On Titus O’Neil’s WWE suspension:
EB: I actually had a conversation with another high profile legend that I won’t name. We were chatting about it the other day and he asked me what I thought about it. I only know what I read. I drop in on WrestleZone every once and awhile. Well, I say once and awhile but I should say a couple of times a week. Just to kind of keep up with what’s new in the business when I get time. I was aware of it. Again, it’s one of those situations, I wasn’t in the room. I didn’t see it. Was there was something underlying that helped cause that type of penalty or reaction? Unless you’re there you don’t know. All you can do is speculate. If there are no underlying issues and this wasn’t something that was getting a little out of control on a little bit of a consistent basis. If that wasn’t the case and this was just a single, isolated incident. Then yeah, it’s pretty stiff. Sometimes you have to be. It sounds like I am making excuses. Believe me, the WWE doesn’t need me or probably want me to make excuses for them. As a business person, it goes back to it being a publicly held company thing. When you have a 250 pound some odd guy, when you’ve got a big powerful strong guy who is in the sports entertainment business physically grabbing the CEO. Whether it was playful or not sometimes it’s just inappropriate. I get it, I’ve kind of been in those situations before and it’s hard because you don’t want to have to be the “corporate, hard line in the sand” kind of guy. When you’re a big company and you’re a publicly held company and the people around you will sue you for thinking a bad thought… you have to be pretty disciplined and your employees have to be fairly disciplined in their behavior. Whether it’s just joking around or the the types of things people say to each other or “ribs” or pranks… all the stuff that used to make the pro wrestling business so much fun in some respect, not all respects, but some respects. Those days are gone. You can’t do that stuff anymore. It’s more like working for the Post Office than it is working for a sports entertainment company in the 60s/70s/80s/early-90s.
On whether he was surprised that WWE did not debut AJ Styles with The Bullet Club as part of an “invasion angle” ala the NWO:
EB: I’m not surprised. I think that would have been kind of an obvious direction and maybe that’s why they didn’t do it. Because it was an obvious direction. Fans also get disappointed when you don’t challenge. When you don’t come up with something new. It doesn’t have to be a brand new idea that nobody’s ever thought of before. If you’re going to present something we have already seen before at least present it in a new and fresh way. That’s all. I think that may have led WWE not to do that story because they wanted to come up with something fresh. For all we know they may have plans on doing something like that six months from now. You just never know. Now that I am really on the outside looking in it’s even more obvious to me how difficult it is for fans to understand the complexities of creative. It seems so easy. Like you’re watching a football game. I could win the Super Bowl five years in a row on Monday. If I had a chance to know everything that I could learn on Sunday and then have 20/20 hindsight and call the plays on Monday, you’d never lose, right?. You’d have 20/20 hindsight. It’s really easy to say, “AW! He should have never thrown that pass!” “Never should have gone for that extra point attempt!” “Never should have done this!” “Never should have done that!” “They never should have brought AJ in without him being a part of The Bullet Club!” It’s so easy to say those things when you don’t know what’s on the other side. When you don’t know what those other challenges or opportunities are. You just sit back, watch it and enjoy it for what it is and not what you think it could have been if you knew something that you really don’t know.
On what fans can expect from his upcoming WWE DVD:
EB: I just saw a rough cut of it last week, actually. It’s getting to the point now that they might even be finishing it up. It’s kind of hard to watch a documentary about yourself, right? Kind of awkward. It’s hard to be objective, let’s put it that way. Even so, I am looking at it and I was very proud of it, let’s put it that way. The WWE came out to my house in Wyoming last summer and spent 3-4-5 days there? I can’t remember. Shooting a lot of stuff. A lot of my life post-wrestling and even prior to wrestling is centered around my life in Wyoming and the things I like that most wrestling fans have never heard about or saw. They spent a lot of time just getting in to my life. Not really my wrestling life but my life. That’s kinda interesting because that has never been done before. My wife was a part of it. My brother and sister are a part of it. I have some friends in it. I don’t want to promote it. I want WWE to promote it the way they want to promote it but there’s some people in the wrestling business that you might expect and some that you’ll be surprised to see on an Eric Bischoff DVD. It’s all fresh. There may be a couple of clips in there. I’m sure there are. In fact, I know there are because I’ve seen it! I’d say 80% of it is all original content.
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