WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW President Eric Bischoff discussed several topics on an episode of his podcast, “83 Weeks.” One key point he made was that WCW lacked a strong group of managers, such as Paul Heyman or Jim Cornette, which contributed to its weaknesses.
Bischoff said, “No. I mean, From a business perspective, you can’t keep a stable of guys who are really only — they only exist to solve a problem. They don’t exist because they draw money. I know they’re all gonna say, ‘Oh, my God, that’s not true.’ Okay. From a business perspective, they’re there to plug a hole. If the talent isn’t good enough on the mic? Okay, we’re going to have to spend the extra money to fix that. But to have a stable of those people ready to go, like in case of emergency? Just business-wise, it wouldn’t have made sense. It wasn’t a weak spot, it wasn’t a blind spot. It was a decision not to become reliant on it. Because otherwise it’s too easy. Before you know you got half a dozen or dozen managers on your roster, each making 150 grand a year. Because if they’re not worth at least 150 or 200 grand a year, they probably suck — or, suck is hard. They probably just aren’t really going to deliver much. They’re just going to be there and serve a purpose, and that gets kind of expensive.”
On why talents like Paul Heyman are unique:
“First of all, Paul Heyman even back then, was — would you like to have four or five Paul Heymans on your roster? Sure you would. Go find them, they don’t exist. Paul’s a very, very unique talent. There’s nobody like him. Bobby Heenan, as you pointed out — Bobby didn’t want to be a manager, that was in his contract. He didn’t want to be in a ring. He didn’t even like being near the ring because of his neck issues. So Bobby Heenan wasn’t an option. Would have been cool if he would have been, because things would have been way more entertaining if we would have able to use Bobby in that role. But we weren’t. So we didn’t have Paul Heyman. We weren’t going to get Paul Heyman. Same with Jim Cornettt. Now I didn’t try to get Jim. I’m not sure he would have even taken a phone call at the time, but I don’t put Jim quite in the same category as Paul Heyman. But he’s in the same zip code for sure. But beyond those two, taking Bobby out of the equation, there just wasn’t anybody that was really that good. Certainly not on the level of a Jim Cornette or Paul Heyman. And if you can’t have somebody on that level, it’s better not to have somebody.”
On and why the nWo era made the classic manager role more difficult:
“And again, wrestling had changed. We’re talking about now the nWo, and we’re Nitro and the reality-based programming is becoming a little bit more dominant on the format. We still had the other stuff but reality — the audience had developed an appetite for the reality type wrestling that WCW Nitro was the first to really present. That made it even more difficult. So no, I think that — yeah, Roman’s an exception, because Paul’s an exception. And that worked. Just about everybody that gets hooked up with Paul Heyman kind of works. But there just wasn’t enough of them.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
