Eric Bischoff Says nWo Sting Was An Improvisational Idea, Recalls Bet He Made With NJPW Referee Tiger Hattori

In the latest episode of the podcast 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff spoke about the creation of the nWo Sting, which was played by Jeff Farmer and was an idea that apparently didn’t have a lot of thought behind it initially. Here are highlights:

On the nWo Sting: “Jeff Farmer was an aspiring performer in WCW. I wanna be very sensitive. Yeah. Sensitive. That’s what I want to be. I want to be sensitive in the way I describe Jeff because he’s a super guy. He was never going to be a major star in WCW, in my opinion, at that time, not necessarily because of his lack of talent but because of the overabundance of it that existed at that time. Hard to break through the clutter for him. And the whole fake Sting/imposter Sting thing was king of an improvisational idea, somebody threw it out there, ‘Aw wouldn’t this be kind of cool?’ This would be a cool little stunt, angle, whatever…and it worked. Jeff did a great job. Physically he looked very much like Sting. About the same height, same build. Once you gimmicked him all up, put him in his Sting outfit, you would have a hard time differentiating between the two, at least on television. So it worked really well. So we decided to utilize that angle. Actually the folks over at New Japan did, they decided to utilize that angle over in Japan. The motivation was probably pretty obvious. It was a lot cheaper, it was a lot easier…there wasn’t necessarily a financial consideration, but it was a lot easier to get the fake Sting over to Japan on a regular basis than it was the real Sting.”

On Jeff Farmer’s popularity in Japan: “So Jeff Farmer, who I recently ran into when I was over in Japan, a couple of months ago, is still working in Japan as nWo Sting. He became a huge hit over in Japan. It was just one of those kind of obscure, unexpected things that you do, it’s not like a whole lot of thought went into it. Nobody masterminded it, there wasn’t a big debate. We didn’t sit around the booking room and pound copious amounts of coffee and try to come up with a way to come up with a suitable replacement for Sting over in Japan. It just kinda happened almost as an improvisational kind of thing. But for whatever reason, he got over huge. And he’s still working to this day in Japan. He built a 20-year career out of being the imposter Sting. The fact that, here’s a guy that had it not been for the nWo and the imposter Sting character, he might have spent a cup of coffee in the sports entertainment business and instead, he spent twenty years making a fortune over in Japan. It’s great.”

On how he knew Tiger Hattori: “The way that came about, interestingly enough, Sonny [Onoo] was the liaison between WCW and New Japan for all logistics, let’s just put it that way. Whether it was travel, merchandise orders, whatever it may be. Sonny, because he was fluent in Japanese, he was born there and fluent, was our in-house liaison. Nobody else was about to handle or function. As such, whenever New Japan Pro Wrestling wanted to order nWo merchandise, they would order through Sonny. We would then have it manufactured and shipped to New Japan Pro Wrestling. We would mark it up however we marked it up, 25, 30, 40 percent, I don’t recall. If something cost us four dollars we would sell it to New Japan for eight or nine dollars. They would mark it up then, as I was told, to 35 or 40 dollars for retail. So it was a big piece of business for New Japan, about eight million dollars worth in 1997. Previous to myself being charge of WCW and Sonny being adjunct to me and part of the process, previously in WCW’s history with New Japan, Misawa, or Tiger Hattori, was that liaison.”

On making the bet that Hattori could take him down: “Now what Misawa was doing, he was along the way so he would order something from WCW or whoever else he worked with in the United States, because he was a based in New York, he would then mark it up for himself and move it on down the line to New Japan. So he was pocketing a ton of cash. I didn’t know any of that. I didn’t know the history, I didn’t know how business was done before. Nobody told me, nobody smartened me up. I don’t think anybody really frickin’ knew, to be honest. So now I come along, new kid on the block, WCW, re-establishing my personal level, professional level with New Japan Pro Wrestling, got real tight with Masa Saito who was really the direct connect, Antonio Inoki and I got pretty close, my relationship with the upper management with New Japan became pretty solidified without knowing how things used to be done. I didn’t realize that we were totally circumventing Hattori.

Now at this event in Osaka, we were in this bar and Hattori had kind of a chip on his shoulder. He saw how big everything was getting with the nWo, he saw millions of dollars of merchandise and he wasn’t getting a cut. So he was kind of a dick, to be honest. And of course, we’re drinking, obviously alcohol involved and he had a chip on his shoulder. Things escalated in the conversation and as things escalated through the night in a half-hearted kind of funny sort of way, I started pushing Hattori a little bit because he was being a little bit of a jackass. I didn’t know what his background was. I knew he was an amateur wrestler in Japan, I knew he had pretty stiff credentials but I didn’t know the details or I probably would have been a little cautious. But yeah we ended up clearing the chairs and he was pounding his chest and telling me how easy he could wax the floor with me and things like that. I wasn’t his caliber wrestler, I want to make this really clear…on my best day as a high school wrestler I was mediocre. Now I got better out of high school, I started wrestling in AEU, freestyle, Greco-Roman wrestling tournaments, I actually wrestled on an AEW wrestling team representing the US against Finland. So I actually got better out of high school because I started taking it more seriously and training with a different level of people. But I was pretty confident with myself in 1997 in terms of my wrestling ability more because of my martial arts background. By 1997, I had already been a black belt for a long time. And controlling the gap between your opponent is probably as important to just about anything. And I was pretty confident in myself at that point so I said ‘Sure! I’ll bet you!’ And again, because I didn’t know Hattori’s background, I didn’t know how embarrassed he would be when he lost that bet…it was a highlight of my career. As a post-post amateur wrestler, that was probably the highlight of my amateur wrestling career was taking Hattori’s money in front of all of his peers which made it better because Masa Saito, a lot of the boys, the top wrestlers from New Japan were all there, they all saw it. So Hattori was not only a dick, he was humiliated in the process, which made it great.”

IF you use any of these quotes, credit 83 Weeks with an h/t to 411mania.com.