Eric Bischoff Discusses Not Wanting Ultimate Warrior To Cut A Live Promo

On the most recent edition of 83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff, Bischoff discussed WCW Halloween Havoc 1998, which featured Hulk Hogan battling The (Ultimate) Warrior in a rematch of their legendary WrestleMania 6 encounter.

About 27 minutes into the show, the subject of Warrior cutting a promo came up.

Conrad Thompson: “…Meltzer was pretty adamant that you guys behind the scenes, made a decision that Warrior in front of a live crowd with a live mic is a bad idea. So you started to lean more towards the, ‘hey, let’s pretape more of your interviews.’ Was that accurate?”

Eric Bischoff: “Yes. And it wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t like Dave stumbled across an internal company memo that was only supposed to be seen by a few people. It was no secret–it just wasn’t working.”

Earlier in the show, Bischoff admitted that they knew the Ultimate Warrior “experiment” was destined to fail.

“I mean for me it was really that first interview that he did… I knew in that moment that we were in trouble. I just didn’t know how deep of trouble we were in. Again, we had hoped–I had hoped that we were gonna be able to find a way to, pardon the pun, smoke and mirrors our way out of it. it became more obvious each and every attempt to try to recreate that magic that we were getting farther and farther away from it” is how Eric described their feeling after Warrior’s debut promo.

You can hear listen to the entire show (which is recommended) here: