The Monday Night Wars will always be remembered as the hottest period in contemporary pro wrestling, and while the lion's share of viewers watched WCW or WWF, the third company, ECW, was also hugely influential. But Paul Heyman, who ran the company from 1993-2001, couldn't match Vince McMahon's checkbook - which meant he certainly couldn't match Ted Turner's. Chris Jericho, Eddie Guererro, Rey Mysterio, Dean Malenko, Chris Benoit and more got their start in ECW, caught the attention of Bischoff and subsequently went to WCW, causing serious tension between Paul E. and E. Bischoff. And while Vince would pay ECW a small amount every month to makeup for the fact that he was raiding Heyman's talent, Bischoff made no such gesture. In a 2002 interview Heyman, before admitting that the two are now fine, said of the former WCW executive 'I hated his guts. He was brutal to ECW. I don't know if there was anybody in the industry that I disliked more than Eric Bischoff.'
Journalism graduate from the University of Technology, Sydney.
As a child, when I wasn't doing typical Australian things like fending off dingoes while riding in the pouches of kangaroos, I was watching wrestling.
