10 Meanest Backstage Wrestling Feuds

The Nature Boy didn’t always have an adversarial relationship with Eric Bischoff. Back in 1993, when Bill Watts was fired from his position as WCW booker, Flair claims to have been instrumental in persuading TBS executive Bill Shaw that Bischoff had some good ideas and deserved the break.

A year later, Bischoff would find Flair to be the deciding factor in persuading Hulk Hogan to sign with WCW. Hogan was paranoid about protecting his character and image, and over a dozen or so meetings Flair, a company man to the hilt, convinced him that the NWA was the right way to go.

It was when Bischoff had the core of his stars in place that things began to go wrong for Flair in WCW. It’s common knowledge that the Nature Boy - who’d carried the NWA upon his back in times past - was treated as a hasbeen and a joke under Bischoff, who was far more interested in Hogan, the Outsiders and his NWO creation than Flair. The company’s homegrown stars were too southern, too parochial.

Back in those days, Bischoff had a tendency to grandstand, talking himself up in front of the boys, and when he announced cheerfully that as far as he was concerned only Hogan, avage and Piper were selling tickets for WCW - with Flair in the room - Naitch began to see, for the first time, that Bischoff honestly didn’t give a handful of unhappy crap about him or his accomplishments to date.

Upset over the less-than-impressive terms of his proposed new contract, Flair no-showed a number of events (including a WCW Thunder TV taping - he’d given plenty of notice that he’d be at his son’s wrestling tournament) and was promptly sued by Bischoff, who referred to him in front of all the boys as ‘garbage’ and threatened to bankrupt and break him.

The enmity between the two was later parlayed into a WCW storyline, but life would imitate art imitating life in March 2003 when, with WCW a fading memory, both men met in a WWE locker room. This time, Bischoff was an on air performer with no executive responsibilities, the same as Flair, and Flair saw his opportunity for a little payback, assaulting Bischoff backstage in catering and threatening to gouge out his eye.

It was all water off a duck’s back for Bischoff, not a man who worried about taking a few punches, but it cleared the air a little. Today, Flair and Bischoff are cordial but not friendly: Bischoff’s simply been too much of a sh*t to the Nature Boy for him to forgive and forget that easily.