Controversy Creates Cash (10 page)

That proved to be a false hope.

Kip Frye

Often, Turner Broadcasting would find an executive who, for one reason or another, wasn’t working out in the division or department he was in. Inevitably he would be earmarked to be the next WCW

president.

Kip Frye was one of those guys. He was a young attorney in the entertainment division, probably in his mid-thirties. I guess because he was an attorney and had some background in entertainment, they probably felt like he’d be the best executive for WCW. Who knows what anybody was thinking? That was one of the problems at WCW. Turner Broadcasting really had no idea how to run it.

Taking someone with no experience as an executive and no experience in wrestling and making them head of WCW wasn’t the worst thing. On the contrary—many of the people who were involved in WCW were wrestling people with many years in the business. And that was worse.

Inheriting Problems

I’m talking about former wrestlers turned bookers, people who worked for the Crocketts in the NWA and stayed on after the sale to Turner. Most couldn’t adjust to the changing times. They didn’t understand what Vince McMahon was doing with wrestling and cable television.

They also all had their own political and personal agendas. More often than not, depending on their political faction, these groups of WCW: THE EARLY DAYS

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people would conspire with each other to work against what should have been the best interests of the company. Most had histories of one sort or another with each other, some good, most bad. It was a very, very political environment.

Turner had acquired a lot of the very same problems that had forced the Crockett family to sell in the first place. When you buy a company and bring everyone over that was associated with it, the odds are you’re bringing over a lot of the cancer. That happened to WCW. A lot of the deadweight, a lot of people with limited abilities and vision but plenty of baggage, came along with the purchase.

That was why people like Jim Herd had such a hard time. Not only was he working against the forces of a competitive environment, but he was working against internal political bullshit that undermined him.

And the same thing happened to Kip Frye.

The Sharks Circle

I think Kip came in with his eyes wide open. He was enthusiastic.

He embraced WCW and genuinely wanted to turn the company around. But after about two or three weeks, when the vultures and the sharks around him smelled weakness, they pounced.

I don’t want to characterize all of these people as sharks, but I think anyone who had any sort of political stroke within Turner Broadcasting at the time had a self-serving interest, whether it was Jim Ross, Tony Schiavone, Dusty Rhodes, or the Sharon Sidellos of the world. Sharon Sidello was a vice president of Pay-Per-View and marketing, and she certainly had her own agenda.

Then again, all of the department heads at WCW had their own agendas, and were politically aligned in different camps. They spent a lot of effort aligning themselves so they could take over another part of the company, instead of doing the kind of things that would turn the company around.

Kip was naive about the wrestling business, and easily swayed on decisions. He didn’t have a real clear-cut vision for how to turn the 70

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company around. So the sharks tried to manipulate him to fulfill their own self-serving agendas.

Initially, I think Kip made a good impact. He increased management’s communication with the talent on creative decisions, for example. But within sixty or ninety days, he was overwhelmed by forces he didn’t understand and shown the door.

No Stroke, No Poke

I was somewhat immune to maneuvering, because I had no stroke. I also had no aspirations to be anything more than what I was, which was a second- or third-string announcer.

It’s kind of funny. When people don’t think you’re paying attention, they’ll all talk to you, because they know they don’t have anything to fear. I was constantly hearing one individual badmouth another, criticizing someone else’s effort or ideas. Then that person would come back and criticize the other person. I was exposed to enough political maneuverings and inner-office drama that I knew I didn’t want to get caught up in it.

I’m not sure anyone at Turner Broadcasting really intended Kip to be executive for any length of time. I think he was always seen as a transitional executive. But whatever, they put together a search for an individual they felt had the right credentials. And they ended up picking Bill Watts.

The Bill Watts Error

A New Sheriff in Town

Frye’s replacement was “Cowboy” Bill Watts.

I’d heard a bunch of stories about Bill Watts, what a monster he was and how tough he was to deal with. As a young wrestler, Watts won a variety of NWA titles in the 1960s and ’70s. He’d headed the WCW: THE EARLY DAYS

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Universal Wrestling Federation during the 1980s before selling it to Jim Crockett.

I knew that Verne Gagne knew Bill Watts, so I called Verne and asked what Bill was like.

“Bill’s a tough guy. He’s got his own way of doing things, he runs a real tight ship. A lot of people don’t like working with him, but he’s a good guy. He knows the wrestling business.” Didn’t sound
too
bad. Verne gave me one word of warning, though: “Be really careful, because he can be a hothead at times.” I thought, Okay. I’ll just see how the cards play out. I was still loving my job, had gotten a raise, and was making six figures. I was also under contract, so I didn’t worry about losing my job.

Emotions about Watts coming in varied from complete ambivalence to—I don’t know if “fear” is the right word, but strong concern doesn’t cover it. I think Jim Ross may have been the only one really enthusiastic about Bill Watts. Jim had a long-standing relationship with Watts, going back to early in his career when he was with Mid-South, which later became Universal Wrestling.

Jim was a big advocate of Bill Watts. I never talked to Jim about this, so I don’t know if he thought, “Better the devil you know than the one you don’t,” or if Jim felt that his bread was going to be but-tered on the right side. Maybe he knew that from the political point of view he was going to have a lot more stroke or leverage with Bill Watts in a position of power as opposed to a Kip Frye or someone else from the outside, who might not appreciate Jim’s long history in the business.

The Ball-peen Hammer Approach

Watts had had some success in the past. For a brief time in the 1980s, his Universal Wrestling Federation had national exposure and was considered a hot franchise. (To simplify the history a bit, the UWF was basically Mid-South Wrestling, rebranded for national exposure. Watts created Mid-South in the 1970s from Tri-State Wrestling, which he’d bought from Leroy McGuirk.) Among Mid-72

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South/UWF’s most famous wrestlers were the tag teams Rock ‘n’

Roll Express, Road Warriors, and Dirty White Boys. The older Guerrero brothers also wrestled for Mid-South.

But that was all in the past. Watts hadn’t changed with the times. He wanted to come and use Turner’s resources to reinvent the business that he used to know. And it didn’t work.

Clearly.

I think Bill Watts at WCW—that whole era—was the darkest, most miserable time in the company’s history. The impact he had was devastating.

Bill first tried cutting as many contracts as he possibly could. In and of itself, that may not have been completely bad. There were a lot of people under contract who shouldn’t have been. But the way he went about it was a disaster.

Guaranteed Contracts

Traditionally, wrestlers were paid according to formulas based on how much they worked. No work, no pay. Additionally, the paychecks could go up or down depending on things like how many people came to their events, how much merchandise with their names on it sold, how well the promotion was doing in general, and enough other factors to keep accountants sharpening pencils for a year. WCW’s contracts, however, were much simpler, guaranteeing wrestlers a specific amount for each year, provided they met the specified terms.

Life and contracts are more complicated than that, but you get the general idea. WCW’s contracts were “guaranteed”; Vince’s were not.

I often get “credit”—in a negative way—for inventing guaranteed contracts for wrestlers. Nothing could be further from the truth. I was hired with a guaranteed contract. Jim Herd was giving out guaranteed contracts a long time before I knew what WCW was.

Anyway, Bill Watts came in, and because guaranteed contracts were not a part of the old formula, not the way they used to run WCW: THE EARLY DAYS

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wrestling businesses, the first thing he wanted to do was cut as many of those salaries as he could.

He couldn’t take a wrestler’s contract away, since it was already signed, but he let them know that when they came up for renewal, it was going to be a whole different day. In effect, he told his talent he didn’t think they were worth what they were getting, and that he planned on knocking them down a few pegs at his earliest opportunity.

I don’t disagree with the idea of reducing compensation for some, but you can do it with a velvet hammer. You don’t have to do it with a ball-peen. And Bill Watts did it with a ball-peen hammer.

Watts was a bully in everything that he did. If Bill Watts said good morning to you, you felt like he was doing it to intimidate you.

This was a guy who wore a gun to work in the CNN Center. The guy tried so hard to convince everyone what a badass he was. Pretty friggin’ weird. It’s not like he needed to be armed in the CNN Center, for cryin’ out loud.

Watts loved to bully the talent. He was loud and he was vulgar, even by wrestling standards. Whenever possible, whether he was demonstrating a move or talking about something, he’d get physical with the talent and take cheap shots. He’d abuse his power, constantly trying to prove he was tougher than the wrestlers. It was obvious to me that he was a very insecure person.

Back to the Future

Watts didn’t really have a clear vision on how to be competitive.

His approach was to take the product back to the way it was presented in the 1970s, not unlike what Verne Gagne had tried.

One of the big discussions we had was about lights and audiences.

“Why do we have all these big lights?” Watts wanted to know.

“Why do we need to see the people in the audience? Back in my day, the only lights were on the ring, and you couldn’t even see past ringside!”

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WCW had trouble drawing people to the events we used to produce television shows. When the lights were turned up for the show, you saw a lot of empty seats and a very unenthusiastic audience.

Rather than addressing the fact that we weren’t drawing people, Watts decided to turn down the lights so the home viewer didn’t see what was going on. Or in WCW’s case, what wasn’t going on.

The end result was a television product that looked small, dim, and dull. It also happened to look
a lot
like the product Bill was used to from the 1970s.

But that only exacerbated the problem. Now, besides people not wanting to come to our events, they saw a product on television that literally paled in comparison to Vince’s.

No More Mats, No Big Moves

One of the other big initiatives, if you want to call it an initiative, was taking the mats away from the area outside the ring. Watts apparently believed that if the audience knew that if these guys went outside the ring, and landed on their heads, they really got hurt, then it would make them believe more in the product.

I couldn’t think of anything more ridiculous. All it did was take away a lot of the talent’s working area. They were confined to the ring because of safety issues. Again, that made the product feel less exciting, less dynamic, very stale, and very old.

Wrestlers also weren’t allowed to do moves off the top rope.

That was another retro-wrestling idea, limiting the performers’ ability to thrill the audience with their athleticism.

If you go back to watch wrestling from the 1960s and ’70s, you’ll see that compared to today, it was very basic. Wrestling has evolved a great deal since then.

In fairness, it’s no different from the NFL. If you sit down and watch game film from the 1960s, you see very basic running and pass plays, nothing like we have today. The athletes got bigger, faster, smarter. The coaches got smarter and developed more com-WCW: THE EARLY DAYS

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plex offensive and defensive strategies designed to use their players better. The game evolved.

Well, wrestling evolved, too. But Bill Watts’s approach to that evolution was to stop it—or more accurately, reverse it—primarily because he didn’t understand how to do it any other way.

Looking for a Way Out

Small Towns

Another disastrous back-to-the-future idea was the decision to add house shows in small markets. Because WCW was a dying brand, we couldn’t draw in bigger venues. So we were forced to run in smaller markets, cities with five or ten thousand people, who typically wouldn’t get live wrestling. We couldn’t be successful in Atlanta, Charlotte, or New Orleans, but we could be friggin’ rock stars in Rome, Georgia.

No knock on Rome, Georgia.

The truth is, we didn’t do well in the small towns either. We lost money every time we went out the door. Adding the shows increased our red ink, and upped everyone’s workload, especially the wrestlers’.

Understanding a Carnival Act

The company sank into in a downward spiral. Audiences shrank, and revenue plummeted. It was miserable.

I was pretty miserable, too.

I gave it a fair shot for a few months, but it became clear to me that I had nothing in common with Bill Watts or what he was turning the WCW into. I don’t think he disliked me personally. He didn’t know me, and we didn’t interface. But he probably looked at me the way a lot of wrestlers looked at me and people like me who 76

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