WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW President Eric Bischoff discussed various topics in an episode of his podcast, “83 Weeks.” One notable point he made was about a “false narrative” that has persisted for 25 years regarding WCW’s financial situation before it was sold. He emphasized that it has been wrongly claimed that the company was not losing significant amounts of money.
Bischoff said, “I love answering this or focusing on this, because there’s so much for the last 20 years or more — 25 years — there has been this false narrative jam into the internet wrestling community and all the dirt sheet readers and consumers, that from ’99 to whatever, WCW lost this vast amount of money. Folks, you’ve been lied to by people who are either complete frauds and con artists or just so incredibly lazy and ignorant. Either way, that narrative has been debunked folks, with receipts. And I encourage you to read Guy Evans’ book, Beyond NITRO. The receipts are in the book, along with interviews from corporate executives outside of WCW and a part of the Turner organization who were in charge of said receipts. So you can listen to the dirt sheet, internet wrestling community, low-hanging, low credibility to no credibility garbage, or you can read a book. I encourage you to read a book.”
On the reality:
“For me to answer that question or try to say, ‘Well, if we would have done this, then this would have happened, and then maybe things would have been different,’ you have to ignore the facts. The facts are, we were making money. We weren’t losing the amount of money that we were reported by the dirt sheets to be losing… That wasn’t the case. It was not a financial issue for WCW. It was an internal decision by executives who orchestrated a financial dump of liabilities onto WCW’s books to obfuscate their own and better position themselves with the pending corporate merger.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
