Eric Bischoff: You know, it’s funny that you brought that up. Because I’ve only seen a couple of episodes, I don’t really watch a lot of late night television. I have a home in Wyoming, my son and I were up there a couple of weeks ago and I was flipping through the channels one evening while we were just having a beer and then all of a sudden there I was interviewing, I think it was Mike Enos and Wayne Bloom. I got a big kick out of watching it. It was funny looking at myself 20 years ago and I hardly recognized myself.
Most importantly though, I enjoyed looking at the interviews because I think the interviews, and now I’m starting to sound like the old type of wrestling promoter that I used to not like hear talk about the good-old days, I think that the wrestling interviews were so much better. Even from talent that really wasn’t very experienced. Guys like Mike Enos and Wayne Bloom are perfect examples. They were young guys, they were new in the business. They came in roughly about the same time that I did into the AWA, so they had very little camera time in front of the stick. But yet, the quality of the interview was so much better than what we see today from even experienced talent.
To me it kind of highlighted one of the things that is so much different than today’s wrestling show. And quite frankly, in my opinion, it is one of the things that is lacking is the quality of that interview. A lot of that just has to do with the time. Today’s television environment is so much different than it was 20 years ago. There’s so much of an emphasis on getting as you can into a small amount of time as possible that everything is hurried and rushed, including the interviews. And as a result, the interviews don’t have the impact that they had. And the talent doesn’t really have the opportunity to develop an interview the way it should be developed.
You combine that with the fact that the interviews today are so scripted, and they are scripted by people that have never really been in front of the camera and really don’t understand the character. In some cases, and not to be critical, but the people writing these interviews have never really been in the wrestling business as a talent, so they don’t understand sometimes what it takes to tailor an interview, to make it unique, to make it have impact for a specific talent.
All the interviews in my opinion, with the exception of a handful, they all kind of sound the same. I can pretty much tell you by watching them who wrote them. That’s how similar they are to me. I can literally tell you, in some cases, not every case, but I can listen to an interview and not only tell you wrote, but who was standing there producing it just by the cadence, the tone, and the type of material that was in the interview.
