Controversy Creates Cash (16 page)

This was right around the time that Vince McMahon was scheduled to go on trial for allegedly supplying steroids to wrestlers.

Hogan had been called to testify at the trial. The steroid matter was probably one of the reasons Hogan had had problems with the company. Then, as now, it was a controversial matter.

We knew it was going on. We knew there was a chance that Hogan was going to end up getting some not so favorable press, but we were prepared for that. I spent a lot of time talking to Bill Shaw about it.

Wrestlers as Politicos &

Backstabbers

Closing the Deal

I put on my salesman shoes and set out to persuade Hogan to come over. Ric Flair helped me and was instrumental in convincing Hogan to come to WCW. We had countless meetings and conversations as we slowly got Hogan to come back to wrestling.

Hogan and I remain good friends to this day: we speak every week. He might not say this because he wouldn’t want to hurt my feelings, but it’s true: he didn’t have a tremendous amount of respect for me at the time. He certainly didn’t look at me as a Vince McMahon. He just looked at me as a young guy who had a unique opportunity and was working for some of the most powerful people in entertainment. I’m sure he looked at me as raw meat.

Even so, Hogan was very cautious. He still is, to this day. He doesn’t make moves that he doesn’t think through very carefully.

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knew that if he came over, and WCW crashed and burned, he would have to wear that badge of dishonor. He would have looked like a failure if WCW failed, even if that failure had nothing to do with him.

Wrestling Politics

Wrestlers, particularly back then, could be very political, very manipulative. Hogan was concerned that he would be caught up in that. He knew there would be a number of people who would do anything they could to make sure that Hulk Hogan tanked.

Ric Flair really helped reassure him. He traveled with me over a dozen times to meet with Hogan. He talked about storylines, about wrestling politics, and assured Hogan that if he came over, he’d have a team of people in the locker room who would work together to make it successful. I can’t give Flair enough credit. I couldn’t have gotten Hogan on board if it weren’t for him. Trust was a bigger issue for Hogan than money.

Hogan also knew he could have a good match with Ric Flair. Ric was one of those guys, especially in 1994, who could have a great match with just about anybody. Anyone who’s ever worked with Ric loves to work with him because he has that ability.

At the same time, there was a great story there: Hulk Hogan versus “Nature Boy” Ric Flair, two wrestling legends with large followings butting heads. Hogan and Flair had been touched on briefly in World Wrestling Federation, back when Flair was there in 1991, but it never really happened for them on a large scale. This was the opportunity.

Old vs. New

A Hogan-Flair showdown would capitalize on the differences between the companies. Wrestling for Vince, at the time, was seen as more entertainment-based, more appealing to a mass audience.

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WCW was more old-school wrestling. Hulk Hogan was, or had been, an icon. Ric Flair was a guy who, in the eyes of a lot of guys inside wrestling, was a much more credible
wrestling
champion, a guy who represented traditional professional wrestling. He was old-school to Hogan’s new.

Bringing in Hogan and putting him against Flair would bring the two audiences together. In a way—and in retrospect, because I didn’t think of it this way at the time—we were creating a war between the two brands.

We weren’t looking for a confrontation with Vince, although some people thought we were. Admittedly, some of our statements made it look that way.

Around this time Bill Shaw and I gave an interview to the
Miami Herald,
where we both said we were hopeful that eventually we would overtake Titan, WWE’s parent company at the time. “The biggest challenge we have ahead of us is making people realize we do have a better product,” I told the columnist, Alex Marvez. “I think the consensus is we are better. But not enough people know that.”

We were trying to rally our troops. We wanted people to know we were serious about building the WCW brand, and we wanted our people to feel good about the company A lot of what we said was hyperbole; we knew we were outgunned in 1994.

We had no idea that in a year and a half’s time, we’d be the ones with the heavy artillery—a prime-time show, a ratings lead, and more momentum than a runaway M1A1 tank.

The Power of a Heel

Distrust

Given all of the things that had gone on with his departure from Vince’s company and the controversy with the steroid trial, Hogan 120

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was worried that if he stepped over to WCW and crashed and burned, he’d be dead as a character. He was right. Knowing all that, he held out for creative control over his character.

Historically, wrestlers have always distrusted the people they wrestle for, and even other wrestlers. The business subtly encourages that. If you’re a wrestler, you’re only paid what a promoter thinks you’re worth. And you can only look as good as your
opponent
makes you look.

Wrestling is a unique art form, in that, if you and I are in the ring together, and I like you, I can do everything in my power to make you look good. That ensures that you and I can make money together for a long period of time.

If, on the other hand, I’m threatened by you, for any reason—if I think too much attention is given to you, or I just personally don’t like you—I can do any number of subtle or not so subtle things that will ultimately make you look bad.

Being a Heel

Bad guys—heels—are an important part of any wrestling match.

More often than not, they control the tempo of the match. It’s the bad guy’s heat that makes the match.

The only way to be a “good” bad guy is to be a liar, cheat, or coward. You can be tough, yes, but primarily you’re one of the other three. You have to rely on something from one of those categories to win because you’re
just not good enough.

There’s a basic architecture to every wrestling match. The fight starts out strong, with the good guy in charge. The crowd is behind him. Then the bad guy finds some way to cheat. Let’s keep this all very simple: the referee isn’t looking, and the bad guy does something illegal to take advantage.

Now the bad guy is in charge. The tide of emotion rises. The bad guy gets his heat. He’s beating the good guy to a pulp. The crowd hates it because it looks like the good guy is going to go down. They HULK HOGAN

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don’t want that to happen. Their emotions build as the bad guy’s victory looks more and more inevitable.

Then, at just the right moment, the good guy finds a way to start his comeback. He digs deep, breaks a hold, throws a right hand, and before you know it, is starting his finishing move.

So how is the bad guy in charge?

Say you’re the good guy, and you hit me with a right hand when you’re going into your comeback. If I look at you and smile—you’re screwed. You have no credibility. Your comeback is toast. The audience goes flat, whether they know why or not.

Now granted, that example is extremely simplistic—

extremely—but there are a million little variations and tricks of the trade. A heel can utilize all sorts of subtle tricks of the trade to make his opponent look good—or bad.

Creative Control

Hogan knew he was surrounded by a hornets’ nest. He was surrounded by people whom he was completely dependent on in the ring to make him look good. But he knew that those people were intimidated and resentful because he was coming over. They were fearful that Hulk Hogan was going to take over the company.

That was why Ric Flair was so important when it came to convincing Hogan to sign with WCW. Ric couldn’t guarantee anything, of course, but he made Hogan a lot more comfortable about the people he’d be dealing with.

Even so, Hogan worried that eventually the “us vs. them” mentality prevalent in the WCW would eventually sabotage him. And while he respected Ric to a large degree, he didn’t feel Flair understood the best way to utilize the Hulk Hogan character. He was worried that a storyline that looked good on paper might turn out to be a trap, letting other wrestlers sabotage his character. That’s why he wanted—and got—creative control. It assured him he wasn’t going to be sabotaged.

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Hogan was not subtle or shy at all about this.

“Look, brother, the money’s great. The opportunity to work with Ted Turner is great. Eric, I like you. Yeah, there can be a lot of great opportunities here, but I have a real problem with some of the people in this company. They’re going to look at Hulk Hogan as the guy who’s going to come in and have too much control over their lives, and they’re going to do everything they can to make that unsuccessful. The only way I’m making this move is with creative control. So if the situation is not comfortable for me, I won’t have to do it.” A Sensible Move

It made sense to me then, and it makes sense to me now. It was the right thing to do. You can’t take an asset like Hulk Hogan, an established brand, and throw him into a lion’s den to be shredded up by a bunch of insecure people with their own agendas.

Maybe Hogan boasted about it, or maybe he just told people that he had creative control written into his contract. In any event, word of the clause quickly leaked, and I was roundly criticized.

Admittedly, it was the first time in WCW that anyone ever had creative control in an agreement. But for years, if you were on top, if you were Ric Flair at WCW, say, whether it was written into your contract or not, you had a lot of control. You had the title, and you were the champion. If a booker or promoter or an executive wanted you to do something you really didn’t want to do, you had a lot of options.

Even though it doesn’t exist in a WWE contract today, at least not that I’m aware of, anyone with real stroke has it. Look at Stone Cold Steve Austin. If anybody wants to pretend that, at the peak of his career, Stone Cold did not have creative control, they’re kidding themselves. If Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, Shawn Michaels, didn’t have creative control, then someone has to explain to me why Vince McMahon would jump on an airplane and fly to a house show in HULK HOGAN

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the middle of nowhere to sit down and talk to these guys about something they didn’t want to do.

Creative control has been around in some way for a long, long time. It’s just that in Hogan’s case, it was the first time it had been put in a contract. In effect, it forced arbitration between whoever the booker was and Hulk Hogan. We had to sit down and talk through it.

Out of Whack

As it turned out, we talked a lot.

Hogan had a number of ways to let me know when he wasn’t pleased with the way a particular storyline was going. He’d take days to get back to me on the phone, or maybe I’d get the word through Jimmy Hart, Hogan’s assistant at the time. Jimmy would come in with his tail between his legs and give me the puppy-dog eyes.

“I don’t think Hulk’s very happy about this. I think you should just give Hulk a call. I know he’d like to talk to you.” So I’d get on the phone and convince him that no one was trying to screw him. Or at least, that I wasn’t.

A lot of times I’d have to just drop what I was doing and go to see him. I remember one time going down to Tampa where Hogan lived because he wasn’t happy about something. I found out that he was in a gym, working out. I drove over and waited for an hour and a half for him to finish before he’d talk about the subject at hand. I remember sitting in the corner of the gym thinking,
Wow, how out of
whack is this? I’m running the company, not him.
But at the time, it was one of a lot of things we had to do as a company—that
I
had to do as the head of the company. The stakes were starting to get pretty high.

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“Mean” Gene Okerlund and me taking in the crowd’s reception of Hogan’s arrival.

Momentum

Ticker-Tape Parade

After months of negotiation, we were set to announce that Hulk Hogan was coming to WCW in June 1994. By this time, our relationship with Disney had improved to the point where we had the run of the park. We wanted to film something really special, so we arranged a ticker-tape parade on the Main Street back lot at Disney-MGM. There were a lot of people in the park, and Hogan was a big deal. Fans surrounded him, and it looked great. It gave the whole announcement a big feel, exactly what we wanted.

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Not Moving the Needle

But the truth is, Hulk Hogan didn’t boost our viewership very much that year. Except for the first Pay-Per-View match between him and Ric Flair, where the buy rate was 1.3 percent, he did not have the impact on ratings we’d hoped. His shows didn’t really move the needle.