Controversy Creates Cash (2 page)

You probably also know that Vince McMahon is the chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, better known as WWE.

What you may not know is that almost everything that makes
Raw
distinctive—its two-hour live format, its backstage interview segments, above all its reality-based storylines—was introduced first on
Monday Night Nitro,
the prime-time show I created for the TNT

Network. For nearly three years, my company World Championship Wrestling, kicked Vince McMahon’s ass.
Nitro,
WCW’s flagship show, revolutionized wrestling. The media called our conflict the Monday Night Wars, but it was more like a rout.
Nitro
beat
Raw
in the ratings eighty-something weeks running.

Then Vince caught on to what we were doing, and the real battle began.

Unfortunately for me, and the wrestling business in general, the fight wasn’t really between WCW and WWE, which was called World Wrestling Federation at the time. In fact, the real battle was GIVE ME A BIG HUG

3

between WCW and the corporate suits who took over Turner Broadcasting with the merger of Time Warner and then AOL. That was a fight I was never capable of winning, though, being stubborn by nature, I didn’t realize it until it was nearly over.

Stephanie McMahon pops her head into the limo. Stephanie, Vince’s daughter and one of the company’s vice presidents, has come to take me in to the show.

Ready?
she asks.

I’m ready.

Nervous?

Excited.

She stares at me a second, probably convinced I’m lying. I’m sure she thinks I’m a train wreck. The auditorium is packed with people who hate my guts, or I should say hate my character’s guts.

Not too many people bother to distinguish between the character I play on television and who I really am. Worse, a lot of people think they know who I am because of what they’ve read on the Internet or in the

“dirt sheets,” the newsletters that cover the wrestling business for fans.

Wrestling fan sites are generally populated by people with too much time on their hands, who have very little real insight into what’s going on in the wrestling business. A lot of them create their own stories and realities just to watch other people react to them.

As a result of that, there’s a lot of misinformation floating around out there about a lot of people, not just me.

Which is one of the reasons I decided to write this book.

The truth is, I hate most wrestling books. I read a sentence, a paragraph, sometimes a page, then quit. They don’t take a serious look at the enterprise. Most are bitter, self-serving revisionist history at best—and monuments to bullshit at their worst. A lot of the guys who write them seem desperate to have the last word on every-4

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

thing. Rather than telling people what we’re really all about, they refight old battles that everyone but them has forgotten. They come off like whiners, complaining about everything.

That’s not me.

I’ve had some bumps and bad breaks. Everyone does in life. But pro wrestling for me has been full of good things. I started out as a salesman and then, by necessity rather than ability, became an on-camera talent. I went from that to being chosen, improbably, to head the second largest wrestling promotion in the country. We were a distant second to Vince McMahon’s company, bleeding money every year. With hard work and against heavy odds, we became number one. What had been a company generating 10 million in losses on 24 million worth of revenue, became a company with 350 million in sales pumping out over 40 million in profit. Then things went to hell. After a wild roller-coaster ride I ended up back where I had started—as an on-air talent, ironically, with the guy I had been at war with for years.

And ultimately we became friends.

Let’s go,
says Stephanie.
You’re on in a few minutes.

We get out of the car and begin walking through the backstage area. My appearance has been a well-kept secret until now, and the looks of shock on the wrestlers’ faces as I pass confirms it.

I can hear the crowd in the arena as I reach the holding area backstage. WWE writers have given me a two-page script to memorize, and the words are bouncing in my head. The funny thing is, I’ve rarely had to memorize a script before—all these years on camera, I’ve improvised my lines. But not tonight. The writers for WWE

have spent a fair amount of time on this script; my job tonight is to deliver what they want.

But even before I look at the words, I know what I have to do tonight. I have to find my inner heel. Once I’m out there, the adrenaline will take over, and I’ll be fine.

GIVE ME A BIG HUG

5

There’s a hush outside. Vince McMahon has come onstage and is about to introduce me.

Wrestling began in the United States as a sideshow carnival attraction.

It thrived and grew because it blended showmanship, unique characters, and illusion. It still does, in some respects. But it’s also a business, and a very sophisticated one at that. The business structure and revenue model are extremely complex. No other form of entertainment, quite frankly, combines the different revenue streams and opportunities that WCW had, or that WWE has now. I hope to give you some idea of that complexity in this book.

What happened to WCW while I was there is as much about business as it is about wrestling. A lot of wrestling fans think WCW

unraveled because of things like guaranteed contracts for wrestlers and the decision to give Hulk Hogan creative control over his matches.

The fact that we may have overpaid some wrestlers
was
one reason WCW ended up in a position that was difficult to recover from.

But it had nothing to do with why WCW failed. If our talent budget was half of what it was, in the end, it would have made no difference. The company failed because of what happened inside Turner after it was bought by Time Warner. Turner’s merger with Time Warner, and Time Warner’s ultimate merger with AOL, was the single largest disaster in modern business history. WCW was just one of many casualties. There was a lot of collateral damage. Even Ted Turner suffered in the fallout.

Did I make mistakes? Sure. I’ll list a few of the bigger ones here.

But I’m tired of hearing things like, Eric Bischoff killed WCW because he overpaid wrestlers and was a Hollywood guy and so on.

That’s all bull. Take Eric Bischoff out of the equation, and WCW

still goes down in flames, maybe even faster.

What happened to WCW is a cautionary tale. My story isn’t just about wrestling and sports entertainment, but about what happens

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

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GIVE ME A BIG HUG

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to creative enterprises and individuals when they get caught in the maul of a modern conglomerate and the short-term “meet Wall Street expectations” thinking that’s so prevalent today.

I know I’m not going to convince every reader who picks this book up that what I say is the absolute truth. It’s possible that I’ve remembered some things subjectively or have a very one-sided view of them. Plenty has been written about WCW and my time there.

But none of the stories of its demise have come from someone who was there. It’s been written by people who were either just making shit up or hearing rumors. I was there, on the front lines. They weren’t.

I’m on. I walk out toward the man who was my most bitter enemy for four or five years. We embrace.

That rumbling beneath your feet,
I tell Vince,
is a whole lot of people turning over in their graves.

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I’m about six here.

1

Throwing Rocks

Early Days

Motor City Boy

Alot of what people think they know about me is wrong. So let’s start from the beginning.

I was born on May 27, 1955, in Detroit, Michigan. I lived there until I was twelve. I hated it.

We lived near the city line in a lower-middle-income area. It wasn’t a great place. I did have a great mom and dad, though. My father—Kenneth—was a hardworking guy who had a pretty tough life. He was born prematurely in 1930. His spinal cord hadn’t developed properly. There was a hole at the top of his spine, and as he grew older, it filled up with fluid. That gave him terrible, debilitat-ing headaches. Even so, he was very active. He spent a lot of spare time hunting and fishing, and loved the outdoors.

My mom Carol was a typical 1950s housewife, very devoted to her family. She stayed home caring for me, my younger brother Mark, and my sister Lori while my father worked as a draftsman at 10

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

American Standard. My mother was also an extremely hard worker.

She taught me in her own way to dream big.

Dreadful Surgery

About the time I was five or six, my father’s headaches got so bad that he decided to try brain surgery to relieve the pain. I remember sitting on the couch, waiting, while my mom took him to the hospital, looking out the window, worried because my mom was worried, not understanding really what was going on.

When my father came out of that brain surgery, his headaches were gone. But he no longer had the use of his hands and had limited use of his arms. He couldn’t even brush his teeth. For an active guy with a lot of pride who loved the outdoors and hunting, it was as if his manhood had been taken away.

It had a profound effect on him. He couldn’t work as a draftsman anymore, so he became a purchasing agent. He became a workaholic in a good sense—he had a strong work ethic and just kept at it. But he became bitter.

My mom now had to take care of him as well as us kids. She was tough, one of the toughest women I know. Still is. When you’ve got a family of five living in a small house in a hard neighborhood, and all the kids turn out okay, then you know you’ve done something special.

My dad’s mom, my grandmother Agnes, used to stay with us for a few months at a time while I was growing up. She was a tough old German farm broad, as ornery as any wrestler. More so. She could have made Stone Cold Steve Austin cry like a baby with a glance.

She also smoked like a chimney. To this day I can’t stand cigarette smoke—or walk into a room filled with smoke—without thinking of her.

I went to Dort Elementary School, the same school rap star Em-inem went to, quite a number of years later. It was a tough school in a tough neighborhood. There was really nothing good about it. I THROWING ROCKS

11

hated most of my classes, with the exception of geography and history. I loved to think about faraway places like China, India, Japan, and Europe, and often daydreamed about going to those places we were supposed to be learning about—generally during class, when the teacher wanted me to pay attention to something else.

Rocks

Even the games we played were rough. One game we would play was “army.” Back in the sixties, a lot of TV shows, like
Combat
and
Twelve O’Clock High,
romanticized characters and events that took place during World War II. We copied them when we played. All of the kids from the neighborhood would choose teams, much like the way kids choose baseball teams. One team would be the Germans, and one would be the Americans. We didn’t play with toy guns. Instead, we would literally have rock fights. We would chase each other through the neighborhood, throwing rocks and clumps of dirt at each other. The nurses in the emergency room at Saratoga Hospital on Gratiot Avenue knew me on a first-name basis.

Big-Time Wrestling

I was about eight years old when I discovered professional wrestling.

My father used to work Saturday mornings. We only had one car, so my mother would drive my father to work, drop my grandmother off at my aunt and uncle’s for the day, and go grocery shop-ping. I’d stay at home with my younger brother while they were gone. We had the house to ourselves! We’d start the morning with some cartoons, raid the freezer, and make a gallon or so of chocolate malt. Then we’d catch
Dick Clark’s American Bandstand,
and finally top things off with wrestling—
Big Time Wrestling
on CKLW, Channel 9, to be exact. I remember seeing the Sheik, Killer Kowalski, and Bobo Brazil, among others.