Controversy Creates Cash (35 page)

Sting was a difficult guy to communicate with. He wasn’t a hard person to do business with—don’t confuse those two. Sting was very honest and for the most part straightforward, but in dealing with Hogan he kept his cards very close to his vest. There was a lot of—call it “diplomacy.” They kept feeling each other out.

I don’t think Sting really trusted Hogan. I think the lack of trust was somewhat well founded. There was some of it that wasn’t, but a lot was. Sting had spent all of this time building up this character, and I think it was important to him that the payoff be decisive and one-sided—and in his favor. He wanted the win to have creditabil-ity, boosting the character as we went forward.

Hogan, on the other hand, felt that Sting hadn’t really committed, or he would have shown up in better shape. Therefore, he wasn’t that eager to have the match finish the way Sting wanted it to finish.

The way a wrestler wins or loses can be as important as the result. Losing a match on a disqualification, for example, is viewed far differently than losing on a submission. It’s not just a matter of ego.

It has implications for future storylines and the characters involved.

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Of course, Hogan had creative control over the outcome of his matches. So I was caught in the middle.

We came up with a finish that mimicked what had happened to Bret Hart in Montreal. Sting would lose, or seem to lose, on a quick count by referee Nick Patrick. Bret Hart would rush in, shouting something along the lines of, “I’m not going to let this happen again.” He’d toss the crooked ref from the ring and set up Sting to flatten Hogan with a scorpion deathlock. It wasn’t the finish Sting wanted, because it wasn’t clean, but it seemed like a decent compromise between two powerful pieces of talent.

A Flubbed Ending

The ending did not go the way it was supposed to. Literally millions of fans saw a count that was anything but quick. Replays make it pretty clear that Sting was legitimately counted out.

Which meant that the one who was screwed was Hogan, not Sting. And it undercut everything we’d been building toward.

To this day, I’m not sure why Nick Patrick’s count didn’t go the way we planned. It may have been one of those things that just happens in a live event. I didn’t think he had done it on purpose, as some people suggested; I would have fired him on the spot if I had.

Quite frankly, the only thing I could do at that point was try to figure out a way to fix it the following day. We focused on the controversy—we replayed the tape of the count on
Nitro
and claimed Hogan had won—to justify a rematch and keep interest in the storyline. But it was immensely controversial, and put a bad spin on what should have been a wildly successful angle and Pay-Per-View.

Getting My Ass Kicked

That
Starcade
also marked the first time that I actually wrestled in a match. It was an inauspicious debut.

By that time my on-air persona had evolved to the point where TOO MUCH

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he had enough heat that he could benefit a babyface. I felt it was time to share some of that heat.

I didn’t want to get myself involved in a very high-profile matchup. I didn’t have enough confidence in my ability, and I didn’t want to put myself out there in that way, but I thought it was safe for me to step into the ring with Larry Zbyszko.

The match itself was actually Larry’s idea, and I agreed right away. I thought a few people would think it was interesting to watch me get my ass kicked.

I knew Larry from my days in the AWA. We had good chemistry together. I also knew he’d spend the time to work with me so I wouldn’t embarrass myself or him.

Unfortunately, while we were rehearsing a few days before the match, I blew out my knee. I fractured a bone at the top of the joint. It sounds worse than it was, really. It wasn’t even that painful, but it swelled, and I couldn’t really put much weight on it.

We had to adjust quite a bit because of it. Not that it mattered much to the outcome of the match—Larry had his way with me, and would have even if I’d been in perfect shape.

It was still a tremendous amount of fun. I’d gone out and created emotion by running my mouth, but this was a different way to get a reaction.

Nash’s “Heart Attack”

That
Starcade
was also notable for something that
didn’t
happen—

the match between Kevin Nash and Giant. Nash’s absence set off a flurry of speculation and rumor. A lot of people believed—and probably still do—that Nash simply boycotted the Pay-Per-View because he didn’t want to lose to Giant.

He probably didn’t want to lose, but that wasn’t why he didn’t show.

When his head is on straight, Kevin is one of the most creative and talented people I’ve ever met in the business. He doesn’t have 270

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

anything close to the personal problems that Scott Hall had. But Kevin did have a tendency to withdraw when Scott went off the deep end. He went off the deep end in his own way.

This was our first experience with a personal issue of Kevin’s that has plagued him from time to time. His dad died of a heart attack when he was very young. At the time of
Starcade,
Kevin was getting to the age where his father had passed away, and I think his own mind he was afraid he might follow in his footsteps. So from time to time, when he had a little heartburn or a funny feeling in his chest, he would overreact.

That Saturday when I arrived in Washington for the Pay-Per-View, I got a call that Kevin was in a hospital in Phoenix and undergoing tests for a heart attack. Because of some of the stunts Kevin and Scott had played in the past, my first reaction was that it was Kevin’s way of not having to show up to work. But I picked up the phone and eventually found out that Kevin was truly in the hospital undergoing tests. As angry and disappointed as I was, it was a legitimate scare.

Of course, a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that Kevin was playing games. It wasn’t true, though given the bad feelings that were starting to cycle through the locker room, it wasn’t surprising that they thought that.

Starcade
closed out 1997 by scoring a 1.9 buy rate, our best ever.

WCW had peaked, though we had no idea at the time.

Seeds of Destruction

Thunder Debut

Thunder’s
debut on Thursday night, January 8, 1998, scored a 4.0

Nielsen rating, said to be the highest cable debut of all time. But the success was mostly due to
Nitro.
Our Monday-night show was at its peak, and it was relatively easy to drag that audience over to TBS

and cross-promote the show. I wasn’t surprised it was successful.

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The show did better than most cable programs, hovering in the low 3’s over the next year and a half. But the ratings were always well behind those of
Nitro.
Quite frankly,
Thunder
just wasn’t a great show. We attempted to give it a different look and feel than
Nitro,
because it was so important to be different. We put different talent on the shows at first, but we knew that couldn’t last; we simply didn’t have enough top talent for both shows. And nWo wasn’t strong enough on its own to give it
Thunder.
The show ended up looking dark, and didn’t have the energy
Nitro
had. We didn’t do a good job of making it
different,
so it became
less.

Discontent

The politics and the egos among some of the talent began to wear pretty thin soon after
Thunder’s
debut. I brought Bret Hart in specifically because I needed more talent for
Thunder
and our expanded schedule. But bringing him in and paying him the amount 272

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

of money that I had to pay him created a whole new set of problems with a lot of the other wrestlers. They didn’t like the fact that a newcomer was making more than they were.

Adding more house shows only made morale worse. It contra-dicted one of the basic rules I’d followed in making WCW profitable. One of the draws for talent had been the fact that we put on substantially less shows per year than WWE. The better quality of life had been a big motivator, a reason for wrestlers to join us. Now we’d taken that away.

I tried to split up the wrestlers and rotate the schedule, but the load remained much heavier than it had been. Wrestlers weren’t the only ones who were stretched either. The production people, the office staff, and the people in our support positions also had to do more. Some complained and were generally uncomfortable, even though they soldiered on. It was more a slow burn than an explosion.

Besides
Thunder
and the additional house shows, we expanded
Nitro
to three hours. There was no additional expense doing that, because everybody was already there. Whether you do a one-hour show or a three-hour show, 95 percent of the costs are the same.

But the problem was, the expansion meant we had to fill the extra forty-four minutes with content. That helped overexpose the talent, watering down the impact of a lot of what we were doing.

Then, just as the pressure on WCW was building from within, WWE figured it all out.

Real Competition

Mike Tyson

I remember being in Los Angeles sometime in December 1997 and getting a phone call from someone who said, “You’ll never believe this, but Vince is negotiating with Mike Tyson to appear on
WrestleMania.
”

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At the time, I kind of went,
Eh, whatever.
I didn’t think they could get a deal done. Mike was pretty hot, and the price tag pretty high. It was apparent from everything we were hearing that WWE

had a hard time keeping the water coolers in the building, so finding the money to pay a guy like Mike Tyson seemed unlikely.

I also didn’t think they’d know what to do with him once they got him. Everything they’d done until that point stuck to the tried-and-true WWE formula: animated characters, stories designed for a very young audience. In the past, celebrities on WWE had more or less just showed up. They added their aura to the product but didn’t really get involved in the storyline in a meaningful way. Simply bringing in Mike Tyson without adjusting their formula wouldn’t make much of a difference.

Then at the very end of January 1998, when I was down in Kissimmee, Florida, I got a phone call that told me how they were going to use Tyson at the upcoming
WrestleMania.
Austin and McMahon were going to be involved, and the angle was much more realistic than anything they’d done before. In fact, it felt very much like what we were doing in
Nitro.
Only better.

I remember hanging up the phone and going,
Hmm, if that’s
what they’re going to do, that’s going to change things.
They had figured out our formula, and were willing to use it.

Stone Cold & Shooting the Bird

Looking back, the storyline itself was relatively simple but extremely effective. WWE developed a feud between Stone Cold Steve Austin and Vince McMahon. Vince wanted to bring Tyson in as a world-class athlete to shake things up. Austin took exception.

All the buzz around Tyson upped the excitement level exponentially. Even to this day, as I go back and look at it, they set the angle up beautifully. They wove in enough reality to get the audience to that important point where they would suspend disbelief. To this day, when I see it, it feels real.

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This wasn’t a storyline that appealed to a twelve-year-old kid.

This was aimed at young males in the workforce, people who’d be upset at being passed over for a promotion, people who’d resent their boss, who had something to prove. It appealed to fans who wished they could spit in their boss’s eye.

One of the keys to the angle’s success was Vince McMahon’s decision to put himself out there as the owner of the company, something he hadn’t been willing to do until now. And they couldn’t have picked a better guy than Mike Tyson to give their show an edge. Tyson had edge, he was dangerous—times ten.

The Pay-Per-View helped Steve Austin launch his bad-ass, rattlesnake character to the moon. Everybody wanted to see a wrestler stand up to Tyson and put him in his place, and there was nobody better to pull that off than Steve Austin.

Once I saw the tape, I knew we were in deep shit.

End of a Run

WrestleMania XIV
gave
Raw
an immediate bump in April 1998, helping end our run of eighty-something weeks in a row where we’d beaten them head-to-head in the television ratings. But despite what the media claimed, no one at Turner or Time Warner panicked.

Our numbers were still very solid. Our revenues were still very solid. We were still growing and meeting all of our projections. In the real corporate world—as opposed to the world of dirtsheet writers—as long as we met our projections and forecasts, no one complained about anything.