Eric Bischoff Explains Why He Wouldn’t Allow AEW Talent Work Independent Shows If He Were Tony Khan

On the latest episode of Strictly Business, Eric Bischoff talked about whether he would let his talent work independent shows like AEW and other promotions allow. You can check out some highlights below:

On whether promotions should allow their talent to work independent dates: “I wouldn’t do it. Where’s the benefit other than to the talent and to the indie promoter? Where’s the benefit? Where’s the risk? I guess you could probably, if you dig deep enough and hard enough and you wanted to justify your position badly, you could come up with a benefit. Maybe because you’re supporting the indie scene and building some loyalty and following within the independent audience, and that’s not a bad argument. It’s just that the value of that argument is minimal, in my opinion. What’s the risk? Well, the risk is somebody gets hurt on the indie scene and takes them off your roster. I think that’s probably happened in the past. I just don’t see a scenario where the benefits outweigh the risks. As an average golfer, would you get any benefit from taking lessons from somebody who’s less proficient in golf than you? Here’s your answer. What are you going to learn on the indie scene? How are you going to improve on the indie scene? All you’re going to do is learn a bad golf swing, and it becomes twice as difficult to unlearn a bad golf swing and unlearn bad habits than it takes to learn good ones or to learn good golf swings.”

On WCW video games: “No, I never played them. I kind of was outside of the demo as they were emerging. It was never my thing to sit down and play video games. I’ve never been a video game guy, even. I think I played pong when it first came out because it was new, and you could play it on your TV. And I might have dabbled in that for a minute, but after that minute or two, I kind of lost interest in it. I’ve just never been interested in video games in terms of strategy. I don’t know that there was a real strategy other than, let’s try to get a deal and let’s try to get the best deal we can, and the best deal we could get at the time I think it was either an eight or $10 million guarantee upfront from EA sports for a WCW video game license. So it’s not that we weren’t successful in it, but it was never something that I was familiar enough or passionate about enough to interject myself into. It was an important part of our business, don’t get me wrong, but other people were much more knowledgeable and much more interested in that space than I was. I was interested in the business of the business and the business of video games, but I wasn’t interested in the product itself.”

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