17 Things We Learned From Eric Bischoff On Legends With JBL (Part 1)

13. Ted Turner

JBL details the long and complicated history of Vince buying Crockett Promotions, selling it back to him, the SuperClash PPV, AWA going out of business and Bischoff essentially being broke and having his car towed from his garage. JBL asks that given the history, did Bischoff and Ted Turned have a common goal of getting the 'bad guy from New York' and trying to drive him out of business. 'No, not at all' is Bischoff's reply. He also claims to not know much about the history of the wheelings and dealings between promotions and Vince's deal with TBS until the last couple of years. He says it never came up besides one time when Ted asked Bischoff what WCW needed to do to be competitive with WWE, but it was never a case of them going after Vince specifically (at least not in the early days). Bischoff says it wasn't personal, at least not to him. He went as far as to say that he didn't even talked to Turner that often, maybe seeing him at a Christmas party or in an elevator or something. The two weren't best friends and didn't play golf together. They go off track a little bit and get into whether or not Turner was bitter at the AOL/Time Warner merger in 2000 and Bischoff says that he was and that, when pressed, he thinks WCW 'might have had a chance' to survive had Turner stuck around. He says that he relied on his relationship with Turner and Turner's stroke but that by 1998 Turner didn't have that kind of stroke in his own company anymore.