Controversy Creates Cash (11 page)

didn’t “lace up the boots.” They thought that unless you had been in the ring, you could never understand the business.

A lot of the staff at my level and below were sick of that “you don’t know anything about the wrestling business unless you’re a wrestler” mentality. You get tired of hearing that after a while if you’re someone who works in production or you’re a cameraman or an editor or an announcer. If your opinions have no value, you’re demoralized after a while.

No Space Shuttles Here

The truth is, there’s nothing magical about pro wrestling. The business isn’t hard to understand at all. It’s not like flying a space shut-tle. It’s pretty basic. You give the audience what they want, they give you their money. Entertain them with plenty of action, suspend their disbelief, surprise them, keep them guessing about what happens next, and you’ll be a success. The real complexities involve changing your model to adjust to changes in viewing habits, industry shifts, and revenue opportunities.

A lot of the attitude toward nonwrestlers in the business has to do with professional wrestling’s history. If you look at professional wrestling and how it evolved before television, it was very much a carnival act run by con men. Those con men kept the secrets that made the business successful. They didn’t share them with the outside world. The people who were inside all knew how things worked, but they worked very hard to keep the outsiders from understanding. Magicians never reveal their tricks, and these guys basically thought of themselves as magicians.

The culture of secrecy continued into in the 1950s and ’60s.

That’s why Verne Gagne went to such lengths to hide story angles from me when I was a salesman. He was old-school. It was a tradition.

Of course, a lot of people who have never been in the wrestling business understand it a lot better than people who have been in the business. But that wasn’t Watts’s philosophy.

WCW: THE EARLY DAYS

77

A Sinking Ship

My personal workload became really high after Bill Watts took over.

I went from working two days a week to five, and most of them ten to twelve hours on camera. That’s a lot of time on camera.

I moved my family down to Atlanta to accommodate my schedule in 1992. I didn’t mind that, or the work, but what I didn’t enjoy was the feeling that the ship was sinking. Most people didn’t know what to do about it. The rest tried to convince themselves they were going to be the captain of a submarine.

My personal dislike and disrespect for Bill Watts grew more, the longer I stayed. He was not a professional and didn’t understand the level of business he was being asked to play at.

Another Chance

A Game Show Shot

About that time, I had become friendly with an actor named Jason Hervey. Jason was one of the stars of a hit series on ABC called
The
Wonder Years,
which ran for six seasons, from 1988 to 1993. He played Wayne Arnold, the older brother.

Jason’s family has been part of Hollywood for two generations.

Jason’s uncle is a business manager for some of the biggest names in the industry. His mother is a talent agent, and his brother is an entertainment attorney. Jason has probably learned more about the entertainment business at family reunions than most midlevel network executives will ever know. Besides acting, he’s worked behind the scenes as a writer and producer.

Anyway, around the time I met Jason, I was working on an idea for a television game show that had a wrestling theme. I had originally developed it with a guy out of Miami who had a background in game shows. I thought I’d present it to the WCW people and see if we could get it produced.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

I’d come up with the idea after looking at what we lacked at WCW. Our audience tended to be very old because of our style of wrestling and the traditional feel of the shows. Younger viewers, the more desirable audience from the advertisers’ point of view, had left our product in droves and gone over to Vince. So what I did was reverse-engineer a wrestling-themed game show that I thought would appeal to kids. While it would air separately from the WCW shows, it would carry the WCW wrestling brand. That would hopefully bring the youth audience to our network so our advertisers could enjoy a younger audience.

Given the mentality of Bill Watts and his back-to-the-future approach to the business, this would have been like selling ice cubes to Eskimos. Watts clearly would not have understood what I was trying to accomplish. It would have been alien to everything that he believed in, so I didn’t pitch it.

I didn’t give up, though. I made up my mind that I’d pitch the show out in Los Angeles, independent of WCW. Since Jason had Hollywood relationships and knew the business, I asked him what he thought.

He looked at the storyboards and concept. He liked it.

“Do you know anybody out there?” I asked.

“Sure. We can go out there and pitch it together.” I went out to Los Angeles and pitched it in a couple of places.

We got a lot of traction at Universal and Fox Kids Network. Molly Miles, an executive at Universal Studios at the time, knew Jason.

She ended up giving us an option to develop it. Universal Television would have been the producer, and Fox Kids Network the buyer, if you will. So we said, “Wow, this is great.” I walked out of that meeting, and I made up my mind I was leaving WCW. I was going out to Hollywood.

I could feel the energy on the street. The environment was positive and creative, a hundred and eighty degrees from the dark, pre-historic feel of Bill Watts’s WCW.

I went home and told my wife, “The good news is, I think we’ve WCW: THE EARLY DAYS

79

sold the show—it’s going to be great, it’s going to work. The bad news is, I can’t stand going to back to Bill Watts and WCW. I’m going to resign.”

She was cool with that. We started to make arrangements to move.

Out with the Old

It was just about that time a rather tasteless racial remark Bill Watts made spread around the offices at CNN. I wasn’t there, but the published reports have said that during an interview Watts gave to Mark Madden at the
Pro Wrestling Torch,
he made a number of comments that appeared to put down blacks or question their rights. One concerned Lester Maddux, a restaurant owner involved in a civil rights fight over whether he has to serve blacks or not.

Watts supported Maddux. Years later in his book,
The Cowboy and
the Cross,
Watts said that while he wasn’t a racist, he felt that a restaurant owner should be able to deny service to anyone he wanted. He also claimed that his comments were misinterpreted, and that Madden sent them to Hank Aaron only because he wanted him fired.

That’s Bill Watts’s side of the story.

Turner Broadcasting was a great environment to work in because Ted Turner was an entrepreneur; Ted Turner was a visionary. He rewarded people who were like him in that respect. He appreciated people who had put it all on the line and made things happen. Con-sequently, most of the people who worked under him had that same kind of temperament.

But the one thing that Ted Turner didn’t tolerate was discrimination. Turner Broadcasting was one of the most progressive companies in terms of breaking down barriers for minorities. So when Bill Watts’s comments filtered over to the north side of the CNN Center, where all the real executives were, Bill’s days were numbered. They got rid of him rather unceremoniously and without a lot of delay.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

Bill Shaw

Watts had been hired and fired by Bill Shaw, a very well respected, highly regarded, long-term executive with Turner Broadcasting. Besides being president of WCW, Bill was corporate vice president of administration for Turner Broadcasting. Ted Turner had added WCW to Shaw’s portfolio roughly a year before with the directions

“Sell it, shut it down, or run it.” He was determined to take another go at turning it around.

Bill came over and had a meeting with everybody in a conference center at CNN. He was very forceful, extremely professional, but very clear about where Ted Turner wanted WCW to be. Bill let everyone in the room know what he would tolerate and what he wouldn’t.

“First and foremost, this is a television company,” he told us.

“Turner Broadcasting is a television company, it is not a wrestling company. And this company is going to be run like a television company, not a wrestling company.”

When Bill said that, it made me realize that there might be a chance for WCW to turn around. If he meant what he said, there’d be no more old-time wrestling guys trying to re-create what they had back in Oklahoma in the 1970s.

His speech made me second-guess whether I wanted to leave WCW.

One of the things Bill said they were going to do was hire an executive producer. He wanted someone who understood wrestling and had a vision for the product, but was
not
a wrestling person.

They specifically did not want somebody who came from that old wrestling mentality.

I went home, and I told my wife I was going to throw my name in the hat for the job. It would be a tremendous opportunity for my career. “And you know what? The fact that they’re going to hire someone to come in and make it look more like a television show than wrestling in the sixties means maybe we have a chance. I’m going to stick it out for a while, whether I get the job or not.” 4

Running the Show

From Disadvantage to Edge

A Leap Off the Top Rope

Applying for the executive producer’s spot was a big leap. I thought there was a very slim chance that I’d get the job. I had only one real advantage—I wasn’t a wrestling guy.

Looking back now, I realize that because of my experience in the AWA, I also had a pretty good understanding of the business in general. There weren’t many aspects of the wrestling business that I hadn’t touched in one way or another. I came in to the AWA with a sales and marketing background. I had developed corporate sponsorships with some large and sophisticated companies. I had a lot of insight into the advertising side of things and understood where the revenue came from. I understood demographics and how syndication worked. I’d promoted events, and understood what it took to promote a live event. Hell, I’d even built my own interview sets!

And I was a talent. I had all of the important bases covered, without having the disadvantage of being a “wrestling guy.” 82

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

But I didn’t have that perspective then. Frankly, I thought they would see me simply as a second- or third-string announcer. I didn’t think in their minds I’d be qualified.

I called Bill Shaw’s office, and I said, I understand that you’re going to be looking for an executive producer. I’d like to be considered. I’d like to come in and meet you and tell you what I think it will take to turn WCW around.

After I hung up, I was convinced he wouldn’t even bother to interview me. But about a week or two later he called and said,

“Okay, Eric, come on up.”

The first thing I did was tell Bill about the kids’ game show. I explained that I wasn’t trying to sell him the show, but wanted to explain that it was the type of thing the brand needed to shore up the demo.

Whether the idea was good or bad, I think he was impressed that I was coming at WCW’s problems from a different angle of attack. I wasn’t thinking like a wrestling guy. I was thinking like a television guy who understood wrestling.

I impressed him enough that I was soon under consideration. There were three or four people inside and outside the company they were looking at. David Crockett, who was part of the Crockett family, and Keith Mitchell, the head of production, were among the WCW con-tenders I knew about. There was at least one other person from the outside up for the job as well, though I was never told any of the names.

I had three or four meetings with Bill Shaw as the interview process continued into the summer. One day Bill called me to his office to talk again. To be honest, I didn’t really think I was going to get the job. But I was so excited to have gotten this far in the interview process that I made up my mind that no matter what, I was sticking with WCW. I respected Bill and wanted to work for him in any capacity.

“Congratulations, Eric,” he said when I walked in. “You’re the new executive producer.”

I almost swallowed my tongue.

RUNNING THE SHOW

83

My Job Was TV

As executive producer, I was in charge of everything we saw on television, with the exception of the wrestlers. Bob Dhue came in as executive vice president, overseeing the creative and business sides of the WCW. Accounting, live events—all of those departments reported up to him, as did the wrestlers.

Bob was a very likable guy, with a charming personality. He also had the attention span of a fruit fly. He was far more interested in golf than he ever really was in trying to turn WCW around. He would go anywhere that had the slightest connection with wrestling—as long as there was a good golf course nearby.

Bob brought in a friend of his by the name of Don Sandefur to run the live events side of the business. Don had a pretty extensive background; I think he may even have been involved with the Harlem Globetrotters and the circus at one point. But I think the real reason Don worked there was so that Bob had someone to play golf and drink martinis with.

Ole Anderson was handling the booking at the time. Ole, who was born in Minnesota, started wrestling in 1966; his career in the ring included a stint as one of the Four Horsemen. He retired from the ring in the late 1980s.

Ole, Bob, and Don did their things, I did mine. I tapered off my announcing so I could focus on my day-to-day job.

We started making some changes. I put the ring mats back around the ring. I turned the lights back up. We developed some new graphics packages. In general, I tried to dress up the product to make it look like it belonged in the 1990s.

Mister Unpopular

Even though I’d been with the company for a while, I was viewed as an outsider by the dirtsheets and other media that covered wrestling.