On the latest episode of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff talked about why he gave out guaranteed contracts in the early days of WCW, being called ‘ATM Eric’ and more. You can check out some highlights below:
On his reaction to the ‘ATM Eric’ line: “I had been hearing it. You know, Vince McMahon started it. It was big bad billionaire Ted, and all the press in every interview he was doing while we were kicking his ass, it was always, you know, ‘Ted Turner is trying to put me out of business. And he’s spending money just to do so.’ And you know, internally at WWE there are still people who walk around deep down inside, if really — if they’re honest with themselves, still believe to this day that all I did was spend money, got lucky, whatever. They still won’t acknowledge deep down inside, what it took to accomplish what we accomplished. And it wasn’t just writing checks. That’s how Vince — that’s the narrative that Vince McMahon wanted out there. And then it just carried over, right? It became true. You start hearing it in interviews, and he says it, you know, Forbes magazine, for example, or wherever he said it, the newspaper. He puts it out there, and he’s very serious about it, and it becomes narrative in the business side. And that’s what Vince’s goal was to look like. He was trying to babyface himself. He was trying to be the milquetoast babyface while big, nasty heel Ted Turner was kicking his ass. He was a sympathetic babyface; Ted Turner was the bully.
“And then like I said, that narrative just kind of took on a life of its own, certainly in the dirt sheets and and even talent. You know, people that were in — even internally in WCW, by the way. There were people in WCW in management that for whatever reason, didn’t feel like I deserved that job. And that their friend or their family member or whomever, for whatever reason, was better suited for it. So there was some of that internally but not much, but some. But outside of WCW? It was everywhere, because nobody really understood what happened or what it took. They didn’t really analyze how I did it. It was really easy to say, ‘Oh, he’s not that smart. He must just be spending money like crazy.'”
On why he gave out guaranteed contracts in WCW compared to selling talent on upside deals like WWE: “If I’m doing a million dollars a month and my talent budget is only $500,000 a month, I’m good. But if my talent budget is $500,000 a month and the bottom falls out, I’m in s**t. With Vince’s contract, it might not be a $500,000 guarantee. It might only be 250, but it still leaves him a margin that I didn’t have. I made a flat guarantee. I wished I could have sold what Vince was able to sell. Keep in mind — and this is the nuance that people who live in the basement will never figure this out or take the time to try. But WCW had no revenue to share. Vince had a history of having lots of revenue to share. There were people at the top, like Hulk Hogan for example. His merchandising checks were legendary. They were folklore, they were so big. And there were people below him that were doing that not as well, but still doing very, very well. Well, what does that communicate to the people in the middle of the card or at the bottom of the card, or maybe somebody that’s thinking about coming in? Now, you may not walk in and get that kind of big, big money, but you’re going to get enough money to pay your bills every month, which you’ve never had before by the way. And you still have an opportunity to take a crack at the big time.
“So Vince correctly — and I think brilliantly. I doubt he came up with it, but whoever worked for him, however it happened, it was a really good pay structure for wrestling because of its volatility. I could never have sold that because I didn’t have any revenue. I couldn’t say, ‘Hey, I know. You came in here wanting $500,000 a month. I’m going to only offer you 250, but here’s how you can make even more money.’ I didn’t have the, ‘Here’s how you could make even more money’ part of my pitch. Because they would have laughed at me. It’d never happen. We were losing money at the time I was handing out this quote-unquote ‘big contracts.’ So that’s the nuance between what I was able to sell to be competitive in the industry and to bring in the names I brought in so that I could successfully turn the company around and make it profitable for the first time in its history, and dig out of a six or seven-year hole in terms of finances. So, ultimately, it was a good strategy on my part. It didn’t have an option. I couldn’t have attracted that talent to come in on any kind of a revenue share basis like they had come from for the reasons I just described. So I’ll never take offense to, for example, JJ’s example of how beneficial and how so much better structured the WWE contracts were than mine. I agree. I just couldn’t have sold it.”
If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit 83 Weeks with an h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.
