World Championship Wrestling wasn't necessarily known for producing many homegrown stars from the ground up outside of a few exceptions. However, there was one man who became a staple of WCW programming after training at the company's "Power Plant,"Ernest "The Cat Miller. The former college football linebacker was recruited by Eric Bischoff, who had high hopes for Miller as he was a fan of his athleticism and his natural charisma. With that said, Bischoff recently admitted on episode of the "Developmentally Speaking" podcast that had Miller debuted in WCW a little earlier, he could have become one of the biggest stars in the wrestling industry.
"Ernest, if he would have come along two to three years earlier, Ernest could have been one of the top stars in WCW by 1997 or 1998. But as it was, by the time Ernest came in, and unfortunately WCW started to decline, we had all the issues that everybody already knows about starting in 1999, Ernest was just coming into his own at that point. He'd been out there in the ring and had a lot of matches, he was getting comfortable with TV time, he was gettinghis character was blossoming, but he was peaking out about 1999 which was the worst time in the world to peak out in WCW because the business was going down."
Bischoff rounded off by saying that two or three years would have been such a difference to Miller's career, and while Bischoff knows Miller has had success in his career since WCW closed its doors in 2001, the peaks "The Cat" could have reached would have been a lot higher than the ones he did reach in WCW.
Please credit "Developmentally Speaking" when using quotes from this article, and give a H/T to Wrestling Inc. for the transcription.
