Eric Bischoff recently spoke with Steve Fall’s Ten Count in a WrestlingNews.co exclusive to promote his new autobiography, “Grateful” by Guy Evans.
During the discussion, the former WWE and WCW executive spoke about why CM Punk returning to WWE wouldn’t be a good business decision for the company.
Featured below is an excerpt from the discussion where he touches on this topic with his thoughts and explains his point of view.
“I don’t think it would be [a good business decision to bring CM Punk back to WWE]. I think CM Punk sh*t the bed. When Tony Khan brought CM Punk into AEW, he still had that mystique, the pipe bomb mystique. He was this character that stood up to [Vince] McMahon and then walked away. There’s a rebellious quality in that character that I think the average American admires. So Punk had this mystique and still had his fan base and Tony Khan was able to take advantage of that. Over a very short period of time, that mystique began to just dissipate. It was like letting the air out of the balloon a little bit more each and every week. CM Punk came in, and you know, great ratings, and then literally the next week, started in a free fall back down to pre-Punk levels. You look at where AEW is in terms of week to week ratings, which is the only thing we have to measure that’s public because the financial information is all private. We don’t really hear anything about the real financial information. We just get the top line stuff. But you know, ratings are the data that we have that we can go, ‘Okay, this is where this product is going.’ Flat-line. Shortly after CM Punk got there, flat-line to pre-Punk levels and I think that a lot of that has to do with, people came, they were excited because of the aura and the mystique, they saw, and they went, ‘Eh, not so much. A little bit, but nothing special.’ Then for Punk to conduct himself in the manner in which he did, I think it left a bad taste in not only the fans mouths, but why would anybody want to hire a guy that’s willing to, live, publicly disparage the guy that’s writing him a check every week?”
Watch the complete Eric Bischoff interview via the YouTube player embedded below. H/T to WrestlingNews.co for transcribing the above quotes.
