Eric Bischoff Vs Paul Heyman Vs AEW - The New Wrestling War
E's are good, E's are good, but are 'Paul E.' and 'Easy E' saviours or shamen?
(This is the third part of our 'The New Wrestling War' Series. Click these links for Part 1 & Part 2)
A blockbuster story soon to dissolve to dust or result in a seismic shift (there will be no in-between), the news that Paul Heyman and Eric Bischoff had taken roles as Executive Directors of Raw and SmackDown respectively blew through the wrestling universe like the flames that engulfed the streets during the Monday Nitro opening credits.
It was virtually impossible not to feel hyped in the immediacy of the update. For a generation of fans, the pair triggered evocative sentiments already fresh in the fertile 2019 wrestling landscape. Echoes of the 1990s - the decade that defines an article just like this one, with narratives of war and creative change - were quashed for the longest time until All Elite Wrestling presented the veneer of North American competition for the first time since WCW hit the deck in 2001. A deck they nearly swerved had Eric Bischoff's Fusient Media group been given a TV slot to keep Nitro on the air before Vince McMahon swooped in to pick at the carcass, just as he had with ECW in signing Paul Heyman a month prior.
All the same names, all the same faces, all the same motivations and all the same places. But being the same had been the biggest complaint levied against WWE for years, and was as much an impetus for AEW's mere existence as Cody's thirst to become an alternate universe Triple H and supposed saviour of wrestling's future.
Heyman and Bischoff can't be the same, or anything close to it, lest in render their new roles pointless. But under McMahon's omnipresent thumb, what can they be?
CONT'D...