Eric Bischoff On Whether House Shows Still Have A Place In Wrestling

On the latest episode of Strictly Business, Eric Bischoff talked about live event touring in pro wrestling and the importance of it. You can check out some highlights below:

On how reliant WCW was on live event gate during the late ’90s: “When I was running WCW, we didn’t get television rights. There were no television rights in our revenue stream, certainly not. Well, since there were none, obviously you can’t compare to what there are today, but I think the connection — and you pointed it out just as you were setting this up how important was the live gate revenues in the WCW business model. I think in general, here was the ideal scenario. When I was running WCW, I thought about WCW revenue at the end of the year, gross revenues as a table. Each one of those tables was supported by one of four legs. You had, let’s knock it out first, arena touring, live gate, whatever you want to call it. You had pay-per-view. You had licensing and merchandising. Well, you had merchandising, I’ll separate them, and then you had licensing.

“Ideally, all four of those legs were equally strong, and that certainly wasn’t the case when I took over WCW in whatever year it was. ’93, we’ll call it. Really not until ’94, but let’s say ’94. At that point, WCW’s table was trying to balance on two legs. Basically, the most significant one is television. Live events were there, it was a cash flow, but it was all the cash that was flowing in, flowing out at a more rapid pace. So it was completely off-balanced. As things started changing for WCW in ’95, really is when it began to change in ’96. It certainly changed in ’97, ’98, and so forth. Those four legs, those four revenue streams, were more closely constructed in terms of strength, you know, their value to the platform and or group.”

On whether there is still a place in wrestling for house shows despite having big TV deals: “I think at the very least, you’re almost forced into doing it, or you’re going to take the risk by eliminating it completely that it really isn’t significant and it really doesn’t matter anymore. And then potentially miscalculating and realizing that even though touring isn’t as successful anymore, and even though ratings are you know, coming down or trending down over time, like everything in television. By eliminating touring, does that accelerate that? Are you willing to risk that? Or does one double down on it? Is that an investment worth making in today’s environment? Because that’s what we’re really talking about. I don’t have the answer. I don’t want to pretend I do.”

On house shows taking a toll on the bodies of wrestlers: “If I were in that situation, if I were in that seat today and had to make that judgment, my judgment would be to tour versus not tour. And I’ll tell you why. Not only for all the reasons that I’ve already laid out, I won’t repeat. I’ll try not to repeat myself. I know I do anyway, but I’ll try. Let’s take all of them — audience, connectivity, and experience are out of the equation for right now. Here’s the other reason why I think touring is really important. First reason, I think the risk of injury to talent is much greater when they’re not as active, and they’re not out there performing every day. Maybe not every day, every other day. And by the way, I wouldn’t want to advocate seeing anybody out there on the road 250 or 300 days a year. I think that’s a bad, bad long-term situation for talent. I’ve seen it. But by not touring it all I think you actually, on the surface of it, you say, ‘Yeah, but the more often you wrestle, the more likely it is you’re going to get hurt.’ And there’s probably some truth to that. But by not wrestling every day, your body is not conditioned to absorb the kind of things that professional wrestlers absorb, especially when they’re out there busting their ass on television. Or you’re really cranking it up on a pay-per-view and trying to raise the bar even higher than they typically do during the week by not. Being out there and doing it on a regular basis, I think you run the risk of getting hurt.

“Now, why do I say that? I’ve never been a wrestler. I’ve never been on tour. I’ve never been out and performed 200 [days a year], I’ve never been out and performed three days a week, two days a week. As far as being a wrestler, I don’t have the personal experience here. But over the years, I’ve talked to a lot of people who have, and across the board most of the guys that I’ve had this conversation with at very high levels, and some breaking into the business, is that they’re going to get hurt when they’ve had four or five or six days off as opposed to being out there two or three days a week, or four days a week. The time off is almost a bigger risk in some cases than working consistently. That’s one reason I do think that you run the risk of injuries. Especially to your top-level performers, the ones that are really going out there and trying to raise the bar higher than they did last week and do things that nobody’s seen before.”

On the importance of house shows for developing talent: “But I think an even more important aspect of it is, talent doesn’t really get a chance to develop. And I used to hate it. I hated it when guys would say that to me. You know the older guys, right? I heard that from the minute I walked through the door in WCW. Ole Anderson, ‘If you’re not out on tour, you’re not doing house shows. You know you’re not going to get it good.; Well, intellectually, I understood that, but I really didn’t understand the magnitude of that position until much later on in my career. And now I can see it even more clearly than I did late in my career.

“Because look, one of the things that I learned from Ted Turner, specifically from Ted Turner, and Ted said it within the context of programming a network. I don’t know what his exact quote was, but it was something to the effect of, you know, ‘Don’t program your network for your own tastes, because you’re programming an entire network for an audience of one.’ Not everybody loves what you love. You may be a very successful person. You may have passionate interests. You may think that whatever it is you are excited about is the most exciting thing on television. But not everybody agrees with you. So, you have to learn how to program a television network for a mass audience if you want it to be successful. And I think the same thing is true in life, right? But if you’re creating content and you’re creating it solely based on your tastes and likes, you’re missing potentially a large part of your potential audience.”

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