Hey, hey, it's Conrad Thompson and you're listening to 83 weeks with Eric Mischoff. Eric, what's going on, man? How are you?

Well, I'd be lying if I said I've ever been any better. So I'm doing great.

Okay, no kidding around. We know everybody's tuning in this week. They can't wait to hear your thoughts on Bash at the beach 98. It went down on July 12th from the Cox Arena in San Diego.

It's going to draw a sellout, not a fillout, 10,095 fans. Now 9,000 of those paid an incredible 314,842 dollars. Plus more than 100 grand in merchandise. It does a huge buy rate 1.42. Wow. What a show. What a time in WCW. Of course, we should have to let the stage, I guess.

Six days prior to this, less than a week prior to this. You guys blew it up at the Georgia dome. Goldberg became the world champion defeating Hulk Coke and you can hear all about that in the archives of 83 weeks.com.

Six days later, you've got a new champ, but on top, it's all about the NWA. Is this the hottest, like summer in the history of WCW?

I think it has to be, you know, obviously July, you know, Bash at the beach 96 with the formation of the NWA and Hulk, and turning heel, arguably from a macro perspective, one would suggest that that might have been the biggest summer just because of the implications of it all.

What's led to this really, but in terms of business, in terms of like you said, you know, Goldberg winning the World Title 60s before this pay per view, this pay per view is loaded with talent, absolutely loaded with talent to NBA champions, an NFL linebacker in addition to one of the deepest and probably the best rosters we had at any point, you know, in WCW.

All of that combined. Yeah, I would have to say that this was one very hot summer. It was it was great that we were near the ocean in San Diego because it was hot everywhere else.

It was an unbelievable time to be a WCW fan, you know, we rewatched it this week at my house and the guy who handles all of our graphics here on the show makes us look good. Dave Silva was over.

And he just kept going on and on. I mean, this was the height of his fandom. And I think so many of our listeners sort of feel the same way, which is why 83 weeks has been such a hit.

Let's talk about some interesting stuff here, the business side of things. The prior two bash at the beaches were both held in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Why don't we move to San Diego for 1998.

A couple of reasons really. I never really liked to venue all that much in Daytona. There was nothing wrong with it. Don't get me wrong. It wasn't wasn't a bad venue.

But it felt a little tired to me. And also as we've discussed so many times on the show, one of the biggest challenges that we had in building the WCW brand, including the pay per views associated with it was, you know, becoming more of a national promotion.

So between the fact that we had been to Daytona a couple times, it obviously was in the southeast and part of the United States, which was our back our backyard, so to speak.

The desire was really to expand the brand and try to get a stronger foothold in the West Coast because historically the West Coast was was really tough for WCW.

If you go back and look at the history of WCW and TBS before Nitro and even after Nitro because of the, you know, we didn't have a border to border feed it when Nitro first started.

WCW Saturday night, which was the foundation for WCW for so many years, you know, aired at 305 on the Saturday afternoon on the West Coast. So we didn't really have a big fan base.

Now, you know, with Nitro and especially with the replay, we started to build that bigger fan base. But one of the things about sports entertainment.

Notice what I did there sports entertainment. Is that what hang on. Are you going to fucking do that all the time now?

I don't know. I'm going to feel it. Oh, come on. I'm going to, you know, come on.

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