AEW President, CEO, General Manager & Head of Creative Tony Khan says WWE Hall of Famer Eric Bischoff has been “incendiary, contradictory and hypocritical” with his AEW criticism.
While Bischoff has made a few special appearances for AEW, he has also not shied away from critiquing the company in various interviews and podcast appearances. Khan appeared on Busted Open Radio today and at one point he addressed a fascination about a perception “that every match on every show should have a long storyline built to what it’s taking place.” Khan said “it just doesn’t need to be the case for every single match.”
Khan did not mention WWE by name, but he alluded to that being the case because of how WWE has booked their TV product over the last two decades. Khan said there are stories, and have been, for the majority of the matches on AEW TV.
Khan then took aim at Bischoff, who he once called a friend. A while back, Bischoff took issue with Khan’s previous comments on how WCW would still be in business if Ted Turner knew half as much about booking pro wrestling as he did. These comments apparently fractured the relationship between Khan and Bischoff.
“Frankly, the person that has been the most incendiary, contradictory and hypocritical on this entire point is Eric Bischoff,” Khan said, explaining that to him, the “good” WCW Nitro episodes from 1995 to 1998 featured random lucha matches and other unexpected pairings.
“There was a certain exquisite randomness to the lineup of the card.” Khan added. “There were a lot of stories happening in WCW, but probably less than half the matches on Nitro had a story going into them and that was fine. It was the industry standard show.”
Khan said WCW then copied WWE’s method of doing things where every single match had to be happening for a reason. He added that his own reason for a seemingly random pairing could be the start of something new, or just a challenge to see who’s the best in that particular match.
“To see the person who probably put more cold matches on TV, and did it successfully and did it well, say that it’s an abomination to do it is pretty contradictory,” Khan said. He later added, “I definitely don’t want to see fans get brainwashed into thinking there’s only one way to do this just because they’ve seen it done one way for a long time.”
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(H/T to F4W for the quotes)
