Controversy Creates Cash (25 page)

Our Own Little War

Madusa

I’ve known Madusa—Debra Ann Micelli, who wrestled under the name Alundra Blayze in WWE—since 1987, when she started with Verne Gagne in the AWA. We’d been pretty good friends, actually.

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So when she called me in the fall of 1995 and said she wanted to come over to WCW, I said, absolutely.

“And by the way, why don’t you bring that championship belt with you?”

Madusa had just won the championship from Bertha Faye. She was pretty reluctant to do it; quite frankly, I talked to her into it. I’m sure to this day she wishes I hadn’t, because it made it very difficult for her to go back to WWE later on.

Madusa came out on national television and walked over to the announcer’s table. She gave her little promo, saying she was coming to WCW. All the while, she held her women’s championship belt in her hand. When she was done, she dropped it into the garbage can.

To people outside the wrestling business, it was just another stunt. To people inside the wrestling business, it was sacrilege. Denigrating someone else’s belt on national television was about as low a blow as you could deliver.

But, given that opportunity I took every advantage and ended up with a big ol’ smile on my face. It was just another one of those in-your-face, fuck-you-WWE moves that I liked. It spoke to the attitude and aggression that I wanted our brand to have.

If I’d have thought about it a little more, I probably would have put the title on a fat little midget and called it the “other” championship, but I didn’t think of it at the time.

Damn it.

I’m sure it pissed off the people in Titan Tower. But the funny thing is, you can see the moment on one of the highlights videos that WWE plays these days to warm up the crowd.

Time Warner

In late 1995, something was going on behind the scenes at Turner Broadcasting that would have far-reaching effects on WCW, though we didn’t know it at the time. Ted Turner began talking with Time PRIME TIME

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Warner about selling a controlling share of the company to the corporate media giant.

The takeover of Turner by Time Warner—or the merger of the two companies, depending on your perspective, I suppose—has been documented in many places. Time Warner had been a large minority stockholder for several years. Among the most onerous provisions of the deal that brought Time Warner—and hundreds of millions of dollars—to Turner was an agreement effectively giving the corporation veto power over expenditures greater than $2 million. Ted continually chafed under this and other provisions of the deal. Eventually, though, he decided to strike a new deal that would make the Turner Broadcasting empire part of Time Warner. The merger went through in 1996.

Ted Turner remained a large stockholder of the combined company, and remained the day-to-day head of Turner Broadcasting—

and WCW’s ultimate boss. But the boardrooms and executive suites soon hosted battles far nastier than anything that took place on
Nitro.
As a tiny division within a relatively small part of the company, WCW had no part in those fights. But like the rest of the corporate divisions, we had to live with the results.

I failed to recognize what the long-term implications of a merger of that magnitude meant. It was one of my biggest mistakes ever. I simply had no idea what the politics or nuances would be like.

When we heard about the merger talks, I took everything I heard at face value. I still believed in Ted Turner, and I couldn’t imagine a situation where Ted Turner’s opinion wouldn’t matter a heck of a lot.

I remember being invited to a Christmas party at Terry McGuirk’s home around this time, and meeting Gerald Levin, the head of Time Warner, for the first time. He seemed like a nice old guy, even kind of harmless.

Okay, so my people-reading skills were not up to this level of play.

Levin and Ted were patting each other on the back, and there 190

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seemed like a lot of love in the room. I could never have imagined it was the beginning of the end.

In the Money

We finished 1995 in the black, the first time
ever
that WCW had turned a profit. Everything was working. We were firing on all eight cylinders. For the first time, we were no longer that bastard stepchild around the CNN Center.

If you recall, earlier in the year I’d made a bet with Harry Anderson about turning a profit. December 24 or 26 or whatever it was, we had a party for WCW employees at a little Mexican restaurant in downtown Atlanta. In front of three or four dozen WCW

employees, Harry Anderson made good on the bet, getting down on his hands and knees to hand me the dollar.

Harry was a great sport about it. He had a fantastic sense of humor.

Bulletproof

Like I’ve said, by this time I walked around with a bit of a swagger.

I took advantage of the political capital I had. Any time there was a political discussion or debate that put me at odds with someone on the corporate side of Turner, I would force that hand. More often than not, I won.

Maybe if I’d known what was going to happen, I would have played a more sophisticated political game. I wouldn’t have been so aggressive. I wouldn’t have taken as many risks, politically, as I did. I wasn’t crazy, but I was confident, and it showed. If there were things that were important for my brand, my employees, I would fight aggressively, and I would fight dirty if I had to.

Not good in corporate politics.

But I wasn’t thinking about that then. I was thinking, I’m Eric Bischoff. I’ve made this division profitable. I’ve had the head of finance on his hands and knees before me.

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I had one of the highest-rated shows on cable. I could get what I wanted. In my mind, I was bulletproof. My stroke in the company shot through the roof of the CNN Tower.

WCW had had an amazing year—but 1996 was going to be even better.

Loose Cannons

Billionaire Ted

WWE was getting spanked. Rather than finding a direction that would work for them, they struck back in a number of ineffectual ways. Probably the funniest were the sketches aired on
Raw
starring a satirical character based on Ted Turner called “Billionaire Ted.” A lot has been written about the Billionaire Ted sketches, about how terrible the people at Turner thought they were. Supposedly WCW wanted to sue the tights off McMahon’s wrestlers for them.

The truth is, we all thought they were kind of funny.

I felt a little bit bad, because it was a parody, and parodies are never complimentary to the subject. But at the same time, the skits didn’t really hurt us. I thought they were a funny little attempt to get into the game and get competitive, but I knew they wouldn’t be effective.

WWE didn’t have a clear understanding of why their audience had left them, and wouldn’t acknowledge the fact that we found a formula that was successful. All they had left was to make fun of us.

It didn’t bother me, and it really didn’t bother Ted. We all thought,
Oh man, Ted is going to be hot.
I wasn’t in the room, but Harvey Schiller told me that Ted laughed his ass off when he saw them. He thought they were funny as hell.

Legal Action

Billionaire Ted didn’t scare me, and neither did threats of lawsuits and the flurry of letters that accompanied them.

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Feeling under the gun, World Wrestling Federation had their lawyers threaten lawsuits for restraint of trade and other alleged commercial crimes and misdemeanors. They hoped—I guess—to try and scare us off. Again, they couldn’t really figure out what we were doing, or maybe they couldn’t really admit to themselves that we were smarter than they were, so they tried to scare us. They stirred the legal pot, hoping to rile the board of directors and shareholders.

Of course, lawyers being lawyers, any time we got a letter, our lawyers wanted to send one back. They had me write one that said, in polite legal language, stick it up your ass. Vince McMahon was obviously impressed with my prose; he read it on the air.

The kind of muck that was being thrown back and forth—they accused us of not having a drug-testing policy, for instance—defined the old expression, “The pot calling the kettle black.” But things took on a life of their own, and eventually WWE filed a lawsuit. We countersued, just to show that we were not going to back down. To me, individually, and to the company, the whole thing was transparent and fairly silly.

Brian Pillman

I like keeping storylines secret. I knew it was next to impossible in my own organization to keep things secret. So there were times when I would work on a storyline with someone independent of everyone else, keeping it between me and him. Brian Pillman and his loose-cannon angle was one of the first.

Brian could be a very dark person to be around, depending on where his head was at, but he could also be a lot of fun. He had a great mind for the business. A lot of guys have a good imagination and can come up with ideas about how their characters can be used; only a select few can do that for other characters. Brian had that ability. He could look at other people and come up with ideas to enhance their character.

Brian and I had a good working relationship and a pretty good PRIME TIME

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personal relationship. Brian came up with an idea for an angle where he would portray a character who might do just about anything at any moment, a character totally unpredictable, on the verge of snap-ping at any given moment, who might just be a little crazy.

I really liked the whole loose-cannon thing. It went directly to the philosophy of doing things differently and continually surprising the viewer.

By the beginning of 1996, Brian was playing the character not just when he was in the ring but outside as well. I remember once when we were in Las Vegas. We were doing the show at the MGM

Grand, but I had a room at the Barbary Coast, where I could enjoy a little privacy coming and going without being seen by the people who throng the MGM. Everyone knew we stayed at that hotel, and they could stake out the elevators. Any time you came through, you had to make your way through hundreds of fans. So I would typically stay down the street under an assumed name.

One night my wife and I were at the bar having a drink. In walked Brian Pillman, acting normal and getting ready to check in.

He glanced my way and must have seen me across the lobby.

He went showbiz immediately, causing an immense scene. This whole loose-cannon character came to life because he and I just happened to be in the same place. He knew what he was doing, and I knew what he was doing: furthering the image of himself as a lunatic, just in case someone happened to see us both there at the same time. I thought that was pretty cool.

Brian had a real ability to make the audience wonder if what they were seeing was real or not. That’s part of the beauty of our business. A lot of the magic of wrestling comes from the blurring of the line between reality and show business. It enhances the suspension of disbelief.

Working the Talent

In early 1996, we decided we would take his loose-cannon charac -

ter as far as we could take it—up to the point of me releasing Brian.

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He would go over to ECW and badmouth me and WCW. At some point, he would come back.

We were going to use it, and go further than anyone had ever gone before. People would really believe it was true. That was our agreement.

Wrestling being wrestling, I knew there was a possibility that I was being worked. Releasing Brian let him sign a contract for more money at WWE; it also meant he might not come back. I was willing to take the risk, because if we could follow through on it, it would be a phenomenal storyline.

No one else was in on it, but as time went on, a few wrestlers figured it out. I know Hulk Hogan did. I remember I was doing play-by-play on
Nitro,
and something happened inside the ring. I don’t remember what the incident was, but for some reason Hulk realized it was all a work. Hulk was pissed that I hadn’t shared it with him.

My assistant, Janie Engle, came up to me during a break. She was white as a ghost. “Eric, Hogan just came up to me and said, well, he wanted me to tell you that you can go to hell.” He didn’t explain why but I knew. Eventually the wrestlers were split about fifty-fifty on whether it was real or not. When I could do that to professionals, guys who were the most cynical in the business, I knew I was achieving my goals. If they didn’t know, the audience didn’t know.

The wrestlers didn’t like it, of course, because they felt like they were being worked. But I didn’t really care.

Was I Worked?

Brian left according to plan, and immediately began tearing me down on ECW—one of the many, many times that someone would use me to get over with an audience. He got a big hit there, and went from ECW to WWE.

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Was
I
the one who was worked? After all, I’d let him out of his contract to go to the competition, where presumably he was paid more. Some people were definitely convinced I was.

I don’t think so, though the truth of the matter is, none of us will ever know who was working who. I wasn’t surprised that Brian signed with WWE. We’d already agreed to take it as far as it would go. Besides, it wasn’t a blow to us, because we were well on our way, with a tremendous amount of momentum.

All the while he was at ECW and WWE, Brian called me, and we would shoot the shit and talk. We weren’t good buddies or anything, but we would talk every six weeks or two months. In my mind, when we felt the time was right for him to come back, he would.

Unfortunately, Brian died before that happened.

Drug Abuse

I talked to Brian just a few weeks before he was found dead in a hotel room October 5, 1997. The media speculated about prescription pills being involved in Brian’s death, but the coroner found that he had died of natural causes.