Controversy Creates Cash (21 page)

You want to know? You’ll have to tune in and find out.

That was a real departure—people just couldn’t imagine why I wouldn’t hype the next week’s show.
How can you produce a
wrestling show and not promote next week’s main event match?

When you look at a lot of successful television programs, you realize that they get you to come back not by telling you what’s going to happen the following week, but by making you want to find out what’s going to happen next. You follow the characters; you get hooked on the story. Every successful television series, whether it’s a sitcom or a drama or a reality series, works that way.

My feeling was, if the show was live and we could create the sense that it was totally unpredictable, we’d create a show where the viewer never knew what was going to happen. If I could achieve that, I wouldn’t
have
to promote what was going to happen next week.
Seinfeld
didn’t.
ER
didn’t. Viewers would tune in to find out.

My goal was to create a show that the audience would say, “Shit, I can’t believe that they did that. What are they going to do next week?”

I knew it would work—if I could kick things off right. With the right surprise.

Blowing Down the Doors

Lex Luger

At some point while the show was being developed, Steve Bor-den—aka Sting—called me at home on a Saturday afternoon with something he wanted to talk about. Lex Luger had let him know that he was miserable and wanted out.

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Here’s Lex, at Starrcade 1995, taking on Mashahiro Chono.

I never really liked Lex much. He’d been at WCW when I first got there, before leaving to work for Vince. I hadn’t had much opportunity to work with him face-to-face, but overall I thought he was an arrogant ass. He treated people badly and had too high an opinion of himself. And I never really thought much of his talent.

Quite frankly, he had fallen on his face. But whatever; his contract was coming due, and he wanted out. We were on the road a lot less, which meant it would be much easier to work for us. And he wanted to be in Atlanta more often, where he lived.

But between his lack of talent and piss-poor attitude, I had no PRIME TIME

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interest in him whatsoever, and I told Sting that. Bringing in a guy like Lex Luger, a guy who in my opinion did nothing but bitch and complain and was a marginal talent at best, just didn’t make any sense to me.

Sting really worked hard to convince me, saying things like,

“Yeah, Lex can come off that way, but deep down inside he’s a good guy and he really wants to make it work. He wants to prove he can be a part of the team.”

Sting really sold his friend hard. And more out of respect for Sting than anything else, I agreed to take a meeting with Lex. I called him on the phone and said, “Okay, I’ll meet with you, but I want no one, and I mean no one, to know about this, other than Sting and my wife, who’s probably hearing me on the phone right now. I want no one, not even your attorney, to know you’re talking to me.”

In my mind, I was thinking that if I was going to do a deal with this guy, I wanted to use him as my shot heard around the world.

Lex would be my surprise.

A Hard Bargain

There’s a saying in our business: Telephone, television, tell-a-wrestler—news travels equally fast through all three media.

I didn’t want anyone to know that Lex was coming over—
if
he was coming over. But I also thought that asking him to keep it a secret would act as a test to see how serious he was about being a team player. If word got out, I’d know he had leaked it.

We met in clandestine places, like Sting’s garage. Lex would show up, then go up to the guest house above the garage. I’d come by about a half hour later and we’d have our meeting. It was like something out of a Bond movie.

After a few talks, I told him I was willing to give this a chance.

But I was still very aware that I had to meet my budget, and I wasn’t entirely convinced that Lex was being straight with me.

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Lex was making—actually I can’t recall exactly what he was making if I even knew at the time, but he was earning $500,000 to $750,000 when he’d left WCW a few years before. I couldn’t afford that, at least not as a gamble. So I thought, here’s the real test.

I told him, “All right. I’ll give you a $150,000 a year. Take it or leave it.

“If this works out, if your attitude is what you say it will be, if you can fit in and be a part of the team, then we’ll revisit it. I’m a fair guy. But you’ll have to take the chance, because I’m taking a big chance bringing you back.”

I didn’t care whether he took it or not. I was of the frame of mind that if I could get him, great. Otherwise, I’d move on and figure out something else.

Lex was shocked. I think he was assuming I would welcome him back with open arms. He didn’t hesitate, though. He was serious about coming back, even if it meant a short-term sacrifice and gamble on his part.

Surprise!!

Lex’s contract literally expired at midnight the day before the first
Nitro
was scheduled to go on the air. Now somebody at WWE may have been asleep at the wheel, or maybe Lex just stayed off their radar screen—I wasn’t on the other side of that, so I don’t know.

But whatever happened, no one realized what was going on. They thought Lex was still working for them.

But he wasn’t. He finished working on Sunday night, September 3, 1995, then flew to Minneapolis, where
Nitro
was scheduled to debut at the Mall of America Monday night.

I didn’t trust anyone in my own company to keep their mouth shut either. I was surrounded by people who had an obsessive-compulsive need to spew anything they knew to anyone who would listen.

To keep it secret, I had Lex make his own travel arrangements PRIME TIME

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and get a room at a hotel in Minneapolis far from where we were staying. I had one of my security people meet him at the hotel and bring him over to the show at the last minute.

Lex literally ran onto the show about a half hour after it went on the air, stunning the audience. In their minds, Lex was a WWE

guy. How could he be on WCW’s new show? What was going on?

What would happen next?

It was really, really effective. It set the tone for what I wanted
Nitro
to be.

Talent had jumped back and forth a lot in the past, but this was really the first time it had been done with no one knowing until the moment it happened. I can’t tell you how effective it was. I’m sure Vince McMahon was in shock, but surprising him wasn’t what I was after. I wanted the audience at the edge of their seats, and we’d achieved that right out of the gate.
Nitro
felt edgy—
different than
any other wrestling show—especially its direct competition,
Monday Night Raw.

You could feel it in the air. At the end of that show, I knew we’d accomplished what we’d set out to accomplish.

Waterloo—Not

I took a lot of heat for doing the show at the mall. But I wanted this to feel truly special, and I couldn’t really achieve that inside an arena.

Furthermore, this was the very first
Nitro
out of the box, and I wasn’t sure I could put enough people in an arena to make it look good. The worst thing in the world that could have happened was to go into the Target Center in Minneapolis and only put 3,500

people in the arena. But holding it in the Mall of America, in the atrium, with three different levels of people looking down—kind of like the Roman Colliseum—that made it different, and better.

It worked. It just worked.

I did a bunch of interviews with newspapers and other media as we ramped up for the show. Much of my contentious relationship 162

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

with the dirtsheet writers dates back to this time. Up until then, the writers, the critics, the inside community that didn’t like me that much anyway, took a fair amount of joy from thinking that
Nitro
was going to be the thing that killed my career.
Oh, Eric Bischoff’s
insane. How can he possibly think this
Nitro
show would ever compete
with Vince?
It went on and on and on. They had a field day predict-ing that
Nitro
would be an embarrassment to Turner Broadcasting and the end of WCW.

Now they had to eat crow, and they hated it.
Nitro
’s success proved just how little the wrestling “experts” really knew about the wrestling business. And I took every opportunity to point that out.

Quite honestly, I didn’t know
Nitro
would be as successful as it became. I did think we would be competitive. But when the show was over, I knew in my heart that we’d achieved everything we’d set out to achieve—and more. And that’s what I wanted— more.

The Monday Night Wars

Head-to-Head

Raw
had been preempted by another show September 4, which was one reason we chose that night to debut. The next week we went head-to-head, starting a ratings war that would continue for years.

The Monday Night Wars, as they came to be known, helped
both
WCW and WWE, bringing millions of new fans to the genre and changing the business forever. Prior to
Nitro
and the Monday Night Wars,
Raw
on USA Network netted Nielsen ratings in the 2.5 to 3

range. By the end of 1998, three years later, the combined audience regularly exceeded 8 or 9. That was a 300 percent increase in viewers.

Sometimes war is good.

We kicked butt that first week, drawing a 2.5 in the Nielson’s to the WWE’s 2.2. After that it went back and forth for a while, neck and neck.

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From the beginning, I planned to be on
Nitro
as the main announcer—again, not because I wanted to be, but because I was the best option I had. I knew the edge and attitude I wanted to give the show, and it was easy for me to do. I became the face of
Nitro,
and relished the role.

I want to be careful how I say this, because I don’t want it to sound like I’m putting myself over too much. But just about everything I had wanted to do with WCW was different than the way things were normally done. And it was successful. Because of that, I became almost intolerant of anything that was standard operating procedure when it came to producing, promoting, or building a wrestling program.

Clearly the goal now wasn’t to become “competitive,” it was to become number one. Over the course of the first
Nitro
show, I went from just wanting to be profitable to having the confidence that we could be number one in a television genre that had been dominated for almost fifteen years by World Wrestling Federation. Once I saw and felt the audience’s reaction, I knew we were onto a winning formula.

That was an amazing amount of fuel for my fire.

It was also the beginning of my criticizing WWE on air. I positioned myself as a rebel—and WCW as the organization that was going to kick down the doors and command respect.

I wanted to turn up the volume. Way up. I was confident—if not overconfident. I wasn’t aggressive—I was hyperaggressive. I’m pretty aggressive by nature—I’m aggressive in my sleep—but if I have momentum behind me like I did back then, I get hyperaggressive, and that’s where my head was at. I smelled blood. Now I wanted the kill.

Pissing on the WWE Campfire

All the traditional thinkers around me cringed when I started criticizing WWE and Vince McMahon on the air. The people who 164

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

worked for me were scared to death. They were afraid that what I was doing was wrong, because it was counter to what they had been taught: One never acknowledges the competition.

I not only acknowledged the competition; I pissed on their campfire.

The people around me were
so
afraid I had stepped over the line. They honestly thought Vince was going to pull some magic gorilla out of his hat while I was pulling rabbits out of mine. And some probably thought they were going to be put in a position where they’d never be able to go to work for WWE because they worked for WCW while I was in charge.

Some people have said that there was something personal between me and Vince McMahon, but that’s bullshit. I’d only met the guy once, and he’d been a perfect gentleman, giving me a chance to try out for a job I wasn’t qualified for. This was all about my desire to deliver.

In retrospect, some people have said that the WWE was in a weak position because of the steroid trial and the other problems Vince and the organization had dealt with during the early to mid-1990s. It’s possible, I guess, but it had nothing to do with our strategy.

Nobody’s going to believe this, but I didn’t know or care about how they were being affected. I just paid attention to my own goals.

I knew we were onto a formula that would work, and they were stuck in one that didn’t. I was confident that Vince McMahon, based on everything I had heard, would dig in his heels and not react to anything we were doing. So I didn’t worry about them.