Well, what keeps it fun for all of us at home is bluechew.com. It's a unique online service that delivers us the same active ingredients as Viagra, the analyst, and the vitro, but in chewable form, a fraction of the cost. And it's so easy to get signed up. Really, take a look at how easy this process is.

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It's Sting and Rick Steiner in a solid steel cage match. Our referee is Tank Abbott. And this is going to be the debut of Tank. Meltzer would have this to say. The Rick versus Steiner, or Rick Steiner versus Sting match in the cage with Tank as the ref was anything but funny. They clearly hadn't trained Tank even one second

before throwing him out there to be lost. By the way, as a trivia note, the big bald guy that Tank runs around with is the same guy who ate Frank Shamrock shoes after he poured nachos on him and challenged him to a fight the night before a UFC show back in late 96. Anyway, this was boring.

Tank didn't even know how to count pins. Those idiot announcers were building Tankup as having the fastest hands in the world as if. He's got a devastating power punch, but his hand speed is nothing special. Anyway, he clocked Sting and left the cage. Rick Steiner beat on Sting, but Sting made his own comeback.

Maybe not the best debut for Tank, but this is heads up with Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Undertaker for the WWF title. We've got a television title match in a cage with Tank Abbott as the special guest referee. Man, it's no wonder you lost that night. I mean, that's an interesting night. don't hold an undertaker wow

i bet that put busting seats no i bet it did melzer would actually give you a compliment here though he says about the only thing good on the show was bischoff as an announcer over the final two hours he was doing a combination of shoots and worked shoots but at least he kept you on your toes and interested rather than the terribly predictable wcdw announcing crew which never says anything.

It isn't so much that the WCW announcers are bad, but that they're either not allowed to or they're afraid of, depending on the issue, to say anything controversial. So what do you think of that? Do you think at times your announcers did play it too safe, and that's what you as this established television character could bring to the table a little bit of that controversy?

I don't think it's that serious is that. I think it's just, It's exactly what I said in my most recent diatribe. I just had a different perspective. I had a different way of telling the story. I had a different approach to my job and play by play. It's not that it was that much better than the other WCW announcers, but this is another exact example, perfect example.

It was different than, therefore it felt fresh. And the audience, like, including Dave, who's always hated my guts, could at least recognize it. So I wasn't any better. I didn't have any more latitude. I didn't have more courage. I just was different. I looked at play-by-play differently.

And I think part of it, and this is not a knock on anybody. But no matter what you do, when you do as much of it as, for example, Well, Tony Chivani did and still does, or Michael Cole or anybody else, if you're not acutely aware, like every time you turn a mic on, then it's really easy to fall into a rut and do the same thing, the same way with the same tone, with the same rhythm, with the same levels of emotion every single time you do it 300 fucking times a year. The audience will tune you out.

I'm even this show today I'm taking a different approach to the show today than you and I normally take trying to get into a little bit of a deeper thought process of what I may have been thinking of that or what I'm analyzing now I'm doing it intentionally because I want to try something different I want this podcast to be as successful as it could be just like I would want if I'm doing play by play my work to make my product as successful as it can be so I'm going to try different things until I see the kind of growth pattern that I'm comfortable with and more importantly till I know for sure I'm not doing the same fucking thing every single time I do it because even I will get bored with my shit if I do it the same way every single time I'm bored I can bet the audiences I can't be well I can't believe we just watch that Randy Savage

Kevin Nash segment and not once that I ask you who booked this shit Kevin. Hey, he'll admit it. We finally got to the bottom of the answer. When you see the ratings come out and you guys get a 3.3 and they get a 6.3, I mean, do you shit your pants full of doo-doo? Truthfully, no. How did you give a shit?

Ratings no longer mattered. They didn't. There was nothing. Until I could change the things that I felt I needed to change and had the ability and the authority and the latitude to change. and the latitude to change them, it didn't fucking matter what the ratings were. There's nothing I can do about it. The only thing that I could affect or impact

were the challenges that were in front of me and ratings was behind me. I mean, once a rating comes out, it's out, there's nothing I can do about it. What can I do to fix it next week? That's what I was focused on. And those issues had really nothing to do. Believe it or not, well, they did.

They had everything to do with creative, But what was inhibiting us from moving forward went beyond creative. Well, we're going to go beyond creative next week. We're seeing Nitro wind down here after that cage match. It was the big Tank Abbott debut. But next week is the Hummer angle. And I know that you've wanted to ask Eric about this for years. Well, this is your chance.

We're going to be watching it, doing a watch-along next week. you can join us live over at ad-freeshows.com or enjoy it at 83 weeks.com. That's where we want to hear from you. 83 weeks.com is your home for all things. Eric Bischoff. So make sure you've hit the subscribe button. Make sure you're going to click and turn on the notifications bell. Throw us a thumbs up.

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That's at 83 weeksmerch.com. And if your business is targeting men 25 to 54, we got them. It's easy to advertise here with us as well at advertise witheric.com. This is the time of year. Schools are getting out. People are looking to maybe look for a new house.

I can help you with that in my real life at saved with conrad.com. Give me a call toll free. I'll get you out of that apartment and into a house with no money out of pocket at 888 425. 0105 or save with conrad.com or just shoot me an email conrad at save with conrad.com. If I can't help you save some cash, I won't waste your time.

We're routinely helping our podcast listeners say 5, 6, 7, even 800 bucks a month. Last month we helped the listeners save $1,500 a month. Find out how much money you can save right now for free at save with conrad.com. NMLS number 32416. Eric, we covered a lot of ground today. We, uh, in the last week have done a profile piece on Mr. Regal. We talked about queen and king of the ring.

We talked about AEW's big pay-per-view, double or nothing. Now we've covered Tank Abbott's debut and pretty controversial angle with Kevin Nash. And next week we talk about the Hummer angle and it's all happening at 83 weeks.com. I'm having a lot of fun lately, man. It feels like we're covering a lot of topics and providing a lot of value at 83 weeks.com. I am having an absolute blast. I would have never believed, you know, at this stage of my life, I would be as excited about doing some of the things that you and I and all of us are doing over to 83 weeks.com. It's just, it's an opportunity to try some new shit and have fun.

I love that. And we're going to have some fun next week. Hit the subscribe button, tell your friends, and tune in next week right here to 83 weeks.com. Hey, this is the national treasure. Nick Aldous and I am recommending that you go to savewithconrad.com for all your home buying needs. If you listen to any of Conrad's shows, which I do on a regular basis, it's pretty hard to miss the fact that he's in the mortgage business. When the time came that we were looking to buy a place, it was really my first choice. I just got the feeling right from the start that Jimmy and Conrad and the whole team

really wanted us to succeed. It felt like it should. it felt like we were all on the same team. You know, it felt like we were in business together, which to me is really how a home purchase and a mortgage process should feel. Not only would I recommend, say, with Conrad to friends and coworkers, I have many times already. If I know that they're in the, you know, their house hunting,

my first recommendation to them always is get in touch with Conrad. Like, his team are the real deal and they will be straight up you and do everything they can to get you in the house. NMLS number 32416 Equal Housing Lender, SavewithConrad.com.