Lately Eric Bischoff has been asking himself the same question over and over. Why do this again? Why come back to pro wrestling at the age of 69? Why leave the home he loves just to go be that guy again.

Then he thinks about that feeling, waiting on the other side of that curtain.

“You're standing back there and they tell you, ‘OK you're coming up in a minute,’” Bischoff says. “‘You’ve got 60 seconds. You’ve got 30 seconds.’ They start giving you the countdown — 10, 9 … — and when you walk through that curtain, you're going to get a reaction. You don't always know what it's going to be.”

That’s it right there. That’s the feeling you can’t get anywhere else. That’s the part people get addicted to, he says. He’s spent the bulk of his adult life around people hopelessly afflicted with that particular addiction, so he should know.

Still, with his next and (if you believe him) possibly last show coming up at the MLW SuperFight 6 event in Atlanta on Feb. 8, the question has been nagging at him again.

“Why am I really doing this?” he says. “I’ve asked myself that a lot of the last six months to a year.”

If you know your pro wrestling history even just a little bit, you can close your eyes and picture that mid-'90s version of Bischoff. Black leather jacket. Jet black hair swooping across his forehead. An nWo T-shirt tucked into his jeans and a mischievous little Dennis the Menace smirk on his face. Like, "who me?"

That’s the first Bischoff wrestling fans really got to know and love (and hate and love). Before that, he’d done some on-camera work, but only enough for fans to recognize him as, in his words, “a sort of harmless weatherman-type figure.”

So when he got to take over as senior vice president of Ted Turner’s World Championship Wrestling in 1994, the fans practically scoffed. This guy? He’s in charge now? It felt somehow unfair, which made them already predisposed to hate him, which in turn made the role “unfairly easy” for him, he says now.

"The wrestling audience cares more about what's going on behind the scenes than they do what's going on in the ring half the time,” says Bischoff. “So when the audience saw me come into power, I think there were a lot of fans who resented that. It was like, 'Who is this kid?' He was a third-string announcer. He did all Tony Schiavone and Jim Ross' dirty work. He watered Verne Gagne’s plants and mowed his lawn. Now he's the president of the company? It kind of irritated people, and I knew that. So I thought, 'Huh, I'll use that.'"

He used it so well that, with help from superstar acquisitions like Hulk (turned “Hollywood”) Hogan, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall and others, he took on Vince McMahon and WWE in the so-called “Monday night wars” of the late ‘90s and early 2000s — and largely won. Well, in a way. For a time. But it was more than anyone else had done, and he did it in that leather jacket and jeans, grinning out from under that mop of raven hair.

It’s the ghost of that character he still has to reckon with when he does decide to show up at these things. The hair is now a close-cut silver. At 69, the boyish good looks flicker beneath a craggy yet tanned exterior, the way the shape of the mountain is still visible under all the winter ice.

He’s been a few different versions of himself over the years. WCW Bischoff, the plucky little thorn in WWE’s paw. Then WWE Bischoff, the entitled and arrogant underling executive. TNA Bischoff, who always seemed like he was up to something even when you couldn’t tell what it might be.

But always he was Eric Bischoff, the name that’s still on his boarding passes and rental car reservations, which sometimes gets an eyebrow raise and flashback smile from someone who didn’t recognize him at first without that shampoo commercial hair bouncing low over his eyes.

Hey, Eric Bischoff! Too sweet! What are you doing in town?

This week it’s Major League Wrestling, which he first got roped into last year for an event billed as “Eric Bischoff’s One-Shot.” It was supposed to be, as you might expect from the name, a one-time thing. It started during a podcast conversation with actor Paul Walter Hauser, a wrestling enthusiast who’s become an actual pro wrestler himself when he’s not starring in Clint Eastwood movies or winning Golden Globes for his work on TV shows.

Hauser doesn’t need pro wrestling. He loves it. Absolutely loves it. Not in the Drew-Carey-at-Royal-Rumble sense, but more in the Andy Kaufman in the Memphis territory sense. He really wants to do it and live it and be a part of it whenever he can, which is how he got hooked up with MLW. And Hauser — an actor, of all people — was the one to connect Bischoff with MLW CEO Court Bauer.

“I’ve been kind of proselytizing about MLW because they've been giving me all these opportunities and they've been so welcoming,” Hauser says. “So I was kind of egging him on in that interview, like, I’ll call up Court Bauer and we'll see if we can make something happen. But it was weird for me just to be talking to Eric Bischoff because I’m such a fan, but also to know that I helped make that connection? I just assume everybody in wrestling knows each other already.”

Bauer was into the idea. Bischoff made a face like a kid who knew he shouldn’t reach his hand back into the cookie jar but also couldn’t resist. The next day there was a graphic up on the website. Eric freaking Bischoff. One night only.

His appearance was popular with fans, but something about it has been eating at him ever since.

“I didn’t hit it out of the park,” Bischoff says. “That bothered me. I didn't have the type of fun I was hoping to have. I didn't get the enjoyment out of it that I was looking for, just because of my own performance. Nothing else. To be honest with you, that’s the reason I’m doing Atlanta, because my last performance for MLW I felt I was at about 70%. I don't want to go out like that. If I'm going to go out, I want to go out knowing that I knocked it out of the park. I don't want to go out thinking I just lost it.”

There may be nothing in this world less reliable than an old pro wrestler’s assurance that the next one is the last one. Retirement is just another gimmick in this business. Better get your tickets, because the chance will never come again.

Bischoff isn’t quite saying that. If WWE calls and wants him to make an appearance here or there, sure, he’ll probably do it. Sitting for interviews for the sake of one documentary or another — Bischoff notes that his segments on the Netflix series “Mr. McMahon” were actually filmed for a separate project and repurposed — that’s fine. He also has his own podcast, "83 Weeks with Eric Bischoff," where he gets to tell his side of pro wrestling history.

But his days of hitting the road and living that life, being “in the business,” that’s over for him, he insists. It’s got to be. He’s a grandfather, for crying out loud. He lives just outside Yellowstone National Park. He chose that remote location for a reason.

“My wife and I built that home back in ’98 because we both love mountains and we love being away from civilization as far as we can,” Bischoff says. “Just me and my wife and my dog, and I like it that way. But when I jump on a plane and come to Atlanta, for example, I start feeling it a little bit. Going through airports, just the crowds and the noise and the energy is so much. After about two or three days of it, I've had enough. It's like sensory overload for me. It never used to bother me.”

At home in Wyoming, he can almost forget that he’s still Eric Bischoff, a guy who lived some of the most consequential moments of his life on TV. People don’t recognize him much. If they know him it’s as the guy who lives in the big house down the road. Then he comes to these wrestling events and everyone knows him. They have opinions about him. They have memories of him, and some of those memories are very special to them. This is also true of the other wrestlers on the show.

“I was glued to the screen the whole time back in the WCW days,” says Tom Lawlor, a former UFC fighter turned pro wrestler who’s booked on Saturday’s MLW event in Atlanta. “My friends from back then, if they see me in a segment with Eric Bischoff, they’ll go nuts. I mean, 15-year-old me would go absolutely crazy if he could see it.”

It’s a hard transition, though. You get used to being just another guy in the middle-of-nowhere Wyoming, someone’s kindly old granddad, and then you get air-dropped back into this world. People want selfies with him. They want to talk about the old days. It’s like they think they’re talking to one of those old Bischoffs, the one in the leather jacket or the WWE suit or a combination of all of them, routed through a soup of nostalgia and parasocial familiarity.

It’s nice to be recognized and appreciated. It’s also all a bit much.

So of course he returns to that question. Why do this again? You don’t need the money. So why come back to this world? But once you start asking that question, you might have to be prepared for a difficult answer.

“I don’t know if it’s my ego or if it’s because I’ve done it so long I’ve gotten addicted to that reaction from the audience,” Bischoff says. “It is a rush when you can manipulate the audience and get them to do what you want them to do when you want them to do it. I guess it's a power play of some sort. It's fun to be able to manipulate an audience. You can’t get that feeling a lot of other places.”

That feeling of standing behind the curtain. Hearing the countdown. That crowd is out there and they’re going to feel some type of way when they see you for the first time in a long time. But what will they think? What can you make them think? What emotional journey will you take them on, and will they follow?

Some of the people in the Atlanta crowd will undoubtedly have loved and hated and loved to hate him over the span of many years. Some wrestlers — think Hulk Hogan at the Netflix premier of WWE Raw last month — come back and discover that the reaction maybe isn’t what they expected. You just never know for sure until you walk through that curtain.

“But I don’t know,” Bischoff says. “Old wrestlers — the term they use to be nice is ‘legends’ — it’s different. I don’t look like that guy anymore. I’m an old man. And who wants to boo an old man?”

And there it is again, that same mischievous smile, still in his toolbox. Who, me? It’s the one that reminds you it’s still Eric Bischoff in there. At least for one more night.