Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (21 page)

Finally Hogan was ready to launch into his finish, the
Superman comeback
. Anyone who’d watched him for the better part of a decade knew its three basic elements, and he wasn’t about to change them now. Hogan threw Flair into the ropes, put his boot on his face as he repelled back, and then dropped his leg across Flair’s torso as the white-haired wrestler lay flat on his back, waiting for the three count. Once it was delivered, Hogan rose and cupped his ear to hear the rendering verdict of every last clap.

Thanks to the heavy publicity blitz, more than 238,000 homes ordered the show, the biggest turnout for a Turner wrestling event in four years. (Between the live gate and the PPV revenue, Hogan netted about $680,000.) And the upswing continued through August 24, when Flair and Hogan wrestled for the first time on free TV. Close to 3 million homes tuned in, the second-highest rating for wrestling on TBS. In November, Bischoff told Flair he wanted him to wrestle another retirement match, but this time lose. Flair grumbled, though a two-year contract extension convinced him to do the job.

By then, Hogan was firmly in possession of the company’s star-making machinery. His contract may have let him skip most of the Orlando-based television tapings, but his fingerprints were all over them. Old friends started appearing regularly, among them “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan, an eighties’ Stars-and-Stripes act whose most recent claim to fame had been getting busted for speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike with the Iron Sheik in the passenger seat and three grams of coke in the Sheik’s shaving bag. Hogan also tried to land Jim Hellwig, the original Ultimate Warrior, though when he failed he settled for an independent named Richard Wilson, who worked as a knockoff Warrior called Rio Lord of the Jungle. Hogan gave him the stage name Renegade and within a month had Wilson contending for a title on one of WCW’s cable TV shows. Steve Austin hated working with Renegade so much that he threw a whole day’s television taping into chaos by refusing to lose to him. As a result, poor Renegade wound up wrestling someone named Tex in a match so nakedly awful that no one associated with it ever talked about it again.
¹

In the roundtable booking meetings, Flair warned that a dangerous schism was developing between the free and the PPV products. The quality of wrestling on the flagship
WCW Saturday Night
show had become atrocious. Fans wouldn’t keep paying to see pay-per-views, Flair argued, if they kept getting fed a diet of shows leading up to them that featured hacks like Renegade.

He was right, of course. But he was also missing the larger point. The problem wasn’t the way the shows looked, or even who wore the belt. The problem was that Saturday night had the lowest viewership among men of any night on television. USA, meanwhile, was breaking cable records with McMahon’s
Monday Night Raw
by siphoning off male viewers who were used to being in front of their televisions for
Monday Night Football
. In May 1995,
Raw
did a 3.3 rating. The 3.9 that it did the next month (with a match between the ghoulish Undertaker, Mark Calloway, and Memphis’s Jeff Jarrett) set a cable television record. These weren’t particularly great bouts. Vince always saved his best stuff for pay-per-view. But they indicated that a silent majority of young men were willing to abandon network television for cable in prime time.

Turner was watching the ratings, too, having been frustrated by his failed attempts to buy both CBS and NBC. Before he could think about another acquisition, his aides told him that he had to concentrate on shoring up his own stock price. The
Wall Street Journal
quoted an entertainment industry executive as saying, “They’ve got to show that they can make some money with what they’ve got.”

It was against this backdrop that Bischoff happened to have his first significant meeting with Turner, having landed what he thought was the final piece that would put WCW into the black: a deal to beam its shows across China. Because the deal involved Rupert Murdoch’s Sky satellite system, it needed Turner’s approval. Bischoff had met the boss socially, but he’d never addressed him close up. He’d been working on his presentation for a month when he finally got word in July 1994 that Turner would see him.

As he was escorted into Turner’s office he first saw Scott Sassa, the head of both TNT and TBS. Then his eyes reached Harvey Schiller, a former chairman of the U.S. Olympic Committee who was now overseeing all of Turner’s sports properties. Schiller was no wrestling aficionado. In fact, his baptism in it came haphazardly—during a party at his Atlanta home. A guest couldn’t stop talking about the prior night’s WCW show, in which one of the wrestlers was carried offstage in a stretcher. Schiller hadn’t seen the episode and was furious to learn something like that could happen on his watch without him being told. When he called Bischoff to demand an explanation, the producer seemed con-fused.” Uh, Dr. Schiller,” he said. “You didn’t believe that, did you?”

As all the men settled in, Bischoff started describing the China option. Then Turner held up his hand to bluntly ask, “Why aren’t we doing better in the ratings?”

Bischoff froze. How hadn’t he seen this one coming? Before he could catch himself, he blurted out,
“Because I don’t have prime time.”
As soon as he said it, he could feel Sassa’s eyes on him. Sassa had done him a favor by getting him this meeting. He’d just sandbagged the man.

“How soon can you get it on the air by?” Turner asked, his face brightening.

“September at the latest,” Bischoff replied, looking to the new 1995 television season.

Turner turned to Sassa and said, “Give the man two hours on Monday night on TNT.”

On the way out, Bischoff expected Sassa to explode, but instead he just sighed with the resignation of a man who’d seen the mogul do this before.

As for Bischoff, it was a classic case of being careful about what one asks for. “I felt like I had a gun to my head,” he says. “I’d just been handed two hours of prime time and everyone at Turner was watching me. Either I hit a home run or my career was pretty much over.”

INSIDE TITAN
Tower, where everyone had put the experience of Vince’s drug trial the year before behind them, news reports of Turner’s decision were greeted with contempt. “We were stunned they could be so stupid,” one of his aides recalls. McMahon was irked by Hogan’s attempt to re-create the old WWF lineup. It was stealing, when you got down to it. But he couldn’t imagine that Hogan and this Bischoff newcomer could do serious damage to Raw. During the steroid controversy, much of the work had centered on Lex Luger, whom McMahon had spent a small fortune luring away from WCW to be the face of his WBF. When that folded, he went to enormous lengths to make Luger his next Hulk Hogan. On July 4, 1993, McMahon had clothed the muscular blonde in a stars-and-stripes body suit and dropped him from a helicopter onto the USS
Intrepid
for a bout with a six-hundred-pound Samoan named Yokozuna playing the role of a Japanese sumo wrestler. (Luger addressed him by saying, “What’s wrong with America is bloodsucking, overstuffed, sushi-eating, rice-chomping leeches like you.”) But it wasn’t long before it began to dawn on Vince that no amount of money was going to make up for the wrestler’s lack of charisma, and all the histrionics in the world weren’t going to make him move any less stiffly. So when Luger’s contract was expiring, and he wrote Vince to say he was considering himself a free agent, the promoter stashed the letter in his briefcase and promptly forgot about it.

On the evening of September 4, 1995, Vince settled into his living room along with the other nearly 2 million viewers to see what Turner had come up with. He was in a foul mood because the USA Network had preempted
Raw
for the U.S. Open tennis tournament, essentially inviting Turner to attack him unopposed. What he saw made his jaw drop. It wasn’t just that Turner did better than expected. The feel was edgy, the crowd amped, and Bischoff, with his full-throated and peripatetic opening, “Welcome to
Monday Nitro,”
did a good job at creating a happening.

A half hour into the show, he was startled to see Luger on the other end of the television screen running across the WCW set. As far as he knew, Luger had wrestled a WWF show in Canada the evening before and was supposed to be en route to another one that night. Then he thought about the letter that Luger had given him, and he cursed.

The first shot in the Monday night wars had been fired.

1.
Though rarely used, he lasted at WCW until early 1999. Upon being given a pink slip, the thirty-three-year-old Wilson lapsed into depression and, several months later, killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head.

TEN

THE SECOND INSTALLMENT OF
Monday Nitro
was held on September 11, 1995, in Miami. And though this was the first time that
Nitro
and
Monday Night Raw
aired against one another, both shows weren’t truly live. As a cost-saving measure, Vince taped four weeks worth of TV in a single marathon session. Only the first hour was broadcast live. The other three were taped for subsequent weeks. Knowing in advance that the September 11 episode was taped, Eric Bischoff opened his show by crowing: “In case you’re tempted to grab the remote control and check out the competition, don’t bother. It’s two or three weeks old. Shawn Michaels beats the big guy with a superkick that couldn’t earn a green belt at a YMCA. Stay right here. It’s live.”

Vince had spent the summer denying that Bischoff could hurt him, and now he was paying the price. On Tuesday morning, the Nielsen overnights showed that
Nitro
had beaten
Raw
2.5 to 2.3—a difference of a few hundred thousand homes. “Until then, there was the feeling that we didn’t like these guys,” remembers Michael Ortman, who was the WWF’s vice president for distribution. “But we also had a sense that there was enough room for everybody under the tent. After Eric gave away the results of our matches, Monday night became a war.”

Since the steroid trial, the WWF had been going through a very public repositioning, and Ortman was one of its architects. A canny tactician, he was troubled by the fact that Congress was taking up the issue of violence in the entertainment industry as part of an omnibus crime bill. If the rider that dealt with television passed, it would bump violent programming into the late evening, causing a massive drop in the preteen audience at a time when the WWF could least afford it. (The fallout from the trial included the dissolution of a licensing deal with Hasbro.) Concluding that the best defense was a good offense, Ortman suggested that they get ahead of the curve by positioning themselves as socially responsible. He helped create a corporate manifesto called
The Principles
that assured affiliates the WWF would ban a catalog of raunchy things during the peak hours for underage viewing, among them “the use of a foreign object as a weapon (i.e., the ring bell, chair or other props), blood employed for dramatic effect, and aggressive behavior toward women.” As he saw it, congressional pressure would accumulate around WCW instead of the WWF, causing Turner to end up in trouble with the one constituency that mattered: his stockholders. McMahon endorsed the plan and promptly lent his name to a series of “Dear Ted” missives. As one of them began:

On Sunday … Turner Broadcasting will kick off the cable industry’s
Voices Against Violence
week by presenting its most violent pay-per-view ever—
WCW Uncensored …
. This tasteless event is being marketed by describing how bones may pierce through skin, eyes might be displaced, a person’s head may be dragged on asphalt from moving vehicle, and a leather strap could cut through flesh like a machete.

The reputation of the company you built will be shaken if this event is allowed to go on as promoted. This letter marks my fourth written attempt to privately implore your company to reduce the incidents of gratuitous violence and unethical solicitation. While I initially held out hope that things were improving, I must now conclude that a consensus decision has been made by your WCW to fill a creative void with increased violent content. In order to further distance my product from yours, WCW’s actions have left me no choice but to place your product under a more public microscope.

Since the trial, McMahon had weaned himself off his rope-muscled steroid gallery by using men like Canada’s Bret Hart, the sultry and sneering Shawn Michaels, and Kevin Nash, who got his WWF start appearing as Michaels’s bodyguard and was now drawing better reactions than Hart. To show he was now a promoter with a social conscience, McMahon even sent the three on a Christmas season “Wish” tour to benefit the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

Thinking that the tour was a good way to tout his company’s new direction, Ortman met several of its Canadian business partners at the US Air Arena, which was just a few miles from his Baltimore home, in November 1995. An antiviolence campaign by the Quebec-based Coalition for Responsible Television had just helped get
Power Rangers
thrown off the air. As he pulled up to the arena in an Acura that he’d fitted with
NEW WWF
license plates, Ortman wanted the Canadians to feel comfortable with the product so they could defend it at home.

The undercard contests were hard fought and exciting, and the main event pitting Hart against Nash was a perfect example of the license plate’s message. The men didn’t have to rely on violent gimmicks because they were athletes. But then something happened to make Ortman shift in his seat. Hart pulled out a chair and leveled Nash with it. In response, Nash rose to his feet and ripped a TV monitor loose from its sockets to go after Hart. Ortman pretended to be nonplussed, mentioning to his guests that pay-per-views, unlike broadcast shows, were supposed to be a bit edgy. But after the show he cornered Vince backstage. “Just give me the words to explain to those folks what I just saw,” he said.