Eric Bischoff went on The Sam Roberts Wrestling Podcast where he talked about Bret Hart’s comments about him on the same podcast earlier this month. The highlights of Eric Bischoff’s appearance on the show, and his response to Bret Hart, are down below (transcript via WrestlingInc.com).
Bischoff on Bret Hart being a miserable person: “I didn’t listen to your show with Bret. I’m generally aware of the kind of things that Bret says because he’s been saying them for years, so it’s nothing new there. I’m sure he didn’t break any news. He’s just a miserable guy. He’s the type of guy–and I said it in one of my responses on Twitter; he has a giant hole in his soul, and he’s going to have to fill it with hate for somebody. When he came to work for me he hated Vince McMahon. He hated everybody in the McMahon family; he hated Shawn Michaels; he didn’t want to work with Hulk Hogan. He hated Ric Flair, he hated Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, he hated everybody, and I had to listen to that. It was a major effort to get him and Flair on the same page; which wasn’t because of Ric, it was because of Bret; he just hated everybody.”
Bischoff on how Hart was treated in WCW: “If you just watched him or listened to him over the years, he was able to get into the WWE Hall of Fame so he buried the hatchet with Vince McMahon and Shawn Michaels, of course he did, but you know, Bret showed up in WCW, it makes me laugh when he says he didn’t like how he was treated because we paid him a lot of money and treated him extremely well. Here was a guy that would show up 45 minutes before television started, before a live TV show and he would show up looking like he would sleep in the gutter the last three days; and he had no energy, no real desire to integrate himself and insert himself in the process. He wasn’t at all passionate about anything he did from day one.”
His thoughts on Chris Jericho leaving WCW: “I tried really hard to keep Jericho. I offered Chris a lot of money; I did everything I could to keep Chris, but Chris was determined to leave WCW because he really only used WCW as a stepping stone to get to WWE, and once he used it as a stepping stone to come to WWE, there wasn’t anything I could have done realistically, I don’t think I could have kept Chris Jericho in WCW.”
Bischoff on not recognizing Jericho’s talent: “I’d’ be lying if I said that I recognized that type of talent back then, but I didn’t. I knew he was a great talent and I wanted to keep him, but we had Bill Goldberg, we had Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Sting; we had a pretty deep main event level roster, and I didn’t see at the time how I could have broken Chris into that category within the time frame that he wanted to be in it; I just couldn’t do it. I hated seeing Chris Jericho go, I really did.”
