Eric Bischoff has Brock Lesnar comfortably inside his top ten of all time, and thinks part of the reason is that Lesnar was never really a character at all.
Lesnar confirmed his retirement this week, having lost to Oba Femi inside Hell in a Cell at SummerSlam and then told the crowd Femi is the future and he is the past. WWE has since moved him to its alumni section.
Speaking on 83 Weeks, Bischoff was asked whether the retirement affects how Lesnar will be remembered.
“I think it does, and I think the fact that Vince used Brock as an attraction is a big part of it. The fact that Brock avoided press, he didn’t court media, he didn’t court publicity. He came in, he did his work, and he went back to the farm, and you didn’t hear from him again until it was time to come back and rinse and repeat the same formula over and over again. And it didn’t have to change the formula because it was so f***ing profitable. It worked.”
That distance, he said, is why the audience never really knew him.
“Because he avoided the media and because of the way he was positioned, you didn’t ever hear a lot from Brock. You hear from Paul, you catch a couple of syllables from Brock here and there, but you never really got close to Brock as a character. He was a machine that you loved to watch in action, but it wasn’t really a character in a traditional sense.”
Asked whether that puts him in the top ten, Bischoff did not hesitate.
“We often talk in the categories of big men, Vader, André. One of the best. The matches he had, his ability, his athletic ability alone puts him in a top 10, and then because of the way he was used, he was such a dominant, powerful force within WWE, and had accumulated so many great moments. He definitely top 10 for sure.”
A Mount Rushmore place, he thinks, will come later.
“Time has a funny way of really affecting perception, and when Brock finally, when the audience actually believes that he’s going to step away, when the absence makes the heart grow fonder factor begins to kick in, you’ll hear a lot more conversation about Brock being a Mount Rushmore candidate. But I don’t think people really bought into the idea that he’s really going to retire. That just takes some time.”
Paul Heyman, who managed Lesnar across his WWE runs from 2012, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2024.
