WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW President Eric Bischoff took to an episode of his 83 Weeks podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including reportedly paying NBA legend Dennis Rodman $1 Million as part of his contract with WCW.
Bischoff said, “It was a massively good investment. And by the way, we don’t know that that’s Dave Meltzer’s report. That’s true. That’s true. Dave Meltzer has reported many things that weren’t accurate or true. He’s made a career of it. So just because Dave Meltzer said it doesn’t mean it’s true, number one. Number two, even if it was you, let’s take that position, okay? They offered 500. I offered a million, but I got out of it. Yeah. It wasn’t just showing up in a corner, you know, and being a Jimmy Hart manager. Right. He was promoting, and h,e was going to be involved in the show, and he was going to wrestle. That comes with a much different price tag and a much bigger benefit. So I still think the deal that I did with Dennis, whether it was ten times more than the WWE offered or not, was one of the best deals I did in 1996 or 97.”
Bischoff also talked about Dennis Rodman being hard to work with back in 1997.
Bischoff said, “Getting him to a facility to train on time, especially if there were camera crews, because we often tried to do two things. Like I remember once we were in Newport Beach, we went to Dennis as opposed to trying to get Dennis to fly to us because, for whatever the reason was, we went to Dennis, got a ring set up, you know, that was an expense, took a lot of time and people energy to get it done and okay, let’s start at noon knowing I think it was a Saturday too. So knowing, you know, Dennis was probably out Friday night. We’ll start at noon, 2:00. We’re looking at our watches, you know, calling Dwight Manley or whoever was his agent at the time because it changed a couple of times. And by the way, who did you book Dennis through? Does he get an agent or manager? But he’d show up; of course, he wasn’t into it. And it looked like, Oh, this is such a pain in the ass. And we were all disappointed that he wasn’t more enthusiastic because we were all crazy jacked up and excited about this. After all, we knew the potential that it had. And Dennis would stroll in, obviously slightly hungover, if not more, or maybe still had a bit of a buzz. And we’re showing him things there. No, I wasn’t. I was there watching. But, you know, whoever was working with him, trying to teach him how to do an arm draw to hit the rover, we were trying to teach fundamentals when trying to get him to do anything crazy. And Dennis would look, and he’s like, he’s not paying attention. And then it would be, okay. Dennis, You want to give it a try? Sure. And then he’d go in and almost hit everything. He was shown perfectly. It’s like he wasn’t paying. He was weird that way. It was like people that have photographic memories, right? You know, it’s like, how do they do that? Dennis stood there and looked like he wasn’t even paying attention to what was. People were trying to teach him or show him. And then once he finally got him in the ring to try it, you’re thinking, let’s walk through this, you know, half speed, third speed, Just get the footwork down. Let’s get the timing a bit, and get a sense of the feel of something. Now you go in there and do it almost flawlessly; he was a freak that way. So while it was a pain in the ass, getting him to wherever we needed to get him to or even in communication with him, sometimes you just got the sense that he didn’t give a s**t. But he did. And he does. And he’s paying very close attention.”
You can check out Eric Bischoff’s complete podcast below.
