Eric Bischoff is aware of the perception some fans had about TNA Wrestling.
On a recent episode of his 83 Weeks podcast, Eric Bischoff compared hardcore TNA Wrestling fans to people who own ugly dogs. Using the humorous analogy to explain how deep fandom for the company ran, Bischoff said there’s a large group of fans that loved TNA Wrestling no matter what, but that also came with a group that only saw all of the negative things the company did, no matter who was in charge.
“You know I think it all comes down to the fact that nobody ever took TNA [seriously]. Now TNA had its hardcore audience that loved everything TNA and loved the homegrown talent and loved the six-sided ring. There was a lot of people, there was a significant amount of people that really loved TNA because at that time, TNA was the alternative, right? It wasn’t WWE, it wasn’t WCW, although they brought in a lot of WCW people, obviously, and some WWE people,” Bischoff said. “But at its core, TNA was looked at as the homegrown alternative. And it had a loyal audience that followed it.
“That loyal audience didn’t care that the show was being shot inside of a soundstage. They loved it so much, they didn’t care. They overlooked, dismissed, some of the obvious shortcomings of the IMPACT episodes under TNA because they loved it so much. It’s like having an ugly dog. You know it may be an ugly dog, but that’s your ugly dog, and you love it, right? But when you get outside of that hardcore super-committed ugly dog owner, and you get out to the larger audience who look at TNA and they looked at that little soundstage,” he noted, “and they never took it seriously. That audience is going to be far more critical of the product than the people with the ugly dog. It just is what it is.”
Bischoff said that in hindsight, most people can see that TNA Wrestling did several things right before, during and after his tenure with the company, but some people will just focus on the mistakes and missed opportunities instead.
“They look at the scale of the show, despite the fact that they brought in Sting, they brought in Booker T, they brought in Hulk Hogan, they brought in Kurt Angle, they brought in Jeff Hardy, they brought in Eric Bischoff,” he explained, “they brought in this guy, they brought in that guy, they brought in that guy. And it still never got outside of that little kind of funky soundstage arena. And therefore people just generally, unless they’re really constructively being critical, look at TNA as a joke. Because it never really reached the level it should have reached, given the talent that was there.”
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