During a recent interview with talkSPORT.com, Eric Bischoff commented on briefly working as the Executive Director of WWE SmackDown, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On how his Executive Director role was described to him: “My job really, as it was described to me, was to, in a general sense, oversee anything within WWE, and to a degree with FOX, anything that touched or related to SmackDown. Which included, by the way, overseeing creative, that was a part of it. But, it was overseeing it, not creating. I was told clearly I wasn’t brought in as a creative person, I was brought in to manage to creative process. They are two entirely different things. It would be fair to say the creative had to go through me to get to Vince McMahon, yes. But it also included licensing and merchandise. It included PR and marketing. It included scheduling. It included just about everything related to SmackDown which is a lot within a company like WWE. But it did not necessarily involve me dealing directly with FOX executives, that’s my point.”
On realizing things weren’t going the way he expected: “That happened fairly quickly. But not for any other reason than processes,” Bischoff stated. “The process across the board in WWE is a very unique, complex and an intense process. Keep in mind, I’ve been self-employed for 20 years. And for at least half of that, I’m kind of a one-man band. I conduct a lot of business, I’m developing a feature film for Netflix at the moment (the Hulk Hogan biopic), I’ve got other projects going on at the moment, but it’s not like I have a staff of people I’m working with. And I don’t really have anyone that I have to report to other than my wife and my banker. So, for 20 years, I’ve kind of been operating as a solo practitioner and now I’m leading an orchestra. And it was a transition. For me, I had a hard time adapting and for two reasons. One is, and this is my fatal flaw, and I tend to overestimate my ability to adapt to almost anything, because for the better part of my life, that’s normally been the case. I thought ‘Ok, I can do this.’ I know I’ve been self-employed for 20 years, I know I live out in the middle of no where in Wyoming surrounded by beautiful mountains, I know I’m in charge of my own schedule, I can come and go as I please, I know I’m only accountable to me, my wife and my family, but, I’ve done that corporate thing before, I can do it again. What I underestimated was just how difficult that adaptation would be for anybody that is good at adapting. It takes time. And I didn’t manage that well. My lack of performance, if you will, in terms of not fulfilling the role in the way that Vince McMahon saw it, that was on me. That wasn’t on WWE. It wasn’t because of any one person or group of people.”
On his failure to adapt: “It was on me and my failure to adapt. I just didn’t work out. It was a bad fit and more of a chemistry issue, really, than anything else. Vince McMahon is not a social friend of mine. We don’t have dinner together when I’m on the east coast or keep in contact a lot, but we’ll share a text every now and again. I still consider him a friend, to a degree. And I have an immense amount of respect for him. So there’s no frustration or anger on my part, because it was on me, not them. I didn’t live up to the job.”
On not seeing the decision coming: “Number one, I didn’t see it coming. I was surprised. Number two, in terms of the narrative – again, these are people who are ignorant who don’t really know what they’e talking about. They’re making assumptions on what makes logical sense to them based on the limited or lack of information they may have. But, it sounds good! It’s a click. It’s a headline. It’s something to talk about when you’ve got to create content because you’re running out of s*** to talk about. Then it’s out there on social media and before you know it, after a week or two, it’s now narrative that is written in stone. I don’t think my departure had anything to do with the ratings. I think my departure had everything to do with Vince McMahon expectations of how I would fill a brand new role that had never really existed before.”
On how Vince McMahon saw things: “He saw it one way and I didn’t have that same clear understanding or picture of that role, so it was inevitable that it wasn’t going to work out. And Vince McMahon is not the kind of guy – I think, at least, with the limited amount of time I’ve actually worked with him – once he makes a decision, he’s pretty quick to move on it. I think it was just his assessment that for whatever reason, I wasn’t the right guy for the role. But I don’t think it had anything to do with the ratings.”
