During a recent interview with Fightful, Eric Bischoff revealed that he had built the nWo up with so many members because there was a mandate to split the two rosters between WCW and nWo. Bischoff explained that he didn’t think it would work. Here’s what he had to say:
Then the opportunity that would have created—and I get a lot of heat, deservedly so, not trying to evade it, deny it, make excuses for it—yeah, a lot of that talent we brought into the NWO was less than star caliber. Yes, they were. But, those people would have been part of a roster, and had a more important role, had there been a NWO exclusive show and a WCW exclusive show, two separate brands. It’s a hypothetical rabbit hole. Once you go in, you can’t come out. Like Hotel California for rabbits. Who knows, you know? Had the merger not occurred, had WCW, like so many other companies—another book if people really, really want to understand and be able to talk about WCW, it’s impact, it’s history, the good, the bad, the good decisions, the bad decisions—read Guy Evans’ book and then read a book by an author by the name of Nina Munk. She wrote a book a long time ago called “When Fools Rush In.” She’s not a wrestling person. She’s a journalist. She wrote a story about the merger. So, it wasn’t just WCW that got hacked, slashed and mistreated as a result of everybody’s dream of increasing what is referred to as [IBEDA] within their respective divisions. So that their stock options would be worth even more money than if they had been hadn’t quite meet those [IBEDAs]. It was all driven, I don’t want to say by greed, but it’s the market. It’s what people do in publicly held companies. But, there was such a mad rush to get that [IBEDA] up to, I think it was something like 18-20%, which in previous years where we were considered successful it was 10% or 11%, we had to do it by robbing Peter to pay Paul and unfortunately WCW and a lot of other companies were Peter and got robbed by Paul. Had that not occurred, there’s a lot of dominos that wouldn’t have fallen the wrong way, in my opinion. But, we’ll never know if I’m accurate or not accurate, full of shit or not. We’ll never know.
You can read the full interview HERE.
