Eric Bischoff Reveals Why WWE Fired Him After Just 4 Months
Back, better than ever... then gone?
Former WCW President Eric Bischoff has revealed the reasons behind his WWE dismissal last October, in an interview with TalkSport.
The news that Bischoff would be making an active return to the company for the first time in more than a decade had WWE fans at fever pitch, as it was announced that he and Paul Heyman would preside over SmackDown and Raw respectively.
However, while Heyman has remained as executive director of Raw, Bischoff's stint would last just four months before he was axed, reportedly because the company was unhappy with SmackDown's ratings under his direction.
In the aftermath of the appointments, many speculated about how much autonomy the two former WWE rivals would be given in their new roles. Bischoff explained that while he served as an intermediary between the WWE and FOX and oversaw what was going on on SmackDown, he was not a member of the creative team:
My job really, as it was described to me, was to, in a general sense, oversee anything within WWE, and to a degree with FOX, anything that touched or related to SmackDown. Which included, by the way, overseeing creative – that was a part of it. But, it was overseeing it, not creating. I was told clearly I wasn’t brought in as a creative person, I was brought in to manage the creative process. They are two entirely different things.
Even twenty years after the conclusion of the Monday Night Wars, many still saw McMahon's former nemesis and WWE as unlikely bedfellows. Bischoff noted that he blames himself for his firing, while also explaining just how difficult it was for him to adapt to working for the company after more than a decade of being self-employed:
"What I underestimated was just how difficult that adaptation would be for anybody that is good at adapting. It takes time. And I didn’t manage that well. My lack of performance, if you will, in terms of not fulfilling the role in the way that Vince McMahon saw it, that was on me. That wasn’t on WWE. It wasn’t because of any one person or group of people."