Controversy Creates Cash (17 page)

There were a number of reasons. Hogan’s character had gotten a little stale. And the whole red-and-yellow, say-your-prayers, eat-your-vitamins thing clashed with the steroids controversy. His credibility had been damaged.

Vince’s audience didn’t come to check out Hulk Hogan. They’d gotten a little tired of him, and turned off because of the steroid controversy and the issues between him and Vince. So we didn’t drag that audience over to our product.

Hogan also didn’t play that well with the audience WCW already had. Viewers who had watched WCW when it was NWA and Georgia Championship Wrestling, going way back, looked at Hogan kind of like an unwelcome guest. Hogan coming to WCW was like Roger Clemens coming to the New York Yankees. Yankee fans thought of him as a member of the hated Boston Red Sox, and didn’t warm up to him right away. To bring in Hulk Hogan appeared to be a version of wrestling blasphemy. The hard-core fan just didn’t understand why we would bring him in, and many peripheral mainstream viewers just didn’t care.

Hogan wasn’t a flop by any means. We brought Hulk Hogan in to get media attention, and convince the entertainment industry that we were no longer the retro-wrestling league. It was our attempt to reposition the WCW brand as a national franchise. This rebranding was the most important goal, and judging on that basis, we succeeded without question.

Of course, the only thing the dirtsheet “experts” talked about were television ratings. They didn’t get it.

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Working the Audience with USA Today

We invested a lot of money to make sure this rebranding was successful. Some of the things we did were unheard of in wrestling at the time. For example, I took out an ad for the Hogan-Flair Pay-Per-View in
USA Today.
I believe this was the first time anyone had ever advertised a wrestling Pay-Per-View
there.
I wasn’t trying to attract viewers directly with the ads; I didn’t think many wrestling fans were reading
USA Today
regularly. I did it because I knew that a lot of morning-drive shock jocks got their topics for the day out of
USA
Today.
I figured that I would probably get some “free” buzz or radio time just by virtue of the fact that it was in there. And it worked.

I also knew that a lot of advertising executives read either
USA
Today
or
Wall Street Journal
while traveling. So advertising there was another way of telling them we were a national platform where they could spend their clients’ money.

Hogan helped us tremendously in New York, where most ad sales take place. Our salespeople could go out and talk about a big star that people outside of the wrestling business recognized. Hogan gave us credibility in the advertising world. He gave the people in the Pay-Per-View department something to be excited about as well. The amount of “lift” Hogan provided mitigated a lot of the potential for corporate backbiting. Everybody benefited, at least temporarily.

There were issues with the wrestlers, though. They all knew that Hogan was making a lot of money. The storylines were going to be built around Hulk Hogan, and everybody’s job was to make Hulk Hogan look good. That’s just the way it works. Still, there was quite a bit of apprehension. Everyone wanted to know what it would mean to
them.
A few felt directly threatened, and even the most secure person in the world would have been at least curious about his future.

After a few months went by and Hogan really didn’t move the needle with the audience, I think there was a lot of relief. Some wrestlers were relieved that he didn’t have the impact they thought HULK HOGAN

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he would have, because if he’d had that impact, he’d have had a lot more power. And believe me, he had plenty of capital to begin with.

Hulk Hogan Kool-Aid

Hogan helped WCW tremendously, but he could also be a handful. The politics between Hogan and Flair, and the politics between wrestlers in both men’s camps, gave me waking nightmares.There was always plenty of maneuvering, backbiting, and politicking going on.

Truth be known, the same thing exists today in WWE. Anytime you’ve got performers—I don’t care if they’re musicians, actors, dancers, ice skaters, or jugglers—any time you have people who perform for a living, those people are fueled first and foremost by their self-image and their egos.

Combine that with the fact that the better positioned a performer is, the more money he or she can make, and you’ve got a highly political situation. Dealing with those politics was one of the most draining aspects of my job.

I was not drinking Hulk Hogan Kool-Aid by any stretch of the imagination. There were times when I would rather slam my own hand in a car door than hang out and have a burger with Hulk Hogan because of the shit he put me through.

At the same time, I have to say that, if push came to shove where Hogan was involved, and I wasn’t sure in my own heart what to do, I would probably call it for Hogan. He’d earned that kind of consideration.

The same thing held true for Ric Flair. I didn’t question his booking decisions. It was when they were working against each other that things got tense. And that didn’t help Ric, frankly.

As 1994 went on, things started to fall apart with Ric. We’d have meetings where he’d get up in the middle and say, “Excuse me, guys, I gotta go call Beth.” We’d be sitting around for an hour and a half, two hours, wondering where Ric went, only to find out he was on a plane heading home. Ric just couldn’t handle the pressure. And there were some real pressure situations with Ric as a booker.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

So if there was a jump ball, and the parties couldn’t agree, I bet on Hogan. Hogan had a better track record, and fell in line with the look and feel our company needed. It wouldn’t have made sense to bring him in and then do things the way we used to do things back in the NWA.

Some people took that personally They’d look at me and say,
He’s in love with Hulk Hogan.
I wasn’t. There were plenty of times he frustrated me so much I’d go bang my head on a curb.

Beyond Hogan

Missy Hyatt

Hogan wasn’t the only thing we were doing to improve WCW, of course. We were starting to grow and gain momentum.

But it wasn’t smooth path, either for the company or me personally. Missy Hyatt was one the nastier bumps I encountered that year.

We were taping a set of shows at Disney in mid-February 1994—I think it was the second set, but I could be wrong—when Missy Hyatt and I had our infamous “disagreement,” which led to her filing a sex discrimination suit against Turner Broadcasting.

Eventually, she accused me of saying she had to sleep with me to get ahead.

What a crock.

Take a Hike

Up until this point, Missy Hyatt was probably one of the top women in WCW, if there was such a thing then. There may have been only a handful of women there, but she was the one who got the most camera time. From time to time she was an announcer and a manager. Her role was fairly insignificant, but she was one of the more regularly featured women on our shows.

HULK HOGAN

129

As part of the lead-up toward Hulk Hogan, we brought in Sherri Martel, who’d had some very high-profile roles working for Vince.

We started using her in a very prominent way, building her as Ric Flair’s eventual on-screen manager. One day Missy stormed into my office at Orlando. She demanded to know why I was using Sherri Martel instead of her, and basically made an ass of herself.

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Sherri Martel.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

I want to be careful what I say here, because the bitch will come out and sue me again, but I had serious questions about how long she would last in the company. There wasn’t much on camera that convinced me she was worth the effort. I have no idea what talent she really had. So for her to throw a temper tantrum because we’d decided to bring in another woman was just a little too catty for me to deal with. I decided on the spot to let her go.

Later that afternoon, I went out to meet my wife and kids in the parking lot, where they were waiting to go over to a barbecue we always had with the cast and crew after the show. Missy confronted me in front of my wife and demanded to know what I was doing and why I was doing it. I basically let her know I was done with her and didn’t feel like getting into it any further.

Missy quickly filed suit, alleging sex discrimination. I believe she ended up saying in her complaint that while I was standing there talking to her, I reached across and fondled her breast.

Now, I’m capable of doing some crazy shit, but reaching across and fondling another woman’s breast while my wife and kids are standing next to me is not one of them.

This was another one of the problems with Turner. In any group of wrestlers, there are going to be some who have a certain kind of mentality and lack of ethics when it comes to the way they do business. A few only care about the easiest way to scam a buck. Some, like the individual who was so proud that he figured out a way to steal plane tickets, don’t mind committing fraud in the process.

Go figure.

Moving to Orlando

With the Disney tapings doing well, I suggested we think about moving our operations to Orlando.

There were a couple of reasons. One was the fact that Florida has no state income tax, so we all would have saved some money.

Secondly, many of our freelance production people and wrestlers HULK HOGAN

131

were already in Florida. If we relocated there, we would save on transportation costs, since we were flying them up to Atlanta for the Saturday show and other tapings.

At the same time, being in Atlanta didn’t provide any production or promotion opportunities, and there weren’t any strategic reasons for staying there. We were spending half our time in Florida anyway.

Big mistake, though.

I didn’t realize the rest of the company wouldn’t be as excited about moving to Florida as I was. I’m a bit of a gypsy, and to me, it doesn’t matter where I live as long as my family is with me and I’m successful. But other people had roots in Atlanta, and homes in Atlanta, and they weren’t excited about giving them up.

I didn’t take that into consideration as much as I should have. I just stood up one day and said, “Guess what! We’re moving to Disney World.”

I assumed everyone would feel like me and be excited. Now I realize how they felt:
Wow, I’m not going to be able to work for WCW

anymore. I’m going to have to find a new job.

It didn’t go over so well. And we didn’t move.

Hollywood BS

Of course, when the dirtsheets got hold of my idea, they reported that I wanted to move down to Orlando because there were movie opportunities down there and Eric Bischoff would be one step closer to Hollywood.

That is so much bullshit.

It goes hand in hand with the rap that the only reason I was interested in doing something with WCW was that it would take me one step closer to Hollywood. Everything we did—from filming at Disney to bringing in Hollywood writers, stunt casting, you name it—was criticized as being somehow aimed at smoothing
my
path toward becoming a big-time Hollywood guy.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

There is a grain of truth in the charge: I was looking at wrestling more from the point of view of Wilshire Boulevard than Peachtree Street. Our business was changing, and WCW had to change with it. But this had nothing to do with my personal goals—if I had wanted to be in Hollywood, I would have moved there in 1993

when I had the opportunity.

It’s funny, but a lot of the things WCW did in 1994 weren’t things
I
invented—they were things Vince McMahon had done first. The connection with Hollywood was a perfect example. In the 1980s he brought Cyndi Lauper, Mr. T, Liberace and others to events, integrating pop stars with wrestling. He came up with that idea, not me.

The fact is, it worked. It brought attention to the brand and got new people to sample the product. Some of them stuck around.

That was my strategy, but it wasn’t my invention.

The dirtsheet writers should have known better. But people would use anything they could to take potshots at what I was trying to do at WCW.

Suspension of Disbelief

Japanese Wrestling

I went over to Japan in 1994 to meet with representatives of the New Japan Pro Wrestling promotion. I went originally to find out how we could work more closely together. But the trip did much more than that. It fundamentally changed the way I thought about wrestling.

Wrestling isn’t just popular in the United States. There are wrestling fans all over the world. American wrestlers can find themselves more popular overseas than in the States. Besides touring on our own in Europe, WCW had arrangements with Japanese promotions to capitalize on that popularity.