Review: Controversy Creates Cash

Controversy Creates Cash by Eric Bischoff
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am not a professional wrestling fan. Yet here I am reading and reviewing a book by a career wrestling businessman and occasional wrestling character. There were three reasons that I chose to read this book, all tied to a TEDx talk by the author. Bischoff spoke at the local TEDxNaperville conference I attended a few years ago. He began his talk by thoroughly belittling our community, ranting for a few minutes, the definition of pompous. The crowd was truly in shock, myself included. After a few minutes of this, he kind of laughed and said it was all just his way of explaining how to control an audience’s emotion. Knowing that you had been manipulated by a wrestling guy felt like a personal failure, and I wanted to learn more about this industry and the performance and influence aspects it traded in.

Continuing the TED talk, Bischoff then talked about some of the forward thinkers in the wrestling industry, especially Verne Gagne. So when I was in junior high, give or take a few years, I did watch professional wrestling, with matches purportedly in nearby Moline, Illinois. One of those wrestlers was Verne Gagne. I remember him as a kind of boring but good wrestler, bald on top, who looked like my uncle. I had no idea he ran the company. So I hoped to learn more about Gagne and the state of midwestern wrestling in the early 70s.

The focus of Bischoff’s talk was that professional wrestling taught the skills that really are valuable in today’s news and politics, including figuring out heroes and villains (called babyfaces and heels in the patois) and creating stories that people grew interested in. Most interesting were Bischoff’s points that Trump is in the professional wrestling hall of fame, and Lincoln had wrestled for money (not to mention former Governor, former wrestler Ventura). Wrestling is intertwined with politics and leadership. I found this talk contained a number of interesting thoughts.

The book was what I’d call a personal business autobiography. It is focused on Bischoff’s career, most all in wrestling. Bischoff worked for Gagne in the beginning of his career, culminating in running the leading wrestling company under Turner Networks and Time Warner and returning to ringside as a character in the subsequent market leader in wrestling with Vince McMahon. You get to know a lot about Bischoff. He is at heart the stereotypical salesman, quite full of himself. About half the content is about the wrestlers he worked with, interesting from a management point of view in dealing with talent, and, frankly, some good entertainment stories are told. Most of the rest of the book is about the business aspects of professional wrestling, where Bischoff worked for declining and rising companies. I enjoyed reading of his time in the Midwest with Gagne and some of the wrestlers I remember from my youth, like The Crusher and Nick Bockwinkel. The book didn’t exactly cover the same topics as the TED talk, but I found it interesting. I also found the editing was pretty bad, with missing words, repeated words, bad grammar, and more. I suspect proper grammar isn't a top goal of the World Wrestling Entertainment Books imprint, quite possibly by design. There were also pictures of many large men in tights and/or suits. You get a good review of pro wrestling from the 70s through the aughts, including the wrestlers and the back-office players.

Can you learn anything usable in other industries here? Certainly yes, given the many storytelling examples. Making cash from the controversy in these stories is left as an exercise for the reader.

View all my reviews

View all my reviews