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#1 Eric Bischoff
Eric Bischoff will be forever known as the man who at one time put Vince McMahon in the shadows and sat atop the wrestling world and came very close to putting the WWF/E machine out of business in the mid-1990s. Bischoff joined WCW as a low-level announcer in the early 1990s and rose to power as Executive Vice President in 1994 after a revolving door of Head Bookers such as Bill Watts, Dusty Rhodes, Jim Herd and others had failed to make WCW a profitable entity and serious competition for McMahon.
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Bischoff though was different from those old timers. He looked to Japan for inspiration and happened upon a storyline with which he would base the revolutionary New World Order (nWo) upon, as well as Light-Heavyweight stars such as Jushin Liger and Chris Jericho who he brought to the company. Through these stunning athletes, he developed the Cruiserweight division which brought high flying action that American audiences had never seen before.
In combination with aggressively pursuing former and current WWF talent such as Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, Scott Hall and Kevin Nash to main event the shows, Bischoff’s WCW became a financial juggernaut and hot-bed of creativity not seen in the sterile family friendly WWE programming of the mid-1990s. Although Bischoff lost his grip on the promotion in 1999, amid Network restrictions, unco-operative talent and a myriad of other issues, his legacy remains one of the most influential figures in wrestling history, one which beat WWE in the Monday night rating war for 18 months straight.
Conversely, the reasons for Bischoff's great success is likely the reason why his induction hasn’t yet happened. WWE would have to admit that Bischoff was good at his job during that famed 1996-1998 period and wasn’t only defeating WWE in the ratings due to Ted Turner’s money, as WWE likes to purport. Don’t doubt it though. Bischoff is currently on good terms with WWE and he will be inducted one day. There a few figures in wrestling history and no one else in WCW history who are more deserving of enshrinement in WWE's hallowed halls.
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