Eric Bischoff exclusive: Vince McMahon’s plan to return to sports entertainment, what Logan Paul can do for WWE, the making of Stone Cold and more…

Fans of the popular online slot game WWE Legends: Link&Win this is for you!  In an exclusive interview with Jackpot City Casino, wrestling legend Eric Bischoff has pulled back the curtain on his new venture, Real American Freestyle (RAF), and the biggest stories in the world of the squared circle.

Speaking ahead of RAF’s first major event, the former WCW impresario talked about the potential for US President Donald Trump to attend the show, and his links with wrestling megastar Hulk Hogan.

Bischoff also spoke about what’s next for Vince McMahon as the controversial former owner of WWE nears a return to sports entertainment.

He added his thoughts on the current superstars of WWE too including Logan Paul and John Cena.

Read the full interview below.

We hope Donald Trump will attend the inaugural Real American Freestyle (RAF) event.

We hope [Trump will attend the inaugural Real American Freestyle Wrestling] There's an obvious connection there with Hulk and President Trump. But I don't want to suggest that we know he's going to be there. If he shows up, we'll make sure that he's taken care of.

Sure, absolutely [We’d want Trump to attend] for the sitting President of the United States to show up to your sporting event, like he did with Nascar, like he does with the super bowl.

But there's also the other side of that. There are people that are so immersed in their emotional political lives that it's a visceral reaction [seeing Trump] in the case of some people. But I don't really care if those people show up and watch.

Vince McMchon will not be joining RAF - he would ‘overshadow what we’re trying to accomplish’.

The worst thing for us right now is for people to go home thinking ‘Eric Bischoff and Hulk Hogan are doing another sports entertainment wrestling company’. We're not, the exact opposite of it, actually. But if you bring in somebody that has even a bigger footprint in sports entertainment, as big as Hulk's, that overshadows what we're really trying to accomplish.

Set aside the obvious issues with regard to controversy, and I wrote the book: controversy creates cash, but there's a limit to everything right? So set that aside and pretend that issue didn't exist. If Vince had walked away from WWE and decided he wanted to come out of retirement and make an investment and came to us. I probably would feel the same way I do now: it's just not appropriate, not because of the controversy, but because Hulk and I already represent professional sports entertainment.

Ben Askren is not competing in RAF because he needs ‘payday’.

Ben Askren is a part of real American freestyle. He's not competing for a payday. He's not competing because he needs the money. He's competing because he loves to compete, and he's got a massive following in both MMA and amateur wrestling, freestyle wrestling, so there's a guy that we're absolutely going to bring him in.

There's a lot of amateur wrestlers in the United States, and the fastest growing segment is the Women athletes, it's really quite fascinating. And we've signed one of them; a young, just beautiful, amazingly talented, and one of the nicest people we ever meet. Her name is Kennedy Blades, she won a silver medal in the last Olympics. Within the world of freestyle wrestling, she's really well known. My challenge is to get the rest of the world to be interested in her.

Chael Sonnen is the perfect frontman for RAF.

We're already getting the return of Chael Sonnen. We're getting publicity because of Chael, because he's a very outspoken guy, which is one of the reasons I pushed hard to bring him on the team and because I see him everywhere. I see him on Fox News. I see him on one of the most highly rated late night comedy shows in the United States, I see him as a guest occasionally. I hear him all the time on ESPN. He's everywhere and he loves freestyle wrestling. He loves this project. He believes in it, and he was on Ariel Helwani talking about it. I'm really grateful that we have him.

We won't be dressing up RAF wrestlers as ‘Crazy Dentists’.

We're not creating characters like we would in WWE or TNA. This is not a scripted wrestling endeavor. This is professional freestyle, Olympic level wrestling. The matches are not going to be scripted out. There's going to be no predetermined winner.  The wrestlers themselves are coming out as professional athletes. We're not dressing them up as firemen or garbage men, or crazy dentists, or anything like that. But we still have to tell stories. We still have to connect these athletes to the audience.

Vince stood in front of a tyrannosaurus rex and told me ‘I have a very, very large appetite’.

My impression of Vince is that he's 79 going on 45, meaning he's not ready to stop working, creating, building and buying. He's just that guy. It's how he's wired. I don't know if he's ever swung a golf club. I don't know that he's ever done anything outside of working out that most people would consider a hobby. He just works and builds and creates. He told me once during one of my first meetings with him back in 2019 when I went back. He said: ‘I have a very, very large appetite’ - and he said that to me sitting in front of a skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex with its mouth open - pretty much sums up why Vince McMahon is thinking about investing or building, because that's that's never going to change with him.

Before Steve Austin became “Stone Cold” he was “The Ringmaster” - ‘It sucked’.

Me and Steve Austin talked about how I fired him by sending him a Fed-ex and how that affected him in the decisions he made about wrestling. He ended up going to ECW. And he was kind of frustrated, pissed off, and didn't know who he was as a character - and then he just went out there and started having fun. And the more fun he had, the more he got over it. And he had fun because he was just being himself. He wasn't out there trying to pretend he was a fireman or a crazy dentist, or an IRS agent. He was just going out there being Steve Austin. I think Steve told me that it was in ECW that the idea for “Stone Cold” Steve Austin started forming in his head. When Steve got to WWE  they wanted him to be “The Ringmaster” - remember I was talking about Goofy, preteen type cartoon characters - so he started getting a taste of who “Stone Cold” Steve Austin was, he goes to WWE and is told to leave that guy back in Philadelphia, in the ECW. You're gonna be ‘The Ringmaster’, here's your gimmick.  They tried that and it sucked, so then Steve got to try [Stone Cold].

AEW have ‘hit rock bottom’ - TNA could replace them as the number two company.

TNA could probably do it [be bigger than AEW] tomorrow if they were on a different platform. AEW is having a hard time holding on to the audience they have. It's slowly deteriorating. The bleeding has slowed down a little bit over the last six months, but I think it's because they hit rock bottom. I think whatever they get is all they're ever gonna get and if they're lucky they'll hold on to what they have. Year over year their deterioration was like hovering around 20%. Now that I think they're down to about 10 or 12% this time, which is still a significant number, you're still losing at this point 12% of your audience, and when you've only got about 600,000 of them, every one of them count. So it's not like they're stabilizing. They're just not bleeding as quickly. TNA on the other hand; attendance is going up, the buzz about them and the positive traffic is going up. The show looks good. I think in the last clip I saw they had a pretty good arena. It looked like there were 2-3,000 people there. I'm not sure. But it looked like it, and it looked good. It was shot well.  And I compare that to what I see in AEW and it's just kind of at best, stale and stable. They're just kind of churning over the same approach week after week after week, hoping something's going to change.

R-Truth’s departure was a ‘math decision’.

What is this contract worth? Do we want to extend this contract over the next two or three years? Ron's contract, I'm guessing, was significant. Probably mid-six figures, maybe more.

It’s about a return on investment if we keep this contract in place - how many times did we use this individual? If we used them 36 times over the course of three years. How much did that cost us? That cost us $100,000 a night, or whatever the math ends up being. So you take the total cost of the contract, divide that by the number of appearances. And then you balance that with merchandise. You see what other ancillary revenue that character brings in, you put it all in a pot, and you just make a math decision.

Hosting Wrestlemania in Saudi Arabia would be like hosting the Superbowl in China.

I would be careful about taking an amazing amount of money [from Saudi Arabia] - that cannot be denied would have a positive impact on shareholder value - without looking at what's the long term impact of that decision? Do you disenfranchise viewers? Do people look at your brand less favorably because they feel like you're kind of abandoning us. This is meant to be our thing. Wrestlemania was our home team, WWE is our home team. And now you're gonna play the biggest game of the year outside the country where we can't even go? That's risky, because it may have minimal effect on the brand, but things like that have a tendency to catch fire, and as difficult as it is to create brand loyalty, it's not nearly as difficult to lose it. And a move like that. I would really want to analyze and research and understand, and be able to at least feel like I can kind of predict what's gonna happen because It’s like if the NFL had the super bowl in China.

Logan Paul calling out his peers is ‘fantastic storytelling’.

I think it's fantastic storytelling. I think it's creating tension. It's the very foundation of building a storyline, because all I'm waiting for now is for somebody to come out and respond to Logan's comments, so that's the beginning of a story. That's my impression. I think they're really doing a good job figuring out how to use social media as the flashpoint or the very beginning foundation

of a story, so that by the time it makes it to TV, by the time they actually pull the trigger say let's shoot an angle with this on TV, they've already got millions of people interested because they've been feuding on social media that brings the audience to the television show.

John Cena will become a babyface again the final scene of this career.

I would love to see redemption in the final scene in the third act [of John Cena’s career]. I'd like to see redemption. Redemption stories always work. And here's why I'm hoping that's what we're going to see, it’s because John has become adept enough, talented enough as an actor. I see it in him, he's always had the [actors] instinct, I'm guessing he's being coached for his acting career so that he can make more and bigger movies, and he's working with directors. He's working with other actors and actresses, all of that experience will translate to John's ability to tell a story in the ring, and I think John could pull it off [his redemption] in a way that makes us go, ‘wow’. That was really good. I believe he has a talent and if they write the story that way. Where somehow John goes through this, ‘I'm gonna ruin wrestling’ act one and act two. But by act three something happens that changes his course, and at the end of that change in course, the final scene is John paying it all back. That's what I would like to see as a fan.

You cannot compare today's factions with the NWO or DX.

Factions are tough, so much of it is chemistry. I think the reason the NWO worked was the unique chemistry between Nash and Hogan and Hall. I think the reason DX worked is because of the unique chemistry with Sean Waltman, who doesn't get discussed enough in terms of what he brought to DX, Shawn Michaels, Hunter, the whole crew. There was China, there was a unique chemistry there and you can't recreate chemistry. You can recreate characters, you can recreate storylines. You can recreate a bunch of stuff. But you can't create chemistry. It's either there or it's not. And most often everything else is great. Everybody does their job. Everybody does a great job in the ring, the matches are good, but if that magic isn't there, it's just not going to reach the DX level or the NWO but it does not mean it's not valuable, you can't always compare factions to DX or to NWO. It's just unrealistic.

I was forced to make an example of Dustin Rhodes after he used blood - it had nothing to do with Hogan’s arrival.

I've always considered Dustin Rhodes a friend, which made the situation when I had to release him really, really hard for me. And I think that's the part that– I don’t want to say it upset me– because I understand how Dustin probably feels, and I could put myself in his shoes pretty easily back then. But it was really hard for me to make that decision. I had no choice.

I was told in no uncertain terms by my boss going forward ‘You're no longer going to be able to do this’ - use blood to enhance the story, so I then pass that information down directly to the people who work for me, who were responsible to me. That's the chain of command, right?

And unfortunately, and people can debate the circumstances, ‘oh, but Hulk Hogan did it’ - I don't give a shit about any of that. I expressly made it clear to Dustin and everybody else involved. Don't do this. And they did it. In the interview Dustin said he went to Craig leathers. Dustin said something to the effect of ‘I would never disrespect my boss, so I went to Craig Leathers’. Well, Craig Leathers wasn't his boss. I was. And see, that's the thing back then at WCW. If you didn't like one answer, you just went to somebody else in authority and got a different one, and if you didn't get it there you'd go to someone else and get it from there, so that way when you went out and did what you want to do, you could say he told me I could.

 I was forced to make an example of him pure and simple. Make an example out of Dustin. And, by the way. it was a hard decision, and when Dustin said, ‘Well, he had to make room for Hogan and his boys’. That's the part that made me go ‘that's not true’. It has nothing to do with Hogan. I didn't have to make room for Hogan's contract. Ted Turner signed off on Hogan's contract, and Ted didn't say you got to fire five other people to make up for this.

It was such the wrong thing for Dustin to say, because that decision was hard for me, and I didn't make it because I had to make room for somebody else's contract. That's the part that pissed me off.