Eric Bischoff Quotes

Wrestling was like stand-up comedy for me. Every night I had a live audience of 25,000 people to win over. My goal was never to be the loudest or the craziest. It was to be the most entertaining.

The cool thing about WWE is it's like entertainment boot camp. You're performing in front of a live audience, a different audience every night. You're doing promos in the ring. You're doing talking segments in the back. You're wrestling. You're performing. It's everything all rolled into one.

If you look at wrestling when I started to get my big break back in 1992, I changed wrestling from the cartoons of Hulk Hogan and Iron Sheik and the matches with the leg drop and the hand behind the ear and the playing to the crowd. They were just cartoon characters if you ask me.

In sports entertainment, you can take your time and digest what's going on along with the audience.

It doesn't matter if you're the best wrestler in the world and can do every move perfectly; if you don't connect with the crowd or sell well or have good promos, nobody cares.

Fans watching need to be able to connect the dots in your match and the story that you're trying to tell.

I'm one of those wrestlers that leaves everything to the audience and to the fans. I never plan anything, and you will never see Alberto Patron planning in the back what he is going to do in the match.

I love wrestling, and I love telling a story to the audience.

I wasn't in NXT for very long, but what I learned there was very valuable once I got onto the main roster - how to communicate to a larger audience, stuff like that.

I do feel in 2018 that pro wrestling has gone in such a different direction. Before, things were so black and white; now, it's shades of grey. It's not so much good guys and bad guys: there are people who are put in situations who do the right or wrong things, but people react to them like they are stars.

I like to lean on making wrestling the most believable, realistic form of entertainment as possible for the most part.

This isn't a competitive sport. Wrestling is not the NFL or the NHL. It's not really sports. It's entertainment. And in order to be entertaining, you have to create emotion. And you can't create emotion by simply having a wrestling match.

If you look at the history of wrestling, what makes heels great is their ridiculous statements.

Without talent, I don't care how funny the writers are or how many comedy lines they come up, without wrestlers you can't have a wrestling program.

In Total Nonstop Action, individual wrestlers have a lot more freedom to artistically express themselves versus WWE.

WWE definitely gives you the forum, the stage to do different things and see what works. That's the cool thing about being in front of a live audience every single week in WWE. You get instant feedback.

Probably the biggest-kept secret about 'Ring of Honor' is that when you go to see a live show - I've had people in their 60s from down in North Carolina that have seen a lot of wrestling tell me that it was the greatest live wrestling show they've ever been to. The atmosphere is off the charts.

I really think that some of the best heels are also those people that can really get reactions as babyfaces, too.

When I started doing pro wrestling, it wasn't the physical aspect doing the moves or taking the moves that was hard: it was interacting with the crowd, body movement, selling, getting that emotional attachment with people so they're invested in a match. That was the hard part.

That's what we do in the WWE: we tell stories; we're characters. We go into the ring, and my character is telling a story in the ring against another character.

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.'

I'm not someone who concerns himself with whether people pay to cheer Roman Reigns or whether people pay to boo Roman Reigns. People pay to see Roman Reigns. They pay to react to Roman Reigns.

There's so many great wrestlers in this sport who could probably work circles around me and it's amazing to see that, but I love being the kind of character who can take you on a roller coaster, make you smile and laugh.

As a professional wrestler in the position I am in, I would rather have people remember my matches for an emotion or for a certain thought it evoked when they saw it.

If you've never been to a live wrestling show, you need to go to one. To understand 'Lucha Underground,' you need to watch it.