During the latest edition of his 83 Weeks podcast WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW President Eric Bischoff revealed that the legendary “Macho Man” Randy Savage took a pay cut during his time in WCW so that the promotion would hire his brother, Lanny Poffo. Hear Bischoff’s retelling of the saga below.
Whether signing Lanny Poffo in WCW was done to keep Randy Savage happy:
“Partially, but, just like I said earlier on about things going on behind the scenes that nobody really knows or understands or is aware of. Here you had a situation where Randy, who loved his brother dearly, and the same is true for Lanny with respect to Randy. But Randy was in a great position. Here is a guy who brought in a sponsor that covered his entire salary. It didn’t cost me a nickel to bring Randy Savage in because I was a smart mocker futher, and I was able to negotiate and make that happen in a way that everybody won. Slim Jim won. Randy won. WCW won. We got a major talent for zero net dollars out of pocket.”
Says Savage agreed to take a pay cut to get his brother a job:
“Randy, because he loved his brother as much as he did, until the day he died, wanted Lanny to have an opportunity, financially and hopefully at some point an opportunity to perform in the ring. Randy came to me on behalf of Lanny — I’m not sure Lanny even knew about it. I don’t know, I’ve never talked to Lanny about this. Randy came to me and said, I want you to hire my brother. My response was, Randy, I can’t. I can’t justify it. Randy was in the midst, not in the midst, but we were talking about renegotiating his next deal, not renegotiating but negotiating his next deal. Randy made it clear that he would take less money. We had talked about that number. We were pretty comfortable with it. Early on, wasn’t a big deal, but Randy said, I’ll take less, just bring Lanny in. So of course I did it. Yeah, in the hopes that there was a story there for Lanny. That there was an opportunity. I didn’t know what it was, but if he’s under contract, and we can start thinking about it, depending on what evolves during the course of a month or three months or six months, there may have been a role that would have made sense for Lanny. But at the end of it all, it didn’t matter to me because, just like bringing in Randy, because of the Slim Jim deal, bringing in Lanny had zero effect on my budget, zero.”
How Randy and Lanny had a great relationship:
“So, I would say to Dave Meltzer. Yeah. It must be nice to have a brother in a high position in a company like WCW at the time but it would be even nicer to have a brother that was willing to take less to give you an opportunity. That says everything anybody needs to know about Randy, about Lanny, who I have nothing but respect for.”
(H/T and transcribed by Fightful)