On the latest episode of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff shared the behind-the-scenes story of his shocking 2002 WWE debut, from the five-minute Vince McMahon phone call to hiding in a hotel room to protect the surprise. You can check out his comments below:
“Probably 10 days, and it happened fast. Vince called me. We had a short conversation — I don’t think it lasted more than five minutes. I knew halfway through the conversation that he was going to offer me a job, and I’d already made up my mind what I was going to do if he did. Vince did set it up, you know. He kind of disarmed me, so to speak. He gave me his idea, and I said, great, I’m in, let’s do it, here’s my attorney, let’s get her done. Probably a day or two later, I got a call or a text from Stephanie. At the time, I wasn’t dyeing my hair, and I wanted to make sure nobody had an expectation of me dyeing my hair, but it didn’t come up. So I reached out to Stephanie and said, hey, just want you to know, because they probably hadn’t seen me in a year — my hair is kind of platinum, looks a little bit like a hubcap on a ’63 Buick. Do you want me to dye it or not? I was hoping she was going to say no, because I didn’t want to, but of course she said yes, and I had to go get my hair dyed.”
“I flew myself into New York at my own suggestion. I didn’t go through WWE travel, because I didn’t want my name showing up on anybody’s computer — it would have ruined the surprise. So I booked my own flight and my own hotel, and I sat in my room. I got to my room about nine o’clock the night before and I didn’t even leave until the limo came to get me, because I didn’t want people to see me and ruin the surprise. Around one or two o’clock in the afternoon, there was a knock on my door, and somebody slipped a big envelope underneath it — it was my format, basically my script for the night, and it’s like 15 pages. What? I already knew the expectation was for me to deliver the script word for word. That was made clear to me. So it wasn’t like I could take a look at the script, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and put it into my own words. That wasn’t going to fly. So I had to memorize that script. I say 15, I’m probably exaggerating, but it was a lot. I just got to work. I didn’t have time to be nervous after that.”
“To the point of worrying about how people were going to react to me — people I’d worked with in the past — I think people make a lot more of that than actually existed. Sure, there were people in WWE who probably wouldn’t be that thrilled to see me, but so what? I wasn’t nervous about that. I was nervous about my performance. There was a lot riding on it, and there was a pretty high expectation of what I was going to be able to deliver, and I wanted to make sure I over-delivered and not under-delivered.”
