Controversy Creates Cash (38 page)

My show, he said, was going to be targeted toward children and families.

That’s when lights went off in my head and I started to see colors.

Flipping Off the Crowd

We were still on solid ground ratings-wise. Financially, we were doing very well, meeting all of our revenue projections.

At the same time, though, our personnel were stretched beyond capacity. WWE had gotten very aggressive, closing the ratings gap.

Steve Austin was flipping off crowds and chugging a cold one in the ring at the end of his matches. They were doing all this sexual stuff to get the male audience—
our
audience—to switch over.

And now I have this thirty-something woman asking for nonexistent scripts and telling me I can’t use jokes that have already aired TOO MUCH

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on network television. And I have a guy—with a straight face—who wants me to target kids and offer family wrestling.

It was the most absurd thing I’d ever heard of.

I started sweating, literally. I saw the control of my show slipping through my hands.

When my friend in advertising got done telling me how and why WCW was going to be positioned as a kids’ show, I said, “Excuse me, Advertising Friend. What’s the name of my show?”

“Uh,
Nitro.
”

“What night of the week does it air?”

There was this uncomfortable, awkward moment of resounding silence.

My feeling was that not only did no one in the room have the faintest clue what we were doing, they didn’t even watch the show.

Their silence proved my point.

But it probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do from a political point of view.

A Line in the Sand

There was no way
Nitro
was going to be turned into a family-friendly hour after everything we had done. It was the most asinine, absurd direction that anyone could have suggested.

I knew I either had to fight or just walk away.

I almost walked away. I should have. I went home after Sturgis and told my wife I had made up my mind that I wasn’t going back.

Ultimately, I changed my mind. To this day, that is probably my single biggest regret.

At that moment, WCW was still such a cash cow that I might have been able to fight the fight. By walking away, I would have drawn a line in the sand that
might
have caused them to back down.

But that’s not my nature. My nature is to fight—I’d generally rather fight than have sex, on any given day. Good fights are harder to come by.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

I also felt that I had a contract, and an obligation to fulfill it.

There was nothing in the agreement that gave me the opportunity to quit because I didn’t like the working conditions.

I felt that by quitting, I would be letting down Ted Turner—and, whether it was true or not, Bill Shaw. They were both men I greatly respected. It would have been an unprofessional thing to do.

Last but not least, I’d built my life around the wrestling business.

Quitting the WCW meant leaving wrestling for good. I certainly didn’t expect I’d be welcomed in WWE with open arms. I wasn’t ready to walk away from pro wrestling.

Team Player

So I stuck around.

I went around being as openly antagonistic and difficult to work with as anyone could possibly be. I called bullshit when I saw bullshit. I pulled no punches and didn’t even try to pretend I was toeing the company line. I honestly thought that at some point I’d end up in front of Ted. At that point, I thought, everything would be re-solved in WCW’s favor.

The more I resisted, the more difficult I made it for myself. They became more and more aggressive. They knew something I didn’t know—Ted wasn’t going to step in.

Time Warner was being restructured. The people in positions in Turner Broadcasting who had never wanted WCW to be successful in the first place were now calling the shots, and making decisions for all of the divisions in the company. I was probably one of the first on their hit list.

Only later did I realize that the meetings that had led up to my ambush at Techwood had probably been going on for four to six months. The decision to confront me may have been sped along because of the Monica Lewinsky jokes, but it had obviously been coming for a while.

The image I’d had of a rebel—which, quite frankly, I played up TOO MUCH

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and exploited from time to time—had worked well in the Turner entrepreneurial environment. In the new corporate structure it was a handicap. They wanted corporate committee clones, not mavericks.

Things went like this for several months. I didn’t realize, really, that I wasn’t going to get to go in front of Ted for several months. I couldn’t get past Harvey Schiller, and Harvey couldn’t get past the committee of Turner executives above him.

Without a Parachute

Up until the summer of 1998, Harvey had always fought for WCW.

But now he was no longer willing to fight. He was more interested in his own political agenda than any problems that I had. Harvey wanted to be president of Turner Broadcasting, and he was willing to throw WCW under the bus—at least temporarily—to achieve that.

Without having Ted to fall back on, and with no support from Harvey, I was flying without a plane, let alone a parachute. It was brutal. Week to week, we fought. I’d get into yelling and screaming matches with standards and practices over the phone. They would demand things that just weren’t practical or even possible.

Have you ever heard of George Carlin’s list of things you can never say on television? Imagine that list times a hundred. That was the list standards and practices gave us of things not to do.

But that wasn’t the half of it.

“Some of the things you’re not allowed to do aren’t on this list,” Terri Tingle told me. “So if you want to do anything we might be of-fended by, you have to call us up.”

I know it sounds pretty funny, but I’m not exaggerating. That’s how insane it was.

Over on
Raw,
you have Mae Young giving birth to a hand.

You’ve got Sable taking her tits out of her top. And I’m being told,

“Here’s a list of a thousand and one things you can’t do. And oh by the way, if it’s not on this list, call me before you do it. Now go out and get ’em.”

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

Budget Cuts

The wrestling police were bad enough. We also had to deal with bean counters gone wild. Finance took a look at our EBITDA—

damaged by
Thunder
—and decided it wasn’t good.

“You have to cut your production budget. We’ve got to reach twenty percent growth in all of our divisions, and the only way you’re going to do that is by cutting all of your costs. So slice, slice, slice.”

The cuts hit our promotion budget hard, undercutting our ability to drive interest in the brand. Marketing and promotional expenses seem easy to cut, because they’re not fixed costs, like rent for example. But in our business, marketing and advertising get us to the dance. If you don’t market your product, it dies very quickly.

We went from 160 miles an hour, flying down the center of the track, to being told we couldn’t use tires anymore.

“And damn it, get out there and win that race!” That’s how ludicrous it was.

Remember, in three and a half years, WCW had gone from a company losing 10 million a year to one that netted 40 million in profit in 1998. But we were supposed to cut back.

Toeing the Line

I could either toe the line and do as I was told, or I could sabotage my superiors. While I fought the powers-that-were privately, publicly I had to do my job. I had to carry the message back to WCW

and put it into effect.

I couldn’t tell the talent everything that was going on. I couldn’t say, “Look, guys, gather round. I know what we’ve been doing the last couple of years and what we’ve done. I created the formula, and you guys made it better. But here’s what we’re going to do: think
Sesame Street.
”

TOO MUCH

295

I tried to be as positive as I could. A lot of the wrestlers, the creative people, and even some department heads protested. They were concerned that the momentum that we had created with our programming was going to be lost. They saw that we were now going in the opposite direction—and they knew it was wrong. The proof was in the numbers—Nielsen ratings, buy rates, asses in seats. They all pointed out that what we were going to do wasn’t going to work.

My job now was to stand on a soapbox and espouse the company line. I had to look everyone in the eye and tell them this was the right strategy.

I was a hypocrite.

I knew what I was telling them was wrong. It was bullshit.

My choice was either to quit, or toe the company line. And I chose, unfortunately, to stay.

My morale went into the toilet. The talent began to unravel.

WCW started to fall apart.

Entrepreneurs Not Needed

Ultimately, AOL Time Warner became the largest unmitigated disaster in corporate history. WCW wasn’t the only victim, but it was one of the first. The serial mergers that created the company—Time merging with Warner, then Turner, then AOL—plowed under a lot of lives.

The corporation failed because it became exactly the opposite of the company that Ted Turner built. Turner Broadcasting was built on vision—and risk. Ted was willing to risk failure to achieve phenomenal levels of success.

Gerald Levin claimed he wanted to merge with Turner to incul-cate Time Warner with the Turner entrepreneurial culture. Guess what? It worked the other way around. All of the entrepreneurs Ted had attracted became paralyzed either by fear or their own greed and concern for stock options.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

That’s all anyone cared about, their stock options. Whatever they could do, whatever they could say—whatever they could
not
do or say—to protect those almighty stock options, they did. Or didn’t do.

The atmosphere became one of paralysis. Decisions weren’t made, boats weren’t rocked. Standard operating procedure was to form a committee to name a committee that would appoint a group to study a problem, then report back to an advisory committee to make a presentation to the original committee. It was like working for the federal government.

9

Unraveling

Shit Storms

Unraveling

As time went on, it became clear to anyone who worked with me that emotionally I’d thrown in the towel. I told people that if things didn’t change, I was getting out.

That was the cue for several individuals to make political hay.

Some of the political animals around me realized that I had gone from a guy with the Midas touch to someone who had no control over his own company. They began angling for power—or simply survival. They weren’t interested in saving the company; they were interested in trying to save their asses.

The dirtsheets began filling up with backstage gossip and rumors of what was going on behind the scenes. Wrestlers and staff leaked a lot of information, sometimes to benefit themselves directly, sometimes just to stir the shit. In their twisted minds, they thought the dissension would benefit them.

The dirtsheets pointed out all the things that were going wrong 298

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

with WCW. Some of what they wrote was true, though they didn’t understand the reasons why. They took the position they’d always taken: Eric Bischoff was not the guy to run the company.

So much of what they wrote was, at the very best bullshit and speculation. Some of it was intentionally misleading and inappropriate information fed to them by people hoping to fulfill their own agendas.

Among many other things, someone gave the media information on what we were willing to pay talent whose contracts were being negotiated. This was all confidential information prepared by an attorney. If we’d had the time and the focus, we not only would have fired the people responsible, but prosecuted them as well.

Was I angry?

Yeah.

But the leaks were just one more thing. The real issue was the shift in the way the company was operating, and my lack of ability to do anything about it. WWE began beating us in the ratings week after week, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I don’t want to come off like I had all the answers. I didn’t. By this time, I had
no
answers. I didn’t have a rabbit in my hat. I didn’t even have a hat. There were so many things going on around me and that company—and the other companies and divisions in Turner and Time Warner as well—that there wasn’t one thing that could stop the spiral.

Scott Hall, Human Train Wreck

It was at this same time that Scott Hall’s personal problems became acute. Anybody who could read knew about it. His name appeared in police blotters almost as often as wrestling reports. His alcohol abuse problems were hard to miss.

Scott had been in treatment once or twice. When he got out, he was good for a few weeks, then spiraled back again. By the fall of 1998 he was basically unmanageable. His wife, if she hadn’t filed for divorce, was about to.

UNRAVELING

299

Roughly about this time, Brad Siegel came to me and asked me if would hire his niece, Emily. She had done some work in television and was hoping to have a career in the field. I said, sure.

Big mistake. You bring an attractive young woman who’s the niece of a president of a division of Turner Broadcasting into that shark tank, and trouble is sure to follow.

Scott immediately latched on to her. He thought that by getting close to her, he’d somehow be able to protect himself from me.

That just added to the chaos and mess. They both ended up creating all kinds of internal problems.

Halloween Havoc

Talk about your shit storms.

Our 1998
Halloween Havoc
Pay-Per-View ran about fifteen minutes over the time allotted. A large portion of the paying audience went dark and missed the end of the match. As bad as that was, the fallout from trying to fix it was even worse.

Matches go longer than they should for any number of reasons.