Eric Bischoff On Signing Bret Hart, If His Tenure In WCW Was Failure

Former WCW President Eric Bischoff discussed signing Bret Hart from the WWE to WCW in 1997 during a recent episode of his 83 Weeks podcast. Here are the highlights (transcript courtesy of Wrestling Inc):

Reason it took so long to have Bret Hart debut in WCW:

“Why wouldn’t I just drop everything and take in a guy who had a certain amount of time of a no-compete clause; had a broken hand, and just kind of drop everything and throw him in the middle of something without any real planning, backstory and throw it against the wall in hopes that it would stick? Is that the question? That is the kind of prevailing critique that I hear often; how can you take a guy like Bret Hart, which by the way, he wasn’t drawing, there is a reason why Vince McMahon let him go. It wasn’t because he was making Vince McMahon money hand over fist. One of the things that I liked—look at what we did with Sting and Hulk Hogan. I wanted long term plans. One of the reasons I thrust myself in creative, and I may have said this to you before, if I didn’t I apologize, but I was never comfortable with creative. I was comfortable with the business side of it. I understood the business side of the business pretty well. What I didn’t know I could pretty easily understand and figure out, but that creative side was the voodoo side that I never got close to. I never got close to the creative in AWA; not only was I not close to it, I wasn’t allowed to be in a room close to it when they were talking about creative. That is how tightly held Verne Gagne believed in kayfabing people who he didn’t believe needed to be in the process. I had zero exposure to creative in WCW up until 1993, 1994. Even then I was at a distance. I would talk to Dusty Rhodes because he and I were tight and we would talk a little bit, and would explain to me the ideas that he had and sucked up as much as I could. I was fascinated by it quite honestly, but I was still never comfortable being the guy in the room that said yay or nay on something. Ric Flair, when I brought him in as a booker, I was never in that room. I would come in and out. There were certain things that I had to be aware of as Executive Vice President, depending on the timeline was of the company and being responsible financially for things. I had to have an idea of where we were going, what the pay per views were going to look like, how the cards are being advertised six months before pay per views and all that kind of crap, but I didn’t sit in a room with a team filled with guys who had hundreds of years of more experience than I did and try to influence their creative decisions. I tried to stay out of that. It wasn’t until later on that I inserted myself in that process.”

If he considers Hart’s tenure in WCW being a failure:

“I think it all goes back to the very beginning. I think it is fair for Bret Hart and fans of Bret Hart to suggest that there was never really a long term plan with Bret. That is fair. Bret came in rather abruptly. We didn’t have a long time to really lay out in a thoughtful way where we can balance different options and really creatively do the best job that we can do. Even with the time that we had, we didn’t do a great job. I didn’t do a great job, so I think if you go back to the very beginning with all the things that were going on; with the pressures of WCW Thunder and some of the choices I was trying to make, and the pressures were we getting from WWE, and the pressure we were getting from our own company, and the fact that they were gutting our budget, all of those things were throwing us off of our game, and a lot of that had to do with the reason why, so we didn’t have a good plan, we just didn’t, and that is fair for Bret, and for fans of Bret, but I will also say that Bret Hart didn’t contribute. He didn’t try. Despite the ‘hero’s journey’ and the amazingly, Steven Spielberg-ish where he single handedly, against all odds created in Toronto, Canada so that his fans, the multitude of fans, who stood outside in the freezing cold as Bret Hart had to walk over the almost comatose body of the head booker only to prevail in the ring and to prove to all of the bookers and to everybody else that Bret Hart had the keys to the kingdom that night, but despite all of that, Bret Hart didn’t really contribute as much as Bret Hart could have contributed to Bret Hart’s own success. In his own legacy. Right now, Bret Hart’s legacy is a bitter, broken guy who wants to blame everybody from Vince McMahon to Eric Bischoff, to Ric Flair, Shawn Michaels, to Dean Malenko for God’s sake for all of the things that went wrong in his career. Regardless of all the things I did wrong, that is on Bret Hart.”