Eric Bischoff Says Hulk Hogan Didn’t Think Bret Hart Understood the Business Side of Wrestling

Eric Bischoff says Hulk Hogan respected Bret Hart’s ability in the ring but didn’t think Hart understood the business outside of it. On the latest episode of 83 Weeks, Conrad Thompson looked back at Halloween Havoc 1996, which took place days after Hart revealed on Raw that he had signed a 20-year contract with the WWF. Bischoff said he and Hart never got into creative during WCW’s pursuit of him, that Roddy Piper’s debut at the show had nothing to do with Hart, and that he pictured Hart alongside Ric Flair and Arn Anderson on the WCW side rather than in the nWo. He also said Kevin Nash was more supportive of bringing Hart in than he expected. You can check out his comments below:

On If Hart Could Have Been in Piper’s Spot the Show:

“No. Two different things. Did I get that far down the line creatively with Bret? The answer to that is unequivocally no. I don’t care what Bret says, what he remembers, what he’s told himself over the years, and maybe he’s never said anything, I don’t know. But I can tell you, we never got into creative at all. Not even anything close, other than perhaps a general philosophy in terms of where the company was going, or who we saw our audience being, and future plans and things like that. But no real creative. I think the timing is just coincidence. One didn’t have anything to do with the other, meaning Roddy coming in and a spot being available to advance a story. That’s all just coincidence, really.”

On When Piper’s WCW Ceal Came Together:

“I think we were a good four to six weeks out. The contract process took a while. It always did at that time. I think Barry Bloom was the agent there, so it wouldn’t have come together in a week, for sure. Best case scenario, three or four, but likely four to six weeks out. I don’t think it was any longer than that.”

On Whether Hart Would Have Joined the nWo:

“I don’t know for sure. Obviously, none of us will ever know for sure what we would have done 30 years ago if a situation that didn’t exist would have existed. My inclination is to think that he would not have joined the nWo. Because in my mind even when I first met Bret, for whatever reason — and I don’t know why — I looked at him as a WCW type of guy. I saw him in my mind immediately with Ric Flair, like Arn Anderson, a part of that Team WCW against the nWo. That was my impression of who he would be in WCW before I ever went to go meet him in Los Angeles just to socialize and get to know each other. That I can answer pretty assuredly. That’s what I would have done, more than likely.

“Now, there might have been a reason, or something would have come up, or I would have had a conversation with Scott or Kevin or Terry or Hulk or whoever. And somebody would say, ‘Hey, what if we do this?’ Sure, I’d be open to it. But my instinct was that I saw Bret as being traditional. The nWo were anarchists. They were the renegades, they were the rebels. They didn’t like history, they didn’t like tradition. That was their angle, right? That was their perspective: WWE’s hokey wrestling stuff, we’re going to break the rules, we’re going to make new rules. To me, that wasn’t Bret Hart. Bret Hart was the opposite of that, regardless of whatever storyline was going on in WWF because frankly, I wasn’t paying attention to it. I couldn’t care less what he was doing in WWF. I told him on the phone, I didn’t care if he got beat on pay-per-view in WWF. It didn’t matter to me, because the character Bret Hart represented something that I saw fitting into more or less the WCW side of the equation back in 1996.”

On Of Hogan Saw Hart At the Same Level as Randy Savage & Piper:

“I don’t think he did, because I don’t think Bret saw himself at that level. By that, I mean he didn’t carry himself at that level. I’m going to share with you what I remember specifically of conversations that I had with Hulk about Bret, and I’m paraphrasing most of it. Forgive me for not remembering details of conversations, but I’m going to give you the gist of it, and it’s going to be very close. I think Hulk respected Bret’s abilities in the ring as much as anybody. He probably put him right up there with Ric Flair in terms of Bret’s abilities in the ring. Hulk didn’t think Bret really understood the business of the wrestling business to the extent that he needed to in order to become a Hulk Hogan or a Stone Cold Steve Austin, or a John Cena or a Rock. Or even a Cody Rhodes, as early as this still is in Cody’s career, right? Those guys carried themselves in a way and at a level, particularly in public, that set them above everybody else. That’s how stars become stars.

“Jimmy Hart used to say this. It used to drive me crazy, but it’s true. ‘You dress like the audience, and sooner or later, you’re going to be in the audience.’ We heard that from Dick Clark, and we’d always say that. But if you think about it, it becomes very true. How you carry yourself determines in many respects how the public perceives you, whether the public is somebody driving by you while you’re at the bus stop, or 15,000 people that paid 50 bucks a head to come and watch you in the ring. The way you carry yourself and present yourself, the difference between those who are superstars and those who are on the superstars’ card, is night and day. And I think Hulk looked at Bret as somebody that understood the magic in the ring, but didn’t understand the magic outside of it.

On the Lack Of Trust Between Hogan and Hart:

“There was also a lack of trust there. I’ve heard all the stories; I’m so sick of hearing the stories. It doesn’t matter anymore. To be honest with you, you’d have to sift through all the stories to try to distill the truth out of all of it. Because a little bit of all of it is true, but not all of it is true from anybody’s perspective. So I don’t think about that a lot. I just remember specific things that Hulk would say, knowing Hulk the way I knew Hulk — because he was stubborn too. Once he made up his mind about something, anything, another wrestler, it doesn’t matter what it was, he was pretty rigid. He didn’t often change his mind, and when he did, it took a while.

“I’ll give you an example. This is just the one that I remember specifically. He talked about being in an airport with Bret when he was wearing jeans that looked like he’d been wearing them for four days and a leather jacket. Looking like he hadn’t showered in a week, sleeping on a duffel bag in an airport. Here’s your WWF champion, or Intercontinental champion maybe, I don’t know. And I get it. You’re tired, you want to go to sleep, you’ve been traveling; I’ve been there, done that. But you’ve got to carry yourself in a certain way. And I think when Hulk saw things like that, it was just like, ‘He’s never really going to get it.’ That’s it. It had nothing to do with whether Hulk liked Bret, didn’t like Bret, or respected his abilities. It wasn’t any of that. He just didn’t think he could carry the ball. And he might have been dead wrong about that. I don’t know, but nobody changed his mind.”

On If Hogan Would Have Worked With Hart In WCW:

“Would Hulk have said, ‘Okay, let bygones be bygones, and let’s see if we can make it work?’ Absolutely. It’s not that he didn’t want to work with Bret. I think he wanted to see where Bret’s head was at for a little while before he did. I don’t think he would have been excited about jumping right into a match with Bret. It didn’t come up, so I’m not positive. We didn’t talk about it, but I’m pretty sure there would have been some resistance to that.

“Look, I went to Hulk first and said, ‘I’m bringing this guy in.’ I didn’t want to bring somebody in and have the upper 25% of my roster melting down over it. So I gave everybody a chance to share what they thought and how they felt, and nobody said no. Nobody said, ‘Screw that, I don’t want to work with him.’ There were some that were less enthusiastic than others, and there were some that you might be surprised by. Kevin Nash, for example, was way more supportive than I thought he would be. At least a ‘give it a shot’ kind of attitude, as opposed to burying him. But I just don’t think Hulk really saw Bret the same way Bret saw Bret.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit 83 Weeks with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.