Social media is an evolving media. It changes every day.
Eric Bischoff
The fact that we are watching a live 'Monday Night Raw' every week is due to 'Nitro.'
The reason we didn't acquire WCW is an incoming, rotating door, new head of Turner at that time, took prime time television literally out of the deal that we had already negotiated. Once that happened, there was no way to make any sense of it. It was really just a video library and some ring mats.
Eric Bishoff the evil bastard is an effective character.
By the time my attempt to acquire WCW fell apart and Time Warner decided they didn't want anything remotely associated with wrestling near their networks, once that happened and really cut the cord, it was in my rear view mirror and didn't care or think about it too much.
One of the advantages and disadvantages of WCW had to deal with was being a member of Turner Broadcasting.
The WWE also embraced more of a reality-based approach to wrestling a year or two after I established it. I knew, deep down inside, were it came from. The WWE did it better than I did, and they're still here, and I'm not, but nonetheless - I knew where it came from.
There are very few voices that can speak with any kind of authority or credibility on what happened back during the time when WCW and WWF were going head to head, and I think the audience is interested in that period of time, clearly. And like I said, nobody could speak to it quite the way I could.
We formatted our shows so that, at nine o'clock, we were in the heat of hard-hitting, fast-paced cruiserweight action, and it was so different from the WWE that it worked.
DDP was the common guy, the everyman, a blue-collar guy from New Jersey. He represented something that the average person could believe in, in a way that was a little unique.
I couldn't pass a senior high school math test right now, but I could probably teach intellectual property and trademark law at Harvard.
When you hang on a little too long, you disappoint your fans, and deep, deep down inside, you're disappointing yourself, and that's the part that hurts you the most.
Had Fusient been successful in buying WCW, ultimately there would have been no one on that side of the equation, including me, that would have had the commitment to the business that Vince McMahon has had throughout the years.
When I ran WCW, I obviously had a lot of control over the business, but when I was in TNA, I had no control over anything other than creative.
When I created the Cruiserweight division in WCW, nobody called them cruiserweights in the industry at that point. That was a boxing term, not a wrestling term, but I did not want to call them junior heavyweights, light heavyweights, or anything that made them sound diminutive. I wanted it to sound special and cool.
You're going to have haters no matter what you do.
I never got close to the creative in AWA; not only was I not close to it, I wasn't allowed to be in a room close to it when they were talking about creative. That is how tightly held Verne Gagne believed in kayfabing people who he didn't believe needed to be in the process.
I didn't mind when Paul Wight came to me and said WWE offered him $1 million a year for ten years. I was like, 'Dude, you need to take that. You need to go now. Lemme give you a ride to the airport.'
Turner Broadcasting went from a very entrepreneurial, risk-taking company where I had a tremendous amount of freedom and autonomy to a corporate, bureaucratic nightmare.
Hulk will always be a part of sports entertainment/professional wrestling history, and there's nothing that's gonna change that. His relationship with the WWE, whether it's official or unofficial, is something that can't really be erased.
You know that Vince Russo... when Russo and I agreed to work together, one of his big ideas was that he wanted Lance Storm to be my son.
Anybody who comes along and wants to sell a wrestling show, guess who you are not gonna sell it to? You are not going to sell it to FOX and any of its affiliates, and,oh, by the way, you are not going to sell it to NBC Universal or any of its affiliates.
I consider myself an authority on drinking beer.
I had zero exposure to creative in WCW up until 1993, 1994. Even then, I was at a distance.
I never liked D-X since they invaded WCW.
I have a lot of respect for the folks over at WWE, and I have a ton of respect for what they've accomplished within the industry.
Professional wrestling, the WWE, and being in the Hall of Fame represent such a large part of Hulk's life, as does his connection to the audience.
I brought Muhammad Ali to North Korea in 1995. I tried that once. It didn't work out quite that well for me as it did for Dennis Rodman, but I brought Muhammad Ali to Pyongyang, North Korea, as part of a big wrestling event called the World Peace Festival. It was a two-day event that drew over 350,000 people.
A lot of respect for Ric Flair; he's just a great guy.
WCW had its moment, and that's what it was: it was a moment. And we created some great stories and changed the industry to a large degree.
One of the reasons wrestling works is because it allows people to suspend their disbelief. They may know it's not real, but if it's done well enough, they get sucked into it emotionally. And that's why they watch.
Tony Schiavone - I have always liked and respected Tony.
Bumps often require giving yourself completely to the talent you're in the ring with, and that's what makes wrestling such a performance art that is different from every other.
People are finally figuring it out that, at the end of the day, that WCW created some of the best talent in the history of the world. It was a great run.
Florida was a hotbed of professional wrestling, one of the hottest in the country.
Take the main event of WrestleMania and put it in front of 75 people, and it will dramatically affect the way everyone watching feels about it.
Diamond Dallas Page didn't have that larger-than-life persona, but he had a different connection with the audience.
I am pretty transparent how I do things.
I don't regret how I built the Cruiserweight division. Could I have done better? Sure. Absolutely. I'm sure I could have, especially with 20/20 hindsight. I just don't know of anybody that I talk to that looks back at that division and says, 'Oh, man, that sucked.'
Typically, in a live-action format, when you watch a wrestling show, you've got wrestlers in a ring in front of a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand people, and they're playing to large crowd, so you never really get that intimate, close and personal dialogue with them.
There's not as many passive wrestling fans as people would think. There are a lot of fans who just can't get enough, and they're almost more interested in what's going on behind the scenes and the business of wrestling then they are, necessarily, of what's going on inside of the ring.
Clearly there's value in Twitter and Facebook; otherwise, none of us would be involved in it.
If you go back in time and look at a map of all of the television markets where wrestling was most popular, historically, the deepest concentrations of those markets were in the northeast.
Let me just say this, Dolce Maria Garcia Rivas: You are not 'sexy,' you are not a 'star,' and you are certainly not a professional wrestler.
I drink a lot of beer.
It was fun and something I could do together with my wife and kids. We were all hand-washing bottles, cleaning and bottling together. It was like families that cook together - we just happened to brew together.
Mr. McMahon the character is a very effective heel.
When I hired the first group of cruiserweights - which consisted of Dean Malenko, Chris Jericho, and Eddie Guerrero - I sat them down in my office, and I was very clear to them. I said to them, almost verbatim, 'You need to be my human car crashes at 9 P.M.'
I've probably done 1,000 interviews about the 'Monday Night Wars' and how 'Nitro' was made.
You no longer have to have a big record label behind you and have to kowtow to the politics that enabled you to get there. You can be a phenomenal artist and put your stuff out there on YouTube and find yourself becoming a star.
