Controversy Creates Cash (15 page)

To Dusty’s credit, he really tried hard, but it was so alien to his nature that it was ultimately a failed attempt. Dusty, like the business in general, wasn’t quite ready for more sophisticated storytelling.

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Nature Boy as Booker

Anybody who’s ever met Ric Flair will tell you that he can be the most charming person you’ve ever met. Ric Flair can also be extremely persuasive. It’s not that he’s trying to deliberately manipulate or deceive you. Ric truly believes the things he says.

After Dusty didn’t work out, I was convinced Ric Flair would be a good booker. He took the job. I have to say, though, it wasn’t without some reluctance on his part. Ric knew that, as a booker, you’re a target. Booking wrestling is the most thankless, no-win position anyone could ever be in. When things go well, it’s because the talent makes it work. When they go badly, it’s because the booker doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Ric Flair knew he was going to be in that position, but he took the job anyway. I forget now, but it’s very likely he didn’t even get any extra money for doing it.

The one negative thing about Ric is that he doesn’t handle pressure very well. He’s the type of person who wants everybody to love him. He doesn’t like to be in a situation where there’s dissension, or where he feels like he’s being personally attacked or questioned. Ric’s the life of everybody’s party. He doesn’t like being in a position of authority or responsibility—which pretty much comes with the territory when you’re the booker.

I know this now, but I didn’t realize it then. I knew only the positives. Ric supported where I wanted to go with the company. He had a huge amount of experience in wrestling, and of course he was well respected by people inside and outside the company. While some of my ideas were pretty far outside the box of wrestling tradition, Ric was a good counterweight. I think that’s why I stuck with him for as long as I did.

That, and he’s such a charming son of a bitch.

For the first few months, it seemed to me that it was working rather nicely. I was moving so quickly and in so many different directions, I probably didn’t look at the situation as closely as I should have.

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Aiming for Profitability

Four Wheels of Revenue

The wrestling business, in theory, has four streams of revenue—

like the four wheels on a car, if you will. When the business is operating efficiently and well, 25 percent of your revenue comes from arena ticket sales or live events. Twenty-five percent is going to come from ad sales on television. Twenty-five percent should come from Pay-Per-View. And 25 percent from licensing and merchandising.

That’s when you’re hitting on all eight cylinders and driving down the highway at the speed limit.

In WCW’s case, since we weren’t a successful brand, we couldn’t get out of first gear. We didn’t even have four wheels on the car.

WCW hadn’t developed a licensing platform. For people to want your license—the company logo and images, wrestlers’ faces, etc.—you need a high-profile entertainment property. We had no profile, so we had no licensing or merchandising to speak of, and 25

percent of the revenue we needed was nonexistent.

Another of our four wheels, live events, was so badly off I can’t think of a suitable metaphor. We not only had no arena revenue, we were bleeding money every time we went out the door.

New Goals

Once I took over as vice president, my first goal was to shore up Pay-Per-View and ad sales, and then work on live events and merchandising.

The truth is, I was learning on the job. I knew a little bit about advertising, but I had to learn a lot more. I had to learn about merchandising and licensing. In short, I learned how to run a wrestling business on the job.

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I asked a lot of questions. I sat in on a lot of meetings. I read everything I could read. I talked to anyone who would talk to me, inside Turner and outside Turner. I sought out experienced people in advertising and marketing and television, and I learned as much as I could from them. Then I applied what I had learned, or thought I’d learned, to our particular situation at WCW.

Looking back, I was putting in something like seventy hours a week. I didn’t really notice the hours then, though. Frankly, I worked hard because I didn’t know what else to do other than work. I didn’t have many hobbies, didn’t socialize much, and was obsessed with turning WCW around.

The one surprising thing about the job was its intensity. Something was always happening. It wasn’t unusual to get home at ten or eleven o’clock at night and have to deal with a contract or, a little later on, a scissor fight in a hotel room between Sid Vicious and Arn Anderson. It never stopped.

It was one of the most difficult but rewarding periods of my professional life. Even now I look back on it and wish I had stopped long enough to realize just how wonderful an experience it was.

A No-Lose Position

Quite honestly, I was in a no-lose position. Everyone who had tried to come and save WCW had failed miserably. I couldn’t possibly fail any worse than Bill Watts did. I had nowhere to go but up.

People within Turner Broadcasting were convinced that no one could turn that company around. A lot of executives were politicking to pull the plug on WCW.

Scott Sassa, the president of Turner Entertainment, hated wrestling.

It wasn’t Hollywood, it wasn’t glitzy. In his opinion, it didn’t have any place in the Turner portfolio. With his stroke—he was generally considered the heir apparent to Ted Turner—combined with the amount of cash that WCW was bleeding, there was a lot of weight against WCW on the Turner Broadcasting executive committee.

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Fortunately, Ted Turner loved wrestling. He believed in it. I’m not so sure he loved it as a fan, but he appreciated it and understood it in terms of its ability to draw an audience to the network.

That was enough love for me.

Counting Pencils

Contrary to the bs about WCW having money to burn, my mandate was to save money. One of the first things I did was make people count the number of pencils they had in their drawers.

Literally, I told everyone to do a complete inventory as we looked for ways to cut back. I was trying to make a point. There was no expense too insignificant for us to consider. I remember saying at meetings that we would do whatever it took to turn a profit, even if it meant standing at the street corner and selling those pencils.

We cut a lot of costs. A lot of that was uncomfortable, but it was necessary.

One area we paid a lot of attention to was our travel budget.

Triple H still tells a story about the time when he wanted to try out for WCW. He says that when he told me he lived in Massachusetts, my response was, “Sorry, you are a GUD—Geographically UnDesirable.” According to him, I refused to allow him to try out because it would have cost too much to fly him around.

I’m not positive it’s true—some of Triple H’s stories should be taken with a grain of salt—but it does sound possible. One of the things I did to cut costs when I first took over was look at the talent expenses. Unless a talent was at least mid-card, they had to either move to Atlanta where we were working, or we would cut them.

In the end, Triple H flew himself in for the tryout and ended up doing so well he got the job, GUD or not. (Later, he went over to Vince’s company, where he’s a major star today.) Legitimate expenses were one thing. We also had a lot of illegit-imate ones draining the budget. Having been on the talent side, I knew firsthand some that could be fixed.

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The Turner Gravy Train

When I came to WCW in 1991, Larry Zbyszko came up to me, the first day I walked in, pulled me aside, and said, “Kid, this is the greatest gravy train you’ll ever be on. Once your name goes on the payroll list, it never comes off.”

That was the perception that everyone had. And they weren’t far wrong.

But things were worse than that. WCW was so unorganized, and so big, that if you were a dishonest person or a con artist, it wasn’t hard to figure out ways to take advantage of the company. Before I got into management, a wrestling personality—he’ll remain name-less for reasons that will soon be obvious—showed me a stack full of unused airline tickets: “Buddy, this is as good as cash.” He was right. And nothing was stopping him from using the travel system as his own personal ATM.

See, Turner Broadcasting had a travel department that managed travel arrangements for everyone in Turner—WCW, CNN, the Braves. If you were a talent and needed to go somewhere, you called up the travel department and said, “I need a ticket for such and such a date and place.” They made the travel arrangements and sent you a ticket (this was in the days before e-tickets, when everything was done on paper).

But say you then changed your plans, so you were traveling on a different day or to a different place. You then got
another
ticket, without the first one being canceled or collected.

That first ticket could then be redeemed, either for personal use or money. I can only imagine the hundreds of thousands of dollars that Turner was conned out of. It was stealing, plain and simple.

If I’d come in as an executive, I doubt too many people would have come up to me and clued me in on all the ways to cheat the company out of money. But because I’d been a talent, I knew a lot of the problems. So I started putting an end to all of those things, instituting a new travel policy and the like.

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We started saving money. In the meantime, morale began to improve. People felt better about working for WCW. Our momentum was starting to build, not just within WCW but in Turner Broadcasting as a whole. They no longer looked at us as a redheaded laughingstock of a stepchild.

The jury was out. We didn’t belong yet—far from it—but there was the faintest glimmer of a possibility that we might.

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5

Hulk Hogan

The Next Big Step

Midnight Phone Call

Iwas in bed when the phone rang. It was late, maybe midnight, but I reached over and picked it up.

“Hello, brother. I understand you’d like to talk to me.”
The fatigue I’d felt just a moment before vanished. Hulk Hogan had a very distinctive voice, and I sure did want to talk to him.

An All-Time Great

I doubt anyone reading this book needs to be reminded who Hulk Hogan is, or how big a star he was when I picked up the phone in early 1994.

He’d been wrestling since 1978. While he’d once held the NWA Southeastern title, he’d been a World Wrestling Federation Champion since defeating the Iron Sheik in January 1984. His red-and-yellow wrestling gear and his signature “Don’t forget to take your 116

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vitamins” line for kids were as well known as any celebrity’s trademarks. He was one of pro wrestling’s biggest draws ever.

But after a fallout with Vince McMahon and the lure of a career as a movie and television star, Hogan left the company and wrestling in 1993. No one was sure for how long. He’d told people that he was done with wrestling. He was not part of the company’s plans at that time, and he wasn’t under contract to them.

Coincidentally, the Disney tapings brought us into contact with Hulk Hogan. He was taping a television show at the Disney-MGM

Studios called
Thunder in Paradise.

I don’t know how I got his phone number, and I don’t recall whether I put a call in to him or someone else passed his or my number along. Legend has it that Ric Flair made the first contact, and I’d be inclined to believe it. Anyway, as soon I picked up the phone that night, I knew who it was. I explained to him that we were shooting our shows down at Disney-MGM and invited him to come on over. And I added that I would love to have him come over to WCW.

He didn’t jump at the hint, but he didn’t hang up on me either.

The Turner Draw

The fact that WCW was changing the way it produced wrestling and taking big chances may have made Hogan think that WCW was an interesting opportunity. But I think part of what made us attractive to Hulk had to do with Ted Turner. Ted was in the television and movie business, and that was interesting to Hogan at the time.

Sure that Hogan would come to WCW if the circumstances were right, I went to Bill Shaw to get his approval. I wasn’t author-ized to make a decision that big, because it involved
a lot
of money.

I went to Bill and said, If we want Hulk Hogan, here’s what it’s going to cost us.

“We’ve taken the first step. We’ve come out of that dark, dingy, miserable arena look, we’re starting to change the way people are HULK HOGAN

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looking at us as a brand. I want to take the next big step—I want to go get Hulk Hogan.”

Bill took it to Ted, who was very enthusiastic. They gave me the green light.