Eric Bischoff Defends Hated Wrestling Angle – “Wasn’t That Controversial”

Eric Bischoff, who is no stranger to controversy and generating headlines, defended a decision that many wrestling fans call one of the worst angles in the entire history of pro-wrestling.

As the tides began turning further in WWE’s favor during the Monday Night Wars, WCW’s management team, which included Bischoff, began getting more desperate to try and salvage what they were left with.

That sense of desperation led to a cornucopia of problems that only made things worse. At this point there are too many to list individually; however, one can find this archived forum post aptly called “the WCW Epic Fail Files” that sum up some of the more high-profile decisions made at the time.

That said, there is one angle included on that list that is still widely panned and considered irredeemable by most wrestling fans: the decision to make actor David Arquette WCW Champion.

It was a hated decision by almost everyone…except Eric Bischoff himself, who defended the angle on his 83 Weeks podcast.

Eric Bischoff’s justification for this decision was that he hoped the buzz it would generate would boost morale in a company that was already quickly going down the toilet.

“It wasn’t that controversial when it went down. You gotta realize, WCW was so far down morale-wise, ratings-wise, revenue-wise, organizationally … so, any attempt to do anything that might work was generally fairly embraced.

But under the circumstances that we were in, there was not a lot of pushback or people complaining about stuff.”

Additionally, Eric Bischoff compared his decision to WWE’s decision to have Roman Reigns beat Cody Rhodes at WrestleMania because it generated a similar degree of backlash.

“Everybody was just hoping that something was going to click, and this was one of those. Were there individuals backstage who didn’t agree? Absolutely. The same way there were individuals backstage at WrestleMania that didn’t agree with what WWE did with Cody Rhodes.”

h/t WrestlingInc for the transcription