Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (27 page)

To make matters worse, Scott Hall, a third of the core of the nWo, picked this very moment to let his life unravel. Hall’s wife of eight years decided to call it quits on their marriage, and Bischoff had to suspend him for going on the air drunk. A third stint in rehab did no good. A few weeks after he was released, the thirty-nine-year-old crashed his Pathfinder near the Cocoa Beach home he used when he was separated from his wife and was found by a cop sleeping in the wreckage. Later, when the car was towed to a garage, a woman in the parts department who asked for an autograph claimed he’d grabbed her and pressed his penis to her groin, mumbling, “I’ll be whoever you want me to be, baby.” Bischoff could only shake his head at the ensuing lawsuit and at the fact that three days later Hall wrecked his rented Cadillac in a highway spinout, claiming he’d fallen asleep at the wheel.

IT WAS
raining on Monday, April 13, when Bischoff flew to Minneapolis for that night’s
Nitro
. He was in a particularly bad mood. The 1998 NBA playoffs were about to start on TNT, which meant that
Nitro
was going to lose its hold on its Monday night for the duration, giving McMahon a major advantage at a moment when the producer wanted to surrender it least. The WWF had just scored the publicity coup of the year by getting Mike Tyson to referee at
Wrestlemania
. Because of that,
Raw
’s ratings had started to nudge up. The prior Monday’s
Raw
—the second show to air after the Tyson
Wrestlemania
—was the closest call yet:
Nitro’s
advantage was less than two-tenths of a rating percentage point.

When Bischoff landed in Minneapolis, a steady spring rain was falling, the kind that made a tired man ache. To most of the Boys, the strain on the boss’s face had become apparent. Though he dyed his hair black in an attempt to take a few years off his looks, there was no mistaking the worry lines around his eyes or his quick temper. His trusted emissary, Diamond Dallas Page, warned him that he was losing the Boys. In Page’s words, they thought he was “becoming an asshole.” It had been six months since he had given the Ice Palace speech. He decided to give another one when he reached the Target Center.

For one thing, he wanted to clear up rumblings that had been spreading over his handling of a recent tempest involving Ric Flair. Flair missed a TV taping of
Thunder
in Tallahassee the prior Thursday night because he was watching his nine-year-old son wrestle in a tournament in Detroit. In other times, it would have been forgotten. Certainly, it was no worse than any of the unpredictable things Hall did. But Bischoff was so irritated with Flair that he’d sent word from Japan, where he was traveling, that if he missed the Tallahassee show he’d be fired. Flair went to Detroit, anyway, and by the weekend assumed that he was no longer working at WCW. He didn’t even bother showing up at Minneapolis’s Target Center.

The problem was that Flair was a native of Minneapolis and his fans had bought seventeen thousand tickets in less than four hours, expecting to see him. Bischoff rubbed his temples. He had a month of NBA finals ahead of him that were going to bump
Nitro
out of its time slot and he had only this show to use in creating a favorable impression that would linger with the viewers in the interval. Now that Flair was a no-show, he’d have to create that impression using a pissed-off crowd that was going to be dead for the cameras. Marvelous. Just marvelous.

About an hour before show time, he gathered the company before him. Nodding toward Page, he admitted that he’d become a bit short-tempered and promised to be better about it in the future. He also knew they’d all been talking about what had happened with Flair and he wanted to address it head-on, before Flair had a chance to spin his side. His position was simple: Flair’s contract stipulated that he had to be at television tapings, and the company was well within its right to hold him to it.

Bischoff watched the Boys shift uncomfortably. “Look, Ric Flair is a liar, but everyone lets him get away with it because he is Ric Flair,” he said, trying to bring them around to his side. Well, so be it. He had enough. “Let him be Ric Flair. I’m gonna sue his ass into bankruptcy.”

At that, a kind of stunned silence swept the room.

“Ric Flair set the standard for work ethic,” one of the men in the room would later say. “And here’s Bischoff saying he was going to sue him. You could hear everyone thinking, ‘If he can do that to a world champion, what can he do to me?’ ”

If the point of the meeting was to reduce the paranoia and apprehension that was creeping through the locker room, the producer failed miserably. And, as he feared, his eighty-three-week run of ratings wins would end that April 13 night.

1
According to a ratings study by Dave Meltzer, the gross number of viewers was substantially unchanged from years before. The difference was that the audience was now watching in prime time.

FOURTEEN

IN THE SPRING OF
1998, Jim Cornette left a booking meeting in Vince McMahon’s office feeling as if a nervous tic was starting to develop over his left eye. He was worried that McMahon was panicking, reacting too much to what was happening down in Atlanta. Granted it was hard not to worry when, as recently as the summer of 1997, Raw’s ratings had dipped below the 1.5 mark and the company was losing $135,000 a week. It had gotten so bad that watercoolers were taken out of the executive offices. But Cornette was sure that things would turn around without turning
Raw
into an apocalyptic freak show.

And that’s exactly what he feared was happening as McMahon began to take more cues from a pushy new writer. Vince Russo was one of the WWF’s most ardent defenders in New York when he worked as the host of an AM radio show that covered wrestling, and he’d managed to parlay that support into a job writing for the WWF’s magazines. A driven man with long hair, lean features, and a tough-guy accent, he would sit for hours outside his boss’s office, waiting for him to come out so he could pitch ideas.

And what Russo was pitching seemed to be working. As Raw’s ratings drifted into the 2.0 range in late 1997, he became the staunchest advocate of introducing homosexuality, gang culture, broken marriages, racism, and cross-dressing into the program’s scripts. “I’d get a headache and a nervous tic trying to explain to him why you couldn’t have the guys in some kind of explosive goddamned barbed-wire, AIDS-infected needle cage match,” Cornette recalls. “And I would end up with no voice.”

Cornette was particularly appalled when Russo’s deputy, a onetime comedy writer named Ed Ferrara, booked a miscarriage angle involving Dustin Runnels’s now ex-wife, Terri. “Let me ask you a fucking question,” Cornette asked Ferrara. “How many tickets did that sell? And tell me, Ed, why anyone should give a fuck? The only thing that did was piss off anybody who’s ever had that happen to them. Personally, if it happened to my girlfriend and I knew you wrote it, I’d come over and punch your fucking teeth out.”

At USA, the network of Wimbledon and the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, Kay Koplovitz had learned enough from the Brian Pillman affair to know she couldn’t trust Vince’s writers to work alone. That’s why she insisted they run their scripts by a new liaison, Bonnie Hammer. (Wayne Becker had left by then, exhausted by the experience of working with the McMahons.) The fashionably prim native of Manhattan’s Upper East Side couldn’t have been more different than the tough-talking Russo. She’d begun her career at the Boston public television station WGBH and more recently produced a public-service documentary series for Koplovitz titled
Erase the Hate
. She was mortified to learn that her new assignment was wrestling, yet she took it on with the same intensity that she took on everything else. When she traveled to Stamford for her first meeting, McMahon barged into his conference room impatiently, as if anything having to do with USA was a chore. Sizing up the moment, she decided to be blunt. “Vince, I hadn’t ever watched your show until a couple of weeks ago,” she said. “I don’t know what your business is about and I don’t care. But I do know how to make good TV. And I want to get you out of the twos and into the threes.”

Some of the changes were technical. For example, they used smoke machines but didn’t have gadgets to clear the residue; as a result, the rest of the show was filmed in a haze. But the biggest problem Hammer saw was that it was hard for a newcomer to pick up the stories in midstream. “If I can’t understand what’s going on in the first five minutes of the show, then we’re in trouble,” she told Russo. “You have to get viewers in right away, tease them.” She developed what she called “hot minutes” at key channel-switching times, like ten o’clock. She also tried to help him round out his characters to give them more depth.

Hammer’s intervention came at a critical time for
Raw
. The WWF’s three-year contract with USA was due to expire in May 1998, and Vince wanted more than just money in a new deal. He wanted influence. He wanted an expanded role in a network that he felt had underappreciated him for too long. Hammer became a vocal advocate for him within USA. She discussed ideas like a late-night show about the Las Vegas strip and a series on USA’s sister Sci-Fi Channel that would involve the Undertaker. But the truth was that no one at USA was ever going to give the McMahons more power. The network president had just hired a new entertainment chief from CBS, Rod Perth, and he was making deals for big-budget, prestige miniseries like
Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn
, and
Treasure Island
. Koplovitz’s secret prayer seemed to be that those and other new shows would do well enough that she could eventually dump
Raw
entirely.

Then, two weeks after Brian Pillman’s funeral, the terrain shifted completely under everyone’s feet.

Barry Diller, the fifty-five-year-old former head of Paramount and founder of the Fox Network, paid $1.2 billion in cash to buy USA. In a deal that startled Hollywood by virtue of its scope, Diller also gained control of the Sci-Fi Channel and the television production studio of USA’s parent company, Universal. When added to the two home shopping channels that he already owned, the purchase positioned Diller as a new major player in cable television. The dust hadn’t even settled when he told reporters that he found USA to be “under-strategized,” an allusion to its lack of a strong identity. But he was circumspect about his own plans. Was he going to keep going highbrow, continuing the arc initiated by Koplovitz and Perth? Or was he going to go back to what he’d done at Fox and fill its lineup with funny but crude shows like
Married with Children?

“Diller was like
The Wizard of
Oz, “said one high-level employee who worked there at the time. “You always heard he was around, but you didn’t know what he was planning.”

WITH THE
announcement of the deal just days old, Vince was getting his pompadour touched up at a Manhattan barbershop when his cell phone rang with a call from Bret Hart.

Hart was a humorless millionaire who regarded himself as an icon of the business and had been with Vince since the beginning—or at least since Hart’s father, Stu, sold his Calgary-based territory to the WWF in the early eighties. A stooped man with a butcher’s handshake, Stu and his wife raised twelve children in a gabled mansion that had a classically haunted, B-movie look. It had twenty rooms and a labyrinth of a yard piled high with the husks of beat-up cars. The heart of the house, where Stu taught his craft, was a basement dubbed “the dungeon.” Billy Graham, who’d left a bouncer’s job in Phoenix to pursue what he thought would be easy money with Stu’s traveling road show in 1969, recalls that “it was really a classic, hard-core dungeon. I literally walked into a room with no door to close behind me, mats on the floor, and three walls covered with blood, snot, and saliva. Stu liked to make you moan and groan when he got you down there. I was a bouncer in a lot of bars and I dragged a lot of drunks out by their feet, but I was never in positions where I couldn’t hear anything but groaning from my guts.”

The Hart boys—Smith, Bruce, Keith, Wayne, Ross, Dean, Bret, and Owen—spent their time wrestling in the rings that lay in the backyard. Smith, Bruce, Keith, and Dean were the first to enter the business. Bret, however, was the one who was able to make the transition to the States when Stu sold his territory to Vince. With slicked-back hair and sunglasses, he rose through the WWF’s tag-team ranks as part of the Hart Foundation with his brother-in-law, Jim “the Anvil” Neidhart. The combo held the WWF’s tag-team title belts through most of 1987 and again, more briefly, in the fall of 1990. After that, Neidhart was shelved so Bret could be tested as a singles act.

Because he was six-foot-one and 230 pounds, he was small by the standards of the early nineties. But after the WWF’s steroid scandal—when Vince was forced to lessen the visibility of his doped-up muscle men—technical proficiency became more important than size. Boasting that he was the “excellence of execution,” Hart rode a lengthy title reign in which he became instantly familiar to fans everywhere and tried to follow Hogan into acting. He landed a guest spot on the miniseries
Lonesome Dove
and bit parts in other series, and in so doing became convinced that his future lay as a small-screen action star. After losing the WWF title to Shawn Michaels at
Wrestlemania XII
on March 31, 1996, he took a sabbatical from wrestling, but he soon found that it was harder to land parts than he first imagined. In the fall of 1996, with the competition between WCW and the WWF at a fevered pitch, he decided to return to wrestling.