Eric Bischoff was never a fan of the Abyss character.
During a recent installment of his Ad Free Shows program, 83 Weeks, the former WCW Executive Vice President and WWE/IMPACT executive spoke about how he was never fond of the Abyss character portrayed by Chris Park.
Featured below is an excerpt from the episode where he touches on this topic with his in-depth thoughts.
“I love Chris Park as a human being. He is a wonderful human being. I did not like the Abyss character at all. It was a Mick Foley/Mankind, KMart Blue Light special. There was no authenticity to it. There was nothing unique about it. We’ve been there. We’ve done that. We’ve seen that at a very, very high level, and now we’re watching somebody basically ripping off that character, deriving their character from one that was successful previously with Mick Foley. I hated it. As soon as I got a little bit of trust from Chris Park, and a little bit more influence down the road, I was able to create the attorney character, which I think he knocked out of the park. He was scared to death to do that character. You have to know Chris to begin with. He’s such a loveable, good human being, but if you didn’t say good morning to him when you walked by him the first time, he would be scared to death the rest of the day that he was going to be fired. You might have been in the middle of a conversation on the phone walking by, or you’re running late for a meeting and maybe not taking the time to be as cordial. That happens. Backstage environments, live TV, or even taped TV can be fairly stressful, but Chris was one of those guys, ‘Eric, are you mad at me. Did I do something wrong? What can I do better next time?’ He was so over the top sometimes. It took me a while to get enough of a relationship with Chris that I could even explore a different type of character in the attorney Chris Park. When I laid it out to him, and I remembered where we were when I first laid it out to him, his eyes opened up and he got a big smile on his face. He was so freaking good at it. He’s an amazing performer and I would have loved to see him do anything else but that Abyss character.”
Check out the complete show at AdFreeShows.com. H/T to WrestlingNews.co for transcribing the above quotes.
