Cageside Quote - Bret Hart Thinks TNA Needs to Push Younger Stars Instead of "Old Dinosaurs Like Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff"

From an interview with Brian Fritz of Fanhouse:

Well, I'll be honest. After being in WCW and being around them, you start to realize that these guys -- Bischoff in particular -- never understood or knew anything about wrestling. They just struck me as guys that didn't understand wrestling. To see them working with another company now, to me, I think you'll eventually see that they don't know anything. They didn't know anything then and they don't know anything now. They're not going to make a difference anywhere they go.

Yeah, competition is always good. I have a lot of respect for the young wrestlers there like AJ Styles and Kurt Angle and Samoa Joe, Abyss, different guys. I know they've got a lot of talent there and guys that I consider good friends of mine including RVD (Rob Van Dam). I wish them all the best and I hope the younger stars get a chance to show what they've got rather than coming back to the old dinosaurs like Hulk Hogan or Eric Bischoff with the same old certain babble that he's been doing for 10 years when he'll babble about nothing. He somehow positions himself to be a star on the show and I think there's real stars that need to get that light and not him.

I don't think there are many pro wrestling fans that would disagree with him. When you talk about Eric Bischoff, there is very clearly only one success in his career in the business. He can't even be credited with coming up with the invasion idea. But for as long as he's been around and to only have one major success to your name is incredible. Why continue to give him the chance to bury a company? Just because of that one success? Hogan has been living off of what he was 25 years ago and he's so burned out that it's amazing he can even walk around.

What's sad is that TNA has so much potential with so many of the stars they have. Bischoff and Hogan, as long as they are around, will be at the forefront of the show. It's like they don't understand, or are unwilling to accept, the fact that eventually anything gets old. And these guys are old; not just in age but in how long we've had to see them so deeply involved in the business. The attitude among the people that run the show, and this includes Vince McMahon, is that if something doesn't work immediately then they need to ditch the idea and go back to something that's worked in the past. Which means it has about a 10% likelihood of working again.

Just being a competitor to WWE will bring decent ratings. I fully believe that if Ring of Honor was airing on Thursday nights on Spike, it would do around the same ratings TNA does now. But for any promotion to truly be successful and actually challenge WWE, they need to start by adopting a strategy that is almost unheard of in the industry: new and unproven is better than old slightly successful. As soon as they learn that, they may actually become a threat.