Written by Chris Siggia.

83 WEEKS WITH ERIC BISCHOFF 05/04/20:  TNA IMPACT GOES TO MONDAY 3-8-10

Bischoff talking about the Hulk Hogan/Eric Bischoff contract with TNA:  “It was $1.5 million.  That was completely absorbed by Spike TV.  That did not come out of TNA’s budget.  Many people did not know that until many years after the fact.  In fact, we didn’t really understand it completely until after the fact.  We found out later, much later, the same thing was true with Sting and a couple other big talents that came in that Viacom offset the costs for.”

Bischoff clearing up whether TNA thought they would be competitive going up against WWE:  “Nobody said that.  Nobody believed that, myself included because I knew the nature of the product.  There was no way you were going to have a TNA show in the Impact Zone, with a soundstage with 250 people, 30 or 40 or 50 of them you recognize because you see them every week.  That show didn’t have the energy and the scope and magnitude to compete with RAW.  But we did believe that by going head to head and poking the bear, so to speak, a couple things would happen.  The first thing is it would create a buzz…with advertisers.  By making this move, we would plant a flag.  We may not be WWE but we are here.  We have a guy by the name of Hulk Hogan, who is a proven commodity from a media perspective…At the very least, we would get some people to sample the product.  We knew, going in, we discussed it going in that we would give this a run.  Let’s see what we can do with it.  Let’s see if we can go from whatever the audience was and see if we can grow it and take it with us, if and when we would have to move back to Thursday nights.”

Bischoff talking about his heat with Scott Steiner:  “We were trying to get James (Storm) over.  We wanted him to beat Scott Steiner…We told them early enough in the day and said go figure it out, come back to me, let me know what you got so we can smarten up the director so we can make sure we capture it all.  James kept coming up to me throughout the day saying Scott doesn’t want to do anything.  He doesn’t want to put me over.  I said go talk to him.  This is the story and go have the conversation.  Tell your agent, it’s not my job.  He came back to me two or three times and I figured it out.  He didn’t want to confront Scott.  I don’t blame him for that.  Scott can be really difficult when he was in a certain frame of mind…I finally got involved and told Scott this is what we need.  He said I don’t want to do it.  I said, ok, we will find somebody else to do it, meaning it’s not that big a deal that Scott gets beat, it would be nice, that would be our first choice.  That would have elevated James but the show is not going to stop.  We aren’t going to have to replace the match because of it.  We will find another opponent.  Of course, two days later, all of this gets back to TNA management and Scott Steiner got fired.  Scott Steiner figured I’m the one who fired hm.  Then he blamed Hulk.”

JIM CORNETTE’S DRIVE-THRU 05/04/20

Jim Cornette talking about the Barbarian drinking in a bar in 1985:  “He was in the hotel bar and was drinking.  They wanted to close and he didn’t want them to.  He wouldn’t let them close the bar.  He wouldn’t get up.  If they weren’t going to serve him, he was going to reach over and serve himself.  They call the cops.  He is not creating any incident.  He’s not trying to get sh*t free.  He just is not going to leave and he is not going to let them close the bar is the way I heard it.  There was not a big fight or anything until the cops got there.  By that point, he was not going to let them take him out of there or close the bar either.  When they tried to, then there was some resistance.  It took like 7 of them to get him out to the car.  He either broke a set of handcuffs and they had to do the double handcuffs.  They couldn’t get his hands behind him.  He headbutted the roof of the police car in getting mad at them and busted his head open.  He ate the mace.  They sprayed him with the mace and he licked that off and ate that.  Finally, he decided, ok I’ll go with them.  Then he goes and they sow his head up and he head butts the wall and busts his head open again.”

ARN 05/05/20:  PAYBACK 2015

Arn on why the perception of NXT had diminished:  “Some of the guys from the main roster have been bumped back down so you have more star power on that show.  In the front office’s mind, we will take some of these proven talents and bump them back down to make that a more competitive brand.  When they come back down, they bring the RAW or SmackDown style with them.  So, it’s not NXT and NXT style matches.  Now the dynamic changes.  They are seeing a lot of stuff they see on Monday or Friday.  Now it’s on NXT so now it’s not a pure NXT show.”

Arn talking about Cody as Stardust in WWE:  “I didn’t dislike it from the fact that the costuming and Cody looked good in that character.  I know every time I dealt with Cody from day 1 he would give you the best he could.  I knew there should be some good things happening for him because his attitude was good.  His ability was good.  They put this costume on him and I didn’t know how strongly he was against it until later.  But there was no plan passed that to take Cody Rhodes to the next level.  When they change you and change your character and you stay at a level push and you don’t go anywhere with that, what was the reason for the change if there were no positive plans to elevate you and that is one I couldn’t figure out.”

Arn’s thought on the Ascension:  “Why would you take any character that is on our show that the company professes to being the number one wrestling company, or the number one sports entertainment company in the entire world and put them on our TV show, which is valuable TV time and have the announcers bury them.  We make them look bad on our own show.  What is the sense to all that?  What could the mentality possibly be to get guys out there and other than enhance them in every way possible, you make clowns out of them. And it happens all the time.  Everything character wise passes by the big chair if it’s the last place they go, it goes to the big chair for approval, make no mistake, character, angles, you name it.”

AEW UNRESTRICTED 05/06/20:  TONY KHAN

Tony Khan talking about his ideas for empty arena came from:  “When everything shut down, I watched a lot of other programming.  I watched a lot of wrestling.  I watched a lot of other stuff too and tried to get an idea of what people were doing with the restrictions without an audience.  The thing that really captivated me was I have a really good friend who is a writer for Jimmy Fallon who works on the tonight show.  I watched the show Jimmy Fallon did without an audience and he had his writers and his band in the studio, a small group of people and their laughter and the exchange they had made all the difference to other talk shows where they were out there cold.  I thought the Tonight Show and Jimmy Fallon were really on to something and I thought that is what I want to do…The next day I figured we can have a babyface side and a heel side and that was good too.”

TALK IS JERICHO 05/06/20:  THE REVIVAL OF THE REVOLT

The Revival talking about the tag team division:  “Long term, there is just not enough attention paid to the tag team division because there are so many good tag teams there all the time that I think can contribute so much more…We are not happy.  The tag team titles don’t mean anything.  Nothing against Brawn (Strowman), Brawn is a great guy and I get along with him very well, but he steamrolled the entire tag team division and then a 10 year old won the tag titles at WrestleMania.  Then no tag teams were featured at SummerSlam until the last minute they added the women’s tag titles.  When we sked for our release in January, we went straight to the top and asked for it.  I think initially they thought we were bluffing and they said we were planning on putting the tag titles on you.  We are planning on giving you this big run and Daniel said, it is not about the tag belts.  We want the whole division to be featured and everyone to get an opportunity to work.  They initially said they will give us our release.  We went to the talent relations office. They said you can have your release, and I am not kidding you, as soon as we walked out of that talent relations office, everyone knew.  I don’t know how but everyone knew we asked for it.  We were getting texts from everybody.  Right after that, we were getting tagged on twitter that we were complaining and being crybabies. I dare you to ask any of our coworkers if we ever complained.”

The Revival on meeting with Vince McMahon with new gimmick to stay:  “There were multiple different versions of their vision for what they wanted to do for us.  The pictures have leaked online.  They are 100% legit.  They were handed to us by Vince McMahon himself.  I can tell you with 100% certainty that the boys are not the ones leaking out most of the information.  Those photos had to have come from someone from creative who came up with that costume.  We told them these are bad.  These are not good, but we will do these until our contracts expire.  We will do whatever you want.  We will give it 100% and go all in and have fun with it, but when our contracts expire, we are done.  There is no way that we are going to be staying here past June.  We got a phone call saying we have been pulled from everything going forward.  I don’t know if because we agreed to do it, it lost some of its hilarity to them.  The numbers that have been reported contract wise, $750,000 per year, the number was higher than that.  They offered more than that for us to do the clown cat in the hat.”

GRILLING JR 05/07/20:  WRESTLE WAR 89

Jim Ross’ talking about Ricky Steamboat not knowing Terry Funk was going to attack Ric Flair after the match:  “I think Ricky had a tumultuous marriage.  I think that was probably his biggest cause of consternation.  But to not be informed of what was going on after your losing the world title was disrespectful and that’s how I perceived how Ricky felt.  How much disrespect, we didn’t know?  Again, as my role as a broadcaster, I tried to stay away from all that stuff.  I didn’t want or need that extra information.  I didn’t have a clue he (Terry Funk) was going to do that.  But you don’t do that to your world champion because earlier in the day, when all that was discussed, he was the world champion, but he wasn’t treated like a world champion.  Enough was enough and we lost a really good talent.”

THIS WEEK ON EXCUSE ME THE VICKIE GUERRERO PODCAST:

Vickie welcomes none other than former WWE Superstar and Vickie’s son-in -law:  Aiden English. Aiden English shocked the world in NXT by wrestling and showing his operatic singing ability.  Aiden was part of the layoffs this past April.  He is back talking about his newest passion, “Wrestling with Whiskey.” Aiden also discusses how you can book him and his future plans.

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