Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (26 page)

That one was easy. Put the widow on the tube.

And that was where things got weird. Because shortly after the opening credits rolled, shortly after the ten-bell salute to Pillman clanged, it was clear that wrestling was about to cross a very shaky bridge, leaving the faux world of kayfabe behind for good. Vince was going to give
Raw
’s fans a real-life, grieving widow less than forty-eight hours after she’d been left with five orphaned children and another one on the way. To make sure no one missed the exclusive, he hyped it before every commercial break, sending his viewers to the Pillmans’ empty family room where it was announced Melanie would soon appear. When she finally made her way to the couch—the same one on which Brian had gone wild during the home invasion angle nearly a year earlier—Vince’s voice filtered into her earpiece. “You sure you want to do this?” he asked.” Really, it’s not too late to back out.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sure,” she said, waiting for a video game commercial on
Raw
to end.

When the show resumed, Vince appeared dressed in a black army-like jumpsuit with the
Raw
logo embroidered above the breast pocket. He opened the interview in a stilted tone that chafed against the confessional nature of the moment. “Melanie, I’m sure you’re distraught, shocked, dismayed over this, and we thank you very much for joining us tonight,” he started. “There’s always a great deal of speculation when a thirty-five-year-old man who’s in competitive condition passes away. Can you, please, tell us what you’ve been told about Brian’s death?”

“Apparently there was a problem with his heart. Uh, apparently his heart had been under a lot of stress … “

“There was some speculation last night that Brian, because of his injuries, had to take a great deal of medicine,” Vince continued. “There was some speculation that he may have taken too much.”

Melanie expected this question, but the speed at which Vince leaped to it surprised her. Her face curled up in a look that was more disgust than despair. Seeing that, he backed off. “Is there anything you want to say to aspiring athletes who get hurt and may have to resort to prescribed medication, pain pills?”

“I can’t really comment,” she replied, sniffling. “My husband, not only was he an athlete but he was involved in a car accident and had extensive injuries from that and, uh, it was hard on him.” Then, looking into the camera, or perhaps past it, she added, “I just want everyone to know it’s a wake-up call. For some of you it could be your husband. Or it could be you. And you don’t want to leave behind a bunch of orphans like my husband did.”

“How are the children taking the news?” Vince pried, a bit too eagerly to sidestep the Tuesday morning critics who’d call the whole affair exploitative.

“Little Brian doesn’t understand why Daddy’s not coming home,” she said. “But Brittany … she screamed for fifteen minutes.” Melanie suddenly looked exhausted, as if whatever energy she had three questions ago was completely gone. But the impulse to go for one last piece of emotional punctuation proved too great for Vince to resist.

“Have you had a chance to think about what you as a single parent will do to support five children?” he asked, not really needing an answer to bring the segment to a close.

Melanie was back to staring at the floor. She mouthed something about being grateful for the support she’d received from fans and the company, then sighed. “I don’t know, Vince. I don’t know.”

1.
The group included a young Rocky Maivia, a third-generation wrestler who’d entered the WWF a year before as babyface and was now doing a heel turn. Because he loathed the racial overtones of the group, he lasted only a few months before emerging on his own as The Rock.

2.
For years, one of the things that severely irritated Vince about his deal with USA was Koplovitz’s insistence on running
Murder She Wrote
as a lead-in to Raw. Its audience of middle-aged women turned off their TVs as soon as their show ended, forcing him to build his young male audience from scratch. This time, however, Koplovitz agreed to insert the demographically friendly
Walker, Texas Ranger
as a prelude instead.

3.
House shows
are arena shows staged for ticket revenue but not broadcast over TV. Their results are usually considered meaningless. As the old expression in wrestling goes, “If it didn’t happen on TV, it didn’t happen.”

THIRTEEN

LIKE EVERYONE ELSE WHO
knew Brian Pillman, Eric Bischoff was angry with him for dying. But Bischoff was also more than a little afraid that the next one to go might be under Turner’s roof. So on October 13, 1997, a few days after he’d returned from Pillman’s funeral, he gathered the Boys together before airtime at the Ice Palace in Tampa and let them know that anyone who needed help kicking a habit could take the time off, no questions asked. He needed them healthy, he said, because WCW was poised to expand to a third hour on Monday nights and get a beachhead on Thursday nights on TBS. They were all making more money than any of them dared to dream. But nobody should be confused about what Ted Turner wanted. He was sick of the raunchy language, the crotch chopping, and the sexual innuendo. Then, as if to send a heat-seeking missile, he scanned the group of faces, settling on Scott Hall and Kevin Nash. “There are only three wrestlers in this company who’ve ever put asses in the seats,” he said. Then he named Hulk Hogan, Randy Savage, and Roddy Piper.

The line was a near-verbatim recitation of what the old guard had been saying since Hall and Nash arrived to create the illusion of an in-house war and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. “I’m not a Hall fan,” Piper would say. “Personally, I think he’s a piece of shit. And Nash, well, at least he shows up. But I’ve never seen either of those guys draw a dime by being a single main event anywhere. I’ve done that so many motherfucking times—I have no idea how many times I’ve done it.”

Piper was right, but he was also ignoring the obvious. Hall and Nash had spent the last sixteen months storming across the landscape as a pair of rat-pack bullies who smirked their way into the hearts of teenage boys everywhere. They were emotionally stunted millionaires—petulant, crass, leering. And they glided high above the company’s rank and file, determined to get the kind of star treatment that had been reserved exclusively for Hogan.

In their rat-pack roles, Hall was the hothead while Nash was the acid-tongued comic who did more with his wits than his fists. After forty-one-year-old Arn Anderson retired on
Nitro
because neck surgery had left him unable even to button his shirt, Nash skewered the ceremony, tucking his long brown hair into a bald mask and wearing a neck brace to lampoon Anderson’s sentimental good-bye. Anderson had no words when his wife called him backstage because their twelve-year-old son was in tears at home as he watched his father portrayed as a womanizing alcoholic surrounded by senile old wrestling buddies like Flair.

“What was the point of trying to make me look bad?” he’d say later. “I’m retired. What kind of person makes fun of someone else’s genuine emotions?”

Hall made the Boys nervous because there was no telling what he might do at any minute, drunk or sober. One night he hit a wrestler named Jerry Sags so hard with a series of chair shots that he gave Sags a concussion. When the pair met a few weeks later at a
Nitro
taping in Shreveport, Louisiana, Sags was particularly careful about rehearsing a moment in the match when he’d throw a chair into the ring to set up an attack. “Go easy with that thing, okay?” he said to Hall. “You nearly fucking killed me last time.” Hall mumbled agreement, but when show time came and Sags threw the chair to the ring, Hall grabbed it and flung it back, knocking Sags in the head again. Furious, Sags broke character and jumped into the ring, loosening one of Hall’s teeth and puncturing an eardrum in the ensuing scuffle. (Sags subsequently filed a lawsuit, claiming that the cheap chair shot caused a recurring neck injury that led to his WCW contract not being renewed.)

Hall and Nash, the dark soul of the nWo, were just living in the world that Bischoff created for them, a cash-rich world of hard drinking and easy women. (In the prostitution trial of a strip club owner named Steven Kaplan, an exotic dancer would testify that Bischoff’s wife paid her to return to a hotel for a threesome. Taking the stand later, Bischoff would say that he’d drunk at least a dozen beers and called the whole thing “a bit of a blur” while he watched the two women have sex.) Whether one considered them cool or vulgar, the fact remained that they were increasing the number of eyes watching prime-time wrestling.
¹
When
Nitro
debuted in 1995, the total number of homes tuning into wrestling on USA and TBS on Monday nights averaged 4.5 million; now it was 5.5 million. And with the higher ratings, Bischoff was convinced that he was within striking distance of forcing McMahon out of business. In fact, when he gathered the Boys around him at the Ice Palace in Tampa after his return from Pillman’s funeral, he even made a prediction: McMahon and the WWF were going to be out of business within six months.

ONE OF
the faces looking out at Bischoff when he made his speech at the Ice Palace was Bill Goldberg, a rope-muscled former Atlanta Falcon whose career had been shortened by a tackle that tore the abdominal muscles near his groin in a 1994 preseason game against the Philadelphia Eagles. Goldberg understood pain and drugs. He took Vicodin and needed Sunday-morning needles to get through the rest of that season. But no matter how much he took, he wasn’t agile enough. The Falcons put him into the expansion draft and the Carolina Panthers took him; he showed up to camp so lame that he was made the team’s first-ever cut. After that, the son of a concert violinist and a gynecologist hung around Atlanta, running through the last of his NFL salary while he worked out at a local gym that he soon discovered was owned by WCW wrestlers Sting and Lex Luger. A quick friendship followed, and Goldberg found himself being introduced to other wrestlers, including Diamond Dallas Page.

In the course of downing shots at the Gold Club strip bar in Atlanta (later made famous by its sex and mob-related scandals), Page suggested Goldberg try wrestling. But Bischoff was noncommittal when they met, suggesting they simply stay in touch. So Goldberg placed a call to a fellow Oklahoman, Jim Ross, and received an invitation to Titan Tower. When McMahon learned Bischoff was on the fence about hiring the six-foot-three, 285-pound stud, he offered him a contract on the spot. Goldberg demurred, asking for enough time to hear back from WCW. Weeks passed without word, and it wasn’t until Goldberg decided to go to work for McMahon that Bischoff came through with a last-minute offer, which was accepted.

As the producer scanned Goldberg’s face at the Ice Palace, he still wasn’t sure what to make of the man. The instructors at WCW’s training facility, the Power Plant, usually hated football players; most arrived thinking they could breeze through the three-day tryout and wound up leaving it exhausted and puking. But Goldberg was different. He came with a remarkably clear sense of who he wanted to be—a mix of football player, kickboxer, and street fighter. The package came together in his two-part finishing move. Drawing on his knack for headfirst tackles, he learned to ram his head full speed into rivals’ stomachs and then, when they were off balance, hoist them upside down and bring them crashing to the mat. Needing a moniker for his finisher, he remembered the stage name his stepmother wanted him to use: Jack Hammer.

The way Goldberg evoked Steve Austin was uncanny, that much Bischoff could see. And while he wasn’t as darkly nuanced or nihilistic as Austin, he was a primeval mountain of muscle who grunted and groaned, snapped his thick neck in a frightening twitch, and had a truly unnerving habit of head-butting concrete walls. Bischoff saw that watching him in his first few dark matches—ones performed at television tapings for the audience after the cameras were turned off. The producer measured the reaction a wrestler received from the fans in the front row, and he’d been impressed at how Goldberg held their attention without music or pyrotechnics. Though he showed up at his first televised match in Salt Lake City on September 22, 1997, with little fanfare—even announcer Mike Tenay, a walking encyclopedia on wrestling, admitted he didn’t know much about the newcomer—he leaped off the screen in a way that screamed pain, making quick work of a pudgy but agile 325-pounder named Hugh Morrus. He won two more matches by the time the company reached Tampa, where he was scheduled to win TV match number four.

In pushing Goldberg, Bischoff forced men who’d spent years perfecting their own finishing moves to sacrifice themselves for the sake of a rookie whose long-term corporate potential was still uncertain. Nor was he particularly graceful about it. When a tough-guy Brit named Lord Steven Regal got penciled in as Goldberg’s forty-third victim (the numbers rose without much rhyme or reason), Regal tried to retain some respect by throwing in a flurry of offense during their meeting. Unfortunately, it left Goldberg looking lost and confused. After the match ended, Bischoff cornered Regal in the rafters. “What the hell are you doing out there,” he screamed. “You made the man look like a fool.”

Wrestling ratings, like economic indicators, don’t always show the present reality. Loyal fans continue their viewing patterns for months after a show has started to wane. In the case of WCW, that kept the ratings hovering around the 4.5 mark even as Bischoff and his writers flogged the nWo concept past its natural shelf life.

More troubling, the numbers also masked a fundamental turnaround at the WWF. At CNN Center in Atlanta, Turner’s old wrestling hands watched with concern as Vince’s shows became tighter. Somehow, the notoriety of the Pillman escapade had given him his timing back. The pace of his shows was frequently brilliant now, with five to ten well-crafted story lines—involving everything from sex to satanism—woven through a two-hour episode. The cliff-hangers were dead-on, and the plot turns all came at exactly the right moments. It was, WCW executives decided, a bad sign. Whatever Bischoff thought, Vince was too dangerous a man to let get up off the mat.