The Ultimate Warrior’s WCW comeback was supposed to give the company another massive weapon in the Monday Night War. Instead, Eric Bischoff says Warrior’s debut promo went completely off the rails and helped turn the entire run into a failed experiment.
During a conversation with Inside the Ropes, Bischoff explained that WCW carefully planned Warrior’s first major promo to last roughly five minutes. The company didn’t use word-for-word scripts, but Warrior was given bullet points and everyone walked through the segment backstage before going live.
According to Bischoff, the five-minute limit wasn’t a suggestion. WCW had commercial breaks to hit, and the entire live television show depended on talent staying close to their assigned time.
“It was supposed to be five minutes because we had commercials. They have this thing with TV—live TV. It’s called commercial breaks. It’s how you pay for everything.”
“We laid Warrior’s promo out backstage. We walked through it because we didn’t work off scripts, right? We just had bullet points. We had a basic idea of what we were going to do, and we had a pretty good idea of how long that should take.”
Bischoff said experienced performers from that era developed an internal clock that allowed them to finish segments within seconds of their assigned time. Warrior didn’t come anywhere close.
“Everybody, if they were motivated, could hit their times pretty close. You just had a clock inside your head.”
“If somebody said to me, ‘Eric, you’ve got three minutes. I want you to go out and sell me that glass of beer, and you’ve got three minutes to do it,’ I’ll do it in three minutes. Maybe 2:58, maybe 3:05, but I’m going to come within seconds of hitting my time.”
“A lot of people who came up in that era of the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s had to develop that skill, or you wouldn’t reach the top of your game.”
Everything appeared to be settled backstage. Then Warrior entered the ring and just kept talking. Bischoff compared standing there during the segment to being trapped inside a childhood nightmare. Warrior’s promo blew past its five-minute limit, stretched to approximately 17 minutes and left Bischoff searching for any way to make it stop.
“We laid it all out backstage. Everybody’s nodding their head like the Warriors. That’s kind of what it was, right? Go back and watch the tape. I’m not lying.”
“We go out, and I’m standing in the ring. It’s just like a dream that you had when you were little, and you still remember that nightmare. I’m standing out there in the ring, and he’s going on and on and on, and none of it makes any sense. It’s the wackiest shit ever. Nuts.”
“Seventeen minutes. It felt like it had to be 25. You must have seen the edited version, because the live version went on and on.”
Bischoff said his desperation was visible on camera. He recalled looking toward Hulk Hogan and wondering whether Hogan could simply knock Warrior out or create an unscheduled fight to end the promo.
“I remember, literally, if you go back and look at it, I’m looking at Hulk like, ‘What the fuck? Can you just knock him out? Can we just shoot an angle right here, right now? Throw everything out?’”
“I mean, it was the most horrible feeling.”
The disaster wasn’t limited to the wrestlers standing inside the ring. Bischoff said WCW director Craig Leathers was normally impossible to rattle, but even he came out of the production truck looking completely destroyed after Warrior’s promo.
“Our director, his name is Craig Leathers. He’s a super guy, a very talented director and always calm and cool. You could never rattle him, no matter what happened.”
“He’d come out of that truck after the show and go, ‘Yeah, we got it done. It’s pretty good.’ He came out of that truck, his hair was on fire. One eye bulged out, the other one was still in the socket. It was horrible.”
Warrior continued through the Fall Brawl WarGames match and eventually faced Hogan at Halloween Havoc. However, Bischoff said Warrior tore his biceps while climbing the cage during the WarGames match, creating another major problem for a run that was already falling apart.
“I think he blew out a bicep. I think it was Fall Brawl, WarGames, and he jumped up on top of the cage—or got up on one of the bars for the cage—and tore out a bicep.”
“That put him out for like six months to a year. A torn bicep isn’t something you come back from anytime soon.”
“Because he had the injury, and because everything that we tried to do with him obviously didn’t work out, it made it easy for me to call an audible and just make a decision to part ways.”
By the time Warrior stepped into the ring with Hogan at Halloween Havoc, WCW wasn’t planning to evaluate the match and decide what came next. Bischoff said both sides already knew the experiment was finished.
“That was like, ‘Let’s just put an end to this.’ No, seriously, and he knew it. We discussed it. That was going to be the end.”
“There was no, ‘Hey, let’s just get through this match and see what we’re going to do.’ It was like, ‘Can we get you through this match?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Okay, then this experiment is over.’”
“He knew what was coming.”
WCW brought Warrior in hoping to recreate the success it found with established stars like Hogan and Randy Savage. Instead, the debut promo became a 17-minute television nightmare, the creative direction failed to connect and the Hogan match served as the final stop in one of WCW’s shortest major experiments.
Do you think WCW could have saved the Ultimate Warrior storyline after that disastrous promo, or was the entire run doomed from the beginning? Let us know what you think and leave your feedback in the comments.
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