Controversy Creates Cash (32 page)

This guy wanted to come over to us. Paul made a stink about a lawsuit. He knew, having worked at Turner, that all you had to do was say “lawsuit,” and you’d get a check. Maybe a big check, maybe a little check, but you’d get something.

I didn’t want to go through the bullshit. So I called him up and said, “Why don’t we meet in Orlando? Let’s see if we can figure out a way to make this work. Maybe we can have some fun here.” Paul came down. We had dinner. We couldn’t see eye to eye. It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t hostile. We just couldn’t make it work.

No one, including myself, knew at the time that there was a connection between WWE and ECW. No one knew that Paul was being subsidized by Vince McMahon. Paul was clearly speaking with Vince on a regular basis. And when he got back after our dinner, I believe he told someone at WWE that I was on cocaine.

Shortly after my meeting with Paul, during a deposition relating to a lawsuit between WWE and WCW, WWE lawyer Jerry McDivett asked me a series of questions about cocaine use. I thought,
Where the hell did this come from?
It was very odd. We’d had hours and hours of depositions, and nothing like that had ever come up.

I didn’t do cocaine and had no idea at the time why in the world McDivett was going in this direction. It was like asking me how many puppies I had set on fire that week.

Years later, I realized that Paul must have gone back and said, serious or not, “Oh, that fucking Eric, he’s jacked up on cocaine.” During our meeting, I’d excused myself several times to go to the restroom so I could take phone calls I didn’t want to take in front of Paul. I guess he put one and zero together and came up with twenty-seven.

Do I respect him creatively? Yes. Would I work with him in the

244

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

ring? Absolutely. Would I sit down and shoot the shit with him if we were sitting around an arena? Sure. He makes me laugh.

Do I believe he’s so full of shit he believes his own lies?

Absolutely.

And so do others who’ve worked with him.

Speaking of Characters . . .

Hulk Hogan called me one afternoon while I was at a meeting at the airport Marriott in Atlanta. He’d just gotten off the phone with Dennis Rodman. Rodman, the eccentric Chicago Bulls forward, was talking about doing a deal with the WWE. Hogan wanted us to grab

-----------------------

Rodman instead.

------------

--- ----------------------- - - -

-----

-

THE REVOLUTION TAKES HOLD

245

“If I get you Rodman’s number,” he asked, “can you give him a call?”

Sure.

I ended up talking to Dennis’s agent, Dwight Manley. I didn’t ask him much about the WWE; it wasn’t my concern. We ended up doing a deal pretty easily. I don’t remember the dollar amount or the exact terms; it was probably in the area of two television appearances and a single Pay-Per-View, for something in the area of $1

million. That’s a bit lower than was reported at the time.

Dennis was a very high-profile, very controversial character at the time. His basketball career was at its peak, and the Michael Jor-dan–led Bulls were in the middle of what would become an historic second three-peat as champions of the NBA.

If Dennis wasn’t born to be a wrestling character, I don’t know who was. He was an outrageous, over-the-top character. He attracted media attention wherever he went. He fit in perfectly with the nWo bad-boy image.

Dennis appeared at the
Bash at the Beach
Pay-Per-View that July, the first of several Pay-Per-Views that he did with us over the next few years. He was a pain in the ass to work with. Dennis is his own guy and pretty much operates in his own little world. Most of the time, that’s inconsistent with the world around him. He doesn’t like to conform to rules and regulations and structure and schedule—all the things that make the world go around. Getting him to train was problematic, and that limited what we could do with him.

But he could also be a lot of fun, and in the end we were all surprised by how well he did as a wrestler.

Even though Rodman was a phenomenal athlete, wrestling is a whole different skill set and requires a good deal of training even for the more basic moves. While it looks easy, it’s not. Professional athletes are often more confident than they should be in their ability to pick it up. There have been some exceptions. Karl Malone trained incredibly hard and performed exceptionally well.

Kevin Greene was another athlete who did a great job when he 246

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

came on with us. Kevin was a five-time pro-bowl linebacker and standout with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Carolina Panthers. If I recall correctly, he was the NFL’s third leading tackler of all time when he retired in 1999.

He poured himself into the training for our show, trying to be as good as he could possibly be. I had several conversations with Kevin, and he told me that wrestling was even more physically demanding than football. For a guy with that kind of world-class professional background to stand back and bow down to what these guys put themselves through says a lot.

A Million Bucks of Publicity

Some people criticized me for spending any money on Rodman.

They didn’t understand why a crazy basketball player—or any other nonwrestling athlete, for that matter—belonged in the wrestling ring.

They completely missed the point. And while the buy rate was pretty good—the event drew a .78 buy rate, better than
Slamboree
before it and Sturgis afterward—getting more people to tune in wasn’t my real goal either. It’s hard to measure any one element of a Pay-Per-View, but the thing that I was focusing on in hiring Rodman was the press attention we’d get. I knew hiring Rodman would create controversy—and controversy creates cash.

In those terms, the Pay-Per-View was a runaway success. If I had to buy the amount of press and coverage that Dennis Rodman got us, it would have cost me much, much more than what we paid him.

There was one added bonus, though it didn’t appear on any balance sheet or business plan: he drank Hogan under the table. Rodman should get another ring just for that.

Bill Goldberg

Bill Goldberg was also a professional athlete before he came to us in 1997, though obviously he was in a different category than Rodman or Kevin Greene.

THE REVOLUTION TAKES HOLD

247

Bill had played for the Atlanta Falcons for a few years before injuries took their toll and he retired from the NFL. He knew a couple of the guys who worked at WCW and apparently told them he wanted to try wrestling. They had him contact me.

To be honest, it took me quite a while to respond. Bill and I might have traded phone calls once or twice, but because there was so much going on for me, I kept putting it off. Bill got real frustrated and said to somebody, I’m going to wait one more week, and then if I don’t hear from Eric, I’m going to go do a deal with WWE.

I’m not sure who it was now, maybe Sting or Diamond Dallas Page, but somebody came to me and urged me to get back to him. I forced myself to find the time, and he really impressed me. Bill was a very likable guy, charismatic; he certainly had a tremendous look.

I thought there was real potential there, so I hired him and put him in the PowerPlant for a couple of months.

Learning by Doing

You can only teach someone so much about performing within the confines of a gym or training facility. The real art in our business is the ability to connect with an audience and ultimately manipulate that audience’s emotions. That’s born from experience. You have to go out and do it.

We saw a lot of potential in Bill early on, and we wanted to col-lapse the learning curve. He had such a great look, and was
so
intense, that we wanted to get him out in front of people. So we put him out in the ring in what we called “dark” or “squash” matches.

These were matches that weren’t televised and took place at the arena right before
Nitro
went on. They were usually quick matches designed to rev up the audience and, more importantly, give the green, inexperienced performers a chance to get out in front of a crowd and develop their art.

I’d heard so many good things about Bill from the PowerPlant that I made it a point to watch Bill in the dark matches. I could tell

248

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

he was going to be a star. People immediately identified with his character, a wrestler focused on stomping his opponent into obliv-ion as quickly and efficiently as possible. He got so caught up in who he was that the audience couldn’t help believe in him as well.

Bill got a tremendous reaction from the crowd whenever he performed.

That intensity was also one of the things that caused him ultimately to unravel, but that lay in the future.

-----------------------------------------

------------------

------- ------

--------

- -

THE REVOLUTION TAKES HOLD

249

Building Him Up

We had this great character, but Bill still didn’t have enough experience in the ring to have much of a match with anybody. A great wrestling match is a tango or waltz that takes two people to really succeed. They both have to be equally talented. A Ric Flair or a Chris Benoit or a Triple H can have a great match with just about anybody because of their experience and their abilities. But those types of performers are few and far between.

It wasn’t Bill’s fault; he just didn’t have enough experience yet.

You can’t give someone ten years of experience in six months.

But we
really
wanted to use him right away.

I don’t know who came up with the idea—a lot of people seem to have taken credit for Bill’s success over the years—but someone said something along these lines: “Let’s have him go out, and do what he does best: let’s have him mow through people as quickly as possible, and build that character. At the same time, we’ll give him the experience to become a better wrestler.” And so began pro wrestling’s famous unbeaten string, which would build and run through the following year. It was the first time, apparently, that a wrestler had a long unbeaten streak, and that such a streak was used as an angle. The audience gradually caught on, and one by one signs began appearing in the arenas with his record: 30–0, 42–0, 53–0.

Mistakes & Problems

Arn Anderson

From the launch of
Nitro,
WCW was on an incredible roll. It seemed we could do no wrong.

That’s not to say that we didn’t make mistakes. We did. I did.

How I handled Arn Anderson’s retirement was one of them.

250

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

Wrestling fans know that Arn was one of the Four Horsemen and was one of the best tag team wrestlers of all time. I have a lot of respect for Arn Anderson for a lot of different reasons. Did I think that Arn Anderson was a Ric Flair–caliber performer or a Hulk Hogan–caliber performer? No, I didn’t. But I don’t think it’s fair to say that anybody really did. He didn’t perform at that main-event level nationally. He didn’t drive record buy rates or fill arenas. He was never a household name. But he was nonetheless a very solid and important part of the program. He was one of the wrestlers you need to have on your roster, in the upper third, upper 25 percent of your roster. He could go out there day in, day out, have great interviews, and perform in the ring. He had the talent and credibility to perform up to anyone’s level or make a journeyman look like a seasoned vet. Not a lot of performers can do that.

In 1997, Arn Anderson suffered a neck injury that left him unable to perform in the ring. Arn was able to contribute in a lot of other ways after that, but as a wrestler, his career was pretty much over.

Once again, we took a real-life situation and wove it into a storyline. It was something we’d been doing since the start of
Nitro,
blurring the line between fact and fiction. It was the magic formula that made all of this work to begin with. But I didn’t really understand the kind of impact this could have on certain individuals, and Arn was one of them.