During the height of the Monday Night Wars, Eric Bischoff pitched a shocking and elaborate storyline that would have seen him fake his own death in a plane crash to further the NWO invasion angle. Turner executive Harvey Schiller ultimately shot the idea down due to the potential legal ramifications for a publicly traded company.
On his 83 Weeks podcast, Bischoff explained the motivation behind the idea was to solve a “logic hole” in the NWO storyline: how the rogue group could consistently infiltrate WCW shows without being stopped by security. His solution was to reveal that he, as the president of WCW, was orchestrating the takeover from the inside.
To make this reveal have the most impact, Bischoff devised a plan to disappear from television under mysterious circumstances. “I really wanted to fake my own death,” he said. “I had my own plane at the time… what if I just made it known I was gonna go fly around the Grand Canyon… and then somehow the speculation would be that I must have gotten off course and flew into Mexican airspace. I was no longer being tracked by FAA, who knows what happened.”
Bischoff was confident he could have made the story believable by planting tidbits in the rumor mill. He ran the idea by his wife first before taking it to Harvey Schiller, then-president of Turner Sports. Schiller immediately vetoed the angle. “I was an officer with internal broadcasting of a publicly held company,” Bischoff explained of Schiller’s reasoning. “If it’s revealed that this faked death for a wrestling storyline could be interpreted as somehow manipulating public stock, there’s exposure there… So I understood it. I just hated it. If I’d have gotten a green light from Harvey, I would have done it.”
The storyline never came to fruition, and Bischoff instead revealed himself as the leader of the NWO in a less dramatic fashion. Bischoff continues to share behind-the-scenes stories from his time in WCW and WWE on his weekly podcast.
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article, please credit 83 Weeks with an h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
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