Eric Bischoff explains why he let Triple H leave WCW

Eric Bischoff oversaw WCW's talent contracts when Triple H worked for the company in 1994 and 1995. In a recent podcast episode, the WWE Hall of Famer addressed why the 14-time world champion did not receive a new deal.

Triple H, real name Paul Levesque, was known as Terra Ryzing and Jean-Paul Levesque during his one-year WCW run. WWE's current Chief Content Officer was tipped by fellow wrestlers Ric Flair and Terry Taylor to be a future star. However, his reluctance to move from Connecticut to WCW's home of Atlanta caused issues.

On 83 Weeks, Bischoff said he wanted wrestlers to live closer to Atlanta to save the company money. Due to Triple H's location, he struggled to justify giving The Game a larger contract:

"I said, 'Paul, you gotta understand, you are what I refer to as a G.U.D., geographically undesirable,' because previously in WCW they would fly people in all over the place, not keeping track of expenses, not paying attention to the tickets that they were mailing out to people," Bischoff stated. "I've gone into that detail. And around the time that Paul came into WCW, I was focused on saving money, not spending money." [29:19 – 29:50]

According to Bischoff, Triple H's WCW contract was worth around $75,000 per year. Vince McMahon's son-in-law later became WWE's highest-paid superstar.

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Eric Bischoff wanted to keep Triple H

In a previous episode of 83 Weeks, Eric Bischoff explained why he had no interest in hiring Shawn Michaels to work for WCW in the 1990s.

By contrast, Bischoff would happily have kept Michaels' best friend Triple H on his roster had finances not been a problem:

"I had a very, very limited budget, and as much as I wanted to keep Paul, I couldn't. The budget just wouldn't sustain it. One could argue, 'Yeah, but you could have got rid of this guy,' but these people had contracts in place. It wasn't just as easy as trading one wrestler out for another wrestler, but contractually WCW didn't have the budget to really pay Paul what we should have paid him." [29:50 – 30:17]

Bischoff added that Triple H was probably not ready to work for WWE in 1994. He believes The Game's WCW stint gave him the platform to build experience and prove he could join WWE in 1995.

Do you think Eric Bischoff should have kept Triple H in WCW? Hit the discuss button and let us know.

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Please credit 83 Weeks and give an H/T to Sportskeeda Wrestling for the transcription if you use Eric Bischoff's quotes from this article.