Eric Bischoff learned a lot of his ability to engage the audience through trial and error, but he always relied on a certain home-brewed formula in making sure that his wrestling product captivated said audience.
Bischoff spoke with Josh Shernoff of his So Says Shernoff series and was asked if he had a tried and true foundation for how he applied his creative touch. It so happens that the WWE Hall Of Famer did and he created it due to the legendary Dick Ebersol. Eric it was a while until he actually dipped a toe in the creative side of wrestling, but once he did he kept five factors in mind.
“As I became more and more comfortable and especially into ’96 when I got much more involved and around that same time I kind of zeroed in on a formula and it was born out of a newspaper article I read,” Bischoff said. “Dick Ebersol was being interviewed in terms of what he was going to do to improve the audience these Summer Olympics and one of the things that I took away was formula.
“Ebersol talked about making sure you’re not just covering the sport but we’re telling the story, bringing reality into it, creating anticipation in all of the Olympic sports. I thought, ‘Well wow, a lot of that applies to what I do.’ And I had to tweak that formula a little bit and I did and I came up with a formula that I referred to a 100,000 times as ‘SARSA.’ the acronym: Story, Anticipation Reality, Surprise and Action, and throughout my career to varying degrees, certainly in WCW to a large degree because I was in control of my own destiny there for a long time, into TNA once I really starting getting involved in booking across the boards and then I attempted to in WWE I just wasn’t there long enough to pull it off, but I always believed that no matter what, I don’t care how wrestling changes, how the audience change, how many streaming platforms come along, how many people watch their shit on their phone, I don’t care because at the core of why people watch, what they watch on whatever device they are going to watch it on is ‘story, anticipation, reality, surprise, action.’ If you can combine those elements in any content across any platform in any generation of audience, you’re going to likely be very successful.”
Transcription credit should go to @DominicDeAngelo of WrestleZone
Check out the full episode of “So Says Shernoff” below and as always check out Eric Bischoff on “83 Weeks “via AdFreeShows. As a matter of fact, Shernoff will be joining Blue Meanie and Joel Gertner for an episode of “That Was Extreme” on AFS tonight.
