Eric Bischoff recently discussed Chris Jericho's WCW run on his podcast, 83 Weeks. Bischoff addressed some of the criticism of WCW that Jericho wrote about in his book.
"Yes, I did offer Chris Jericho what I offered Dean [Malenko] and Eddie [Guerrero]. The strategy is really simple - when Eddie, Dean and Chris [Benoit] came in to talk about a deal they came in together. That was part of the deal. They weren't going to negotiate individually and I wasn't going to try to split them up. I didn't do business that way or now. I am pretty transparent how I do things. When they came in they wanted to come in together. I knew exactly the roles that I wanted them to play. I knew exactly how much money I had in my budget to pay them. I knew exactly what my expectations of them were, and I agreed to pay them all equally.
When I brought in Chris Jericho, it was my full intention to bring Chris in at the same level as those guys, and the last thing that I wanted to do was low ball a guy so that once he gets there and finds out after he has been there for a couple of weeks from his good friend Chris Benoit and Eddie and Dean that they are making 20% or 40% more than him then I would end up having a pissed off camper, and I didn't want that. I wanted to try and create a parity, if you will, with certain guys as often as I could.
You couldn't always do that, especially with your top guys, which these guys were, at that point as talented and amazing as they ended up being later on because of the opportunities that they all got on Nitro because of the Cruiserweight division, but at the time they were relatively unknowns outside of the hardcore wrestling audience. The mainstream audience didn't know who they were, we had to build that, but we paid them fairly because we knew where they were going to go, and I wanted to treat Chris Jericho fairly. If that makes me a bad guy, if that makes me 'ATM Eric' so that it fits the cutesy little narrative to fit Chris Jericho's book, then so be it."
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