During a recent episode of his 83 Weeks podcast, Eric Bischoff looked back at Dennis Rodman’s run in WCW, and the possibility of Hulk Hogan returning to WWE in 1998.
You can check out some highlights from the podcast below:
If he would have changed anything about Dennis Rodman’s time with WCW: “Absolutely not. Dave (Meltzer) has a tendency to project, it’s one of my biggest issues with him is his own personal take on things. Kind of overshadows any of the information and facts involved. Were we disappointed in the buyrate? Absolutely freaking not. I think what Dave tries historically… what he’s trying to do is project the way he would look at a buyrate and how he would react without any real understanding… he didn’t know our expectations. He had no idea what our strategy is going forward, he had no idea how we valued or didn’t value things. He only looked at it from, ‘Oh, they brought in Dennis Rodman at $750,000,’ which, by the way, is wrong.
“No, man I thought the way we used Dennis, I thought the press that we got out of Dennis, the awareness that was created for WCW and Nitro because of Dennis… I think I could have cared less what the buyrate was to be honest. It didn’t matter. It’s not like every time we put on a pay-per-view, we had a gun to our head and we had to do a certain revenue, you know, reach a certain revenue threshold… wasn’t the case. I wouldn’t have changed one thing with regard to how we used Dennis. It wasn’t $750,000 – it was a million. It was worth three times that much to WCW as a brand. That’s the part that people that have never really been in the business can’t understand. It’s not that they’re not smart or they’re not intelligent or they’re not capable of learning things. It’s just they’ve never been in that situation, so it’s not apparent to them how someone like Dennis could have such a powerful impact on Nitro and WCW as a brand regardless of whatever the buyrate was. Buyrates are not the end-all, be-all.”
Possibility of Hulk Hogan leaving in 1998: “I never felt that way. I was never concerned. I mean, I think we talked about it once on a previous podcast where I think we were in Denver, and after the show, typically Terry and I would get together and go out grab a bite to eat, or have a beer whatever, watch the replay and Hulk said, ‘I got a meeting with Vince. Because yeah, Vince is in town and wanted me to come over and meet him.’ I said ‘Alright, let me know what happens.’ I wasn’t worried then. I was never worried or concerned that there was any gamesmanship going on.”