Anybody who comes along and wants to sell a wrestling show, guess who you are not gonna sell it to? You are not going to sell it to FOX and any of its affiliates, and,oh, by the way, you are not going to sell it to NBC Universal or any of its affiliates.
— Eric Bischoff
The WWE also embraced more of a reality-based approach to wrestling a year or two after I established it. I knew, deep down inside, were it came from. The WWE did it better than I did, and they're still here, and I'm not, but nonetheless - I knew where it came from.
I never liked D-X since they invaded WCW.
Turner Broadcasting went from a very entrepreneurial, risk-taking company where I had a tremendous amount of freedom and autonomy to a corporate, bureaucratic nightmare.
I couldn't pass a senior high school math test right now, but I could probably teach intellectual property and trademark law at Harvard.
If you go back in time and look at a map of all of the television markets where wrestling was most popular, historically, the deepest concentrations of those markets were in the northeast.
There's not as many passive wrestling fans as people would think. There are a lot of fans who just can't get enough, and they're almost more interested in what's going on behind the scenes and the business of wrestling then they are, necessarily, of what's going on inside of the ring.
I don't regret how I built the Cruiserweight division. Could I have done better? Sure. Absolutely. I'm sure I could have, especially with 20/20 hindsight. I just don't know of anybody that I talk to that looks back at that division and says, 'Oh, man, that sucked.'
DDP was the common guy, the everyman, a blue-collar guy from New Jersey. He represented something that the average person could believe in, in a way that was a little unique.
Take the main event of WrestleMania and put it in front of 75 people, and it will dramatically affect the way everyone watching feels about it.
I've probably done 1,000 interviews about the 'Monday Night Wars' and how 'Nitro' was made.
When I created the Cruiserweight division in WCW, nobody called them cruiserweights in the industry at that point. That was a boxing term, not a wrestling term, but I did not want to call them junior heavyweights, light heavyweights, or anything that made them sound diminutive. I wanted it to sound special and cool.
Eric Bishoff the evil bastard is an effective character.
It was fun and something I could do together with my wife and kids. We were all hand-washing bottles, cleaning and bottling together. It was like families that cook together - we just happened to brew together.
I consider myself an authority on drinking beer.
Clearly there's value in Twitter and Facebook; otherwise, none of us would be involved in it.
Typically, in a live-action format, when you watch a wrestling show, you've got wrestlers in a ring in front of a thousand, five thousand, ten thousand people, and they're playing to large crowd, so you never really get that intimate, close and personal dialogue with them.
I am pretty transparent how I do things.
Diamond Dallas Page didn't have that larger-than-life persona, but he had a different connection with the audience.
We formatted our shows so that, at nine o'clock, we were in the heat of hard-hitting, fast-paced cruiserweight action, and it was so different from the WWE that it worked.
When I hired the first group of cruiserweights - which consisted of Dean Malenko, Chris Jericho, and Eddie Guerrero - I sat them down in my office, and I was very clear to them. I said to them, almost verbatim, 'You need to be my human car crashes at 9 P.M.'
Mr. McMahon the character is a very effective heel.
I drink a lot of beer.
Let me just say this, Dolce Maria Garcia Rivas: You are not 'sexy,' you are not a 'star,' and you are certainly not a professional wrestler.
Social media is an evolving media. It changes every day.
I brought Muhammad Ali to North Korea in 1995. I tried that once. It didn't work out quite that well for me as it did for Dennis Rodman, but I brought Muhammad Ali to Pyongyang, North Korea, as part of a big wrestling event called the World Peace Festival. It was a two-day event that drew over 350,000 people.
I didn't mind when Paul Wight came to me and said WWE offered him $1 million a year for ten years. I was like, 'Dude, you need to take that. You need to go now. Lemme give you a ride to the airport.'
Had Fusient been successful in buying WCW, ultimately there would have been no one on that side of the equation, including me, that would have had the commitment to the business that Vince McMahon has had throughout the years.
