Jim Ross Discusses If He Was Bitter Leaving WCW, Details His Meeting With Vince McMahon To Join WWF

In an interview with Conrad Thompson for the Grilling JR podcast, Jim Ross spoke about claims that Eric Bischoff made that Ross should be allowed to leave WCW as he was ‘miserable’, and said, ‘why keep a guy here when we’ve been surrounded by negativity, bad morale and political in-fighting?’ According to the quote from Bischoff, he wanted Ross to leave so that he could get on with his life. Here are highlights:

On Bischoff’s claims that Ross was miserable: “I think he’s inferring that my negativity was infectious, that I was one of the reasons for bad morale and that I was deeply involved in political in-fighting. I take umbrage to all those things. Could they have happened on an isolated basis? Abso-damn-lutely. I failed that, I failed in that relationship [with Jan] and I was pissed at myself, angry at the world because I let this woman slip away. So I could see Eric’s assessment here of having truth sprinkled in, but was I always bitter? No. But was I always a political mess? I don’t think so. I’d like to think not, any more than the wrestling business already is.”

On Bischoff saying Ross ‘got over’ by bashing WCW: “I got myself over, by the way, with my fucking work. My work got me over. That’s what got me over. Wrestle-speak, again.”

On calling Bruce Prichard in February 1993 about leaving WCW: “I said I’m getting ready to…I’m probably going to leave here, I can leave here. There’s some issues, they’ve made some changes. My presence is not necessarily wanted in the role I want to be in. I want to be a broadcaster, that’s something I’ve worked all my life to do Bruce, you know. Much like he wanted to be a performer all his life quite frankly. Nothing wrong with that. I said, ‘You know where I’m coming from with this thing. I don’t have McMahon’s number. I don’t know if he’d be interested. I don’t want to bother him if he’s not but would you let him know that I’m interested in talking to him about work?’ And he said yeah. Wasn’t a long conversation. Bruce and I talked…we would talk sporadically, we’d been friends since the Mid-South days. Since the days of Paul Boesch and all that good stuff. I felt like we had a good relationship, a good foundation. He was the one person there in WWE at that time that I knew I could get through to and communicate with.”

On meeting with Vince McMahon: “So I drove down there to Augusta [Georgia], WWE’s doing a syndicated television taping there. Vince says, ‘We’re going to be down in your area, why don’t you come down and meet? Let’s meet. I want to meet you in person.’ I’d never met him. So I drove down. I remember, this is kinda part of the story, I had this blue, two-door Lincoln. […] I run into Gerry Briscoe, another Okie. He said, ‘Let me go get Vince for you.’ He got Vince, which is unusual at a TV taping, Vince is always…that’s the days he wore his tennis shoes and custom made suits. And he was all over the place, ubiquitous, at the gorilla position, everywhere and all this other stuff. But then when we do voice-overs back in post, there wasn’t a need to talk with the announcers because they weren’t there. So he was everywhere. So he came and met with me. As we were standing in the back of the arena, I knew a lot of the talent…my God, I’d been in the business forever. We kept getting interrupted and he kept getting frustrated. So he said, ‘Let’s go outside.’ We went outside to the back of the building and we were there between two and three hours. He didn’t see any of the taping. I was told later, might have been Bruce, Brisco, Patterson, I’m not sure, they can never remember Vince being at the TV and not working with the talent. He did nothing that whole taping but talk to me. And I just thought we were gonna say ‘Hey, how you doing, I’d like to do something with you, do you want to have a meeting someplace?’ We had a meeting right then, right there. We talked about my salary in WCW. He said ‘I can’t pay you what they’re paying you right now but I can get fairly close and I can also give you 50 grand to sign.’ I immediately stuck my hand out and said you got a deal.”

If you use any of the quotes, please credit Grilling JR with an h/t to 411mania.com