If there’s anyone who knows how to run a successful wrestling promotion, it’s Eric Bischoff.
The 71-year-old Bischoff is obviously best known for his run leading WCW in their “Monday Night Wars” ratings battle in the late 90s with the WWE. Bischoff led WCW’s flagship show, Monday Night Nitro, to ratings supremacy every week for two consecutive years over WWE’s “Monday Night Raw.”
Bischoff obviously has a long and storied history in the wrestling business, beginning in the Minneapolis-based AWA in the late 80s and extending all the way into the 2010s while working for both the WWE and TNA.
Fast forward to today and Bischoff is now busy with a real wrestling promotion in Real American Freestyle Wrestling. Bischoff serves as the Chief Media Officer for RAF, which has now been running monthly events for a year and just concluded RAF 13, which was held in Miami’s Watsco Center and saw former UFC fighters such as Colby Covington, Gilbert Burns and Luke Rockhold compete.
The new promotion has seen heavy UFC crossover with major names such as Armen Tsarukyan, Henry Cejudo, Urijah Faber, Gable Steveson and Michael Chandler compete.
“We’re getting more and more popular,” said Bischoff in a one-on-one interview with Heavy Sports. “Fox has been such an amazing partner. They do so much promotion for us, we’re on the streaming platform Fox Nation, but we’re getting so much network exposure on Fox, and it’s really helping to grow the audience. We’re expanding into other forms of television. We just premiered our first unscripted special this past week called Real American Freestyle Undiscovered. It was a two-hour special, a competition elimination format, much like I guess Contender or many other competition elimination formats, we’ve seen them all.
“But we had our own, and it really is another one of those things that allows us as a producer to expose the amazing characters that make up this amazing sport, and by exposing these characters and showcasing them,” Bischoff continued. “Letting the audience get to know them and appreciate them and their discipline, their dedication, all the things that go into becoming an elite level wrestler, it just creates more fans. We’re looking forward to doing more more of that documentaries we’ve got planned. We’ve got an entire unscripted production team now that we’re assembling, so that we can really bring the essence of what makes wrestling such an important sport to the world who maybe hasn’t really seen it yet.”
Eric Bischoff Compares RAF’s Plan Similar to UFC
RAF 13 sold 4,000-plus seats to Miami’s Watsco Center — as many as it could fit — according to founder Chad Bronstein. RAF 14 will be held in Las Vegas, which will be headlined by Tsarukyan and Dillon Danis. The event after will be held in Chicago.
This follows after RAF held events in international countries such as Russia and Georgia. Bischoff said a key to the growth of the promotion is the international crowd, where real wrestling has a lot of history in those countries.
Bischoff also keys in on growing the 18-to-49 male demographic and mentions how UFC — which is now on a $7.7 billion deal with Paramount — only started exploding in popularity and became a true mainstream sport after its competition series, The Ultimate Fighter, premiered in 2005.
UFC had been around for the prior 12 years but was never accepted by the masses until the premiere of the competition series. Bischoff hopes it will happen with RAF now that they’ve premiered their competition series. He also mentions wanting to run weekly events in the near future, rather than just monthly ones.
“Just look at the business model of UFC, it was losing money by the train car full,” said Bischoff. “Every time they went out the door, they lost millions of dollars. I don’t know what the total number was. I remember reading somewhere it was in excess of $350 million of losses over an extended period of time, and it wasn’t until The Ultimate Fighter came onto the scene, and the guy that kind of created that was a gentleman by the name of Craig Piligian at Pilgrim Studios in Los Angeles. He was an unscripted producer, one of the biggest, one of the most successful and if you look at the business of the UFC, that show completely flipped the future of UFC around similar with Undiscovered and some of the other things we’re doing. Once the audience understands the characters, once they get a feel for the sport, once they start to understand it, they become fans. And it made UFC. The UFC has been on a rocket ship ever since that show and continues to grow. I look for those opportunities. Undiscovered is the first one.”
Eric Bischoff on Key to Growing RAF: More Unscripted Series
Bischoff mentions that other ideas for programs are being discussed for RAF and could soon be finalized.
“There’s another one, I’m not going to mention it now because we’re not far enough down the road,” Bischoff detailed. “But I can assure you, we will be very shortly. My partner Chad (Bronstein) is very very fast. My biggest challenge is keeping up with him, but we’ve got another one that we’re ready to announce here shortly, and we’ve got two or three more waiting in the wings. So to me, that’s growth, and I think if we can continue to produce two big shows a month, continue to produce our unscripted series and documentaries as we plan, and my ultimate goal really is I want to get a weekly show. I’m hoping now — this is just me talking I’m not negotiating publicly. I’m not doing any of that stuff. I’m just putting it out there in the universe because sometimes when you do that, it actually works.”
Bischoff has a lot of optimism when it comes to the growth of RAF, which is really the first wide-scale promotion of its kind. The early returns have been positive and the crossover of UFC stars have played a major role in RAF continuing to show momentum as it embarks on its second year.
“I’m hoping that when we go to Vegas and we put on an amazing show at Fontainebleau, and we get the kind of response I’m hoping that we’re going to get in Vegas for all the right reasons, I’d love to see a weekly live series from Las Vegas,” said Bischoff. “Not necessarily at the same level as our numbered events that we do every month. Not necessarily at the same scale as what we do internationally, but there’s a lot of great athletes out there that would love an opportunity to get on the Real American Freestyle stage at one of our bigger shows, and I think Undiscovered proved that there’s a lot of great talent out there, and we could produce a really interesting weekly show that I think would probably turn things around even quicker for us. Not that we need to go any quicker. But if that’s our goal, that would certainly provide that opportunity.”
Eric Bischoff on How RAF Can Mimic UFC in Growing Young Promotion