Eric Bischoff Reflects On Cutting Lex Luger’s Pay When Signing Him Away From WWE

Eric Bischoff has spoken before about how he was hesitant about signing Lex Luger away from WWE, and he recently revealed how much of a pay cut Luger received. Luger made his return to WCW on the debut episode of Nitro in a shocking moment, as he had appeared on a WWE live event the day before. Bischoff recounted the process of signing Luger on the JAXXON Podcast, and you can see highlights below (per Wrestling Inc):

On not being keen on signing Luger: “Lex had been with WCW a long time and was very close with Sting. Sting came to me and said, ‘Hey, Lex’s WWE contract is up. Would you be interested?’ I said flat out, no. I’d worked with him before, and he was arrogant. I didn’t want to deal with him.”

On eventually agreeing to it: “And then Steve worked on me for a couple weeks, really worked on me and I said, okay look I’ll talk to him [but] no promises. I said here’s how we’re going to do it, Lex. I’m going to give you 150 grand a year, so I cut his pay by 600 grand. I said [I’ll] give you 150 a year if it works out [and] at some point we’ll sit down and talk about renegotiating your deal. Because I think I’m gonna test this guy to see if he really, really wants to be here and prove himself. He didn’t miss a beat, ‘Okay let’s do it’ [and we] shook hands.”