WWE Hall of Famer and former WCW President Eric Bischoff took on an episode of his 83 Weeks podcast, where he talked about a number of topics including who is a better booker between Tony Khan and Dixie Carter.
Bischoff said, “Well, I think the question was, who’s the better booker. And although Dixie didn’t aspire to be perceived to be the head booker of TNA, she at least knew what she didn’t know and brought people in to do that for her. That’s why I think she’s a better booker than Tony Khan, because she recognized what her weaknesses were and tried to surround herself at various times with various people to operate in that world. Whereas Tony thinks he’s a good booker, and clearly is not. Tony Khan doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. And despite the obvious data, and being that Tony is a data analyst from what I’ve been told, you would think one would simply look at the numbers and go, ‘Okay, well, this sucks. It’s not working, so I’m going to do something different.’ Dixie would have done something different. Tony’s not doing anything different. I think Dixie, in retrospect, was a better booker. If you look at the quality — I mean, you can argue about TNA. And people laugh at TNA a lot now, or used to. But I think AEW would love to have the quality of content that TNA had for a long time before I got there, and even while I was there and afterward. TNA gets a bad rap in a lot of ways, and some of it they deserve. A lot of it they don’t. Go back and just watch some of those shows, man, there were some great stories, some great actions, and some top talent in there. And you have top talent in AEW as well. AEW’s issue is not a talent issue, it’s a Tony Khan issue. But Dixie understood that, and she didn’t try to be the booker. She wanted to be perceived to be the female Vince McMahon, so to speak, of the wrestling industry. There’s nothing wrong with that. That was a lofty goal for her. Tony Khan wants the same thing, but he’s not willing to surround himself or listen to the people that he is surrounded by to help him achieve it.”
On the positives of AEW booking smaller venues:
“What you gain is financial relief, because you’re not booking a 10,000 or 15,000 seat arena that you have to curtain off because you can only sell 2,000 tickets. That’s not smart. What you’re going to gain with a smaller, more intimate audience, intimate just being more compact and in around the ring, is a different level of energy, right? Because people aren’t spread out through an arena, they tend to — you know, emotion is catchy, in a way. So I think when you’ve got everybody kind of confined in a smaller area, once the audience gets excited, it’ll be easier to generate enthusiasm through the entire audience.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
