Controversy Creates Cash (41 page)

I haven’t talked to him in years, but I think if I saw Bret on the street today, we’d probably hug, go grab a beer and a steak, and talk about what could have been.

Goldberg’s Contract Dispute

By this time, Barry Bloom represented a lot of the talent we had contractual trouble with, including Ric Flair. So maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that we had problems with Bill Goldberg during the spring of 1999—even though he was signed for a long-term contract.

Barry had been a pretty good friend of mine at one time. I’d even encouraged wrestlers to use him as an agent. My thinking was UNRAVELING

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that they were going to have a lawyer or manager anyway, and I’d much rather them have someone who understood the wrestling business. But by now I’d lost a lot of respect for Barry. The issues with Flair, the attempt to renegotiate Sean Waltman’s deal after we had already reached an agreement months before, and a host of other similar issues made it clear that Barry was just another para-site trying to suck as much blood from WCW as he could. It was no surprise that Bill wanted to renegotiate his contract even though he had plenty of time left on the deal. It was standard operating procedure for Barry Bloom’s clients. I think after Barry had accumulated a number, of wrestlers, he got greedy.

Barry came to me in the late spring or maybe early summer of 1999 and said Bill Goldberg wanted to renegotiate his contract. I said, Well, sure, come to me a year and a half from now, and we’ll discuss it. He has a lot of time left on his contract.

I was willing to bonus Bill because he’d taken off as a character.

But their response was no, they wanted a new deal. It pissed me off, and put me on the defensive. Once I’m on the defensive, I tend to look for an offensive solution. And all that did was escalate the situation. It went back and forth between us and got stupid.

Then Henry Holmes got involved. Henry was Hogan’s attorney and had a reputation for being very aggressive. I’d had a lot of experience with Henry. We’d had ups and downs, but overall had a pretty positive relationship. Barry, knowing that Henry had a lot of success as an attorney representing Hogan, talked Bill Goldberg into hiring Henry for the contract negotiations.

That escalated things to a whole new level. Henry and I ended up arguing over the situation to the point where I wouldn’t take his phone calls and he wouldn’t take mine.

Dealing with Napoleon

Finally I agreed to meet Henry in Beverly Hills. At the time, WCW

was represented by CAA, at the time one of the largest agencies in 316

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Hollywood. I didn’t want to go to Henry’s turf, and he didn’t want to go to mine, so we met at CAA.

I booked the largest conference room there. Michael Ovitz had built the place to intimidate anyone the moment they walked in the door, and I was using everything I could to try and get the upper hand. Henry walked into the conference room and found himself at the far end of a table maybe thirty-five feet long, surrounded by agents, assistants, business affairs people, and probably a few mail-room clerks. None of them had any idea why they were in the room, except to sit there and look really fucking important. I was flanked by maybe thirty men and women in dark blue suits with red power ties and highly polished wingtips.

Henry is a very entertaining, charismatic guy. But negotiating ses-sions with him tend to follow a very similar pattern. Before he came in, I told the CAA people that Henry would start with some small talk. “In the middle of that, Henry will tell you all about the fact that he’s the guy who did the George Foreman grill deal. No matter what we are making small talk about, trust me: He will go on and on about the George Foreman grill.”

Henry had every reason to be proud of that deal, by the way—

Foreman sold fifty-three million grills! But at every meeting I’d ever been in, he rolled out that story. It got to the point I could tell it as well as he could.

So Henry came in, doing his Hollywood attorney thing. “Hey, Eric, good to see you.” We were all friends and family. He sits down.

“Yeah, Eric, I’ve been really working on this George Foreman grill thing.”

Everybody around me started chuckling. The meeting went downhill at a rapid pace from there.

From my point of view, the session would have been a waste anyway, because Henry had decided not to bring Bill Goldberg along, even though talking to Goldberg face-to-face was the reason I came to L.A.

“Where’s Bill?” I asked.

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“Well, I wanted to sit down and go through this with you first.”

“That wasn’t our understanding.”

Henry folded up his attaché case and got up. All the CAA guys got up and went back to work.

That was pretty much how things went for weeks.

Feeding Frankenstein

Unfortunately, we had created the monster. We were fairly dependent on Bill Goldberg at that point. He was really driving our programming. Ultimately, we had no choice but to sit across the table from him and give him pretty much everything he wanted.

We could have done what I had done to Ric Flair, locked him up on the sidelines for the rest of his contract period. He wouldn’t have been able to go to WWE. We could have paid him under protest, making sure we didn’t breach our agreement, then at some point sue him for breech of contract. I suggested as much to Harvey, but by then no one had the appetite for that strategy. By 1999, WCW was in no position to take that hard of a line. Bill and Barry knew it, and he exploited it. He ended up getting well into seven figures for a three-year deal.

Despite all the back-and-forth, Henry Holmes and I remained friends. In fact, Henry represented me in my first contract with WWE. Warriors respect warriors.

Rap Music

Music was one of the few things that I could get past the standards and practices radar without too much of a fight. So when Kevin Nash and Konan came up with the idea of incorporating a rap music angle into
Nitro,
I jumped at the idea. I thought it would give us an opportunity to become relevant again to that younger, cooler demo.

At the time, Master P was the number-one rap star in the country.

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The urban music style in general was popular in every walk of life.

Someone—I’m not sure whether it was Kevin or Scott or someone else—knew Master P and had a discussion with him about doing something with wrestling. We then arranged for him to appear on several
Nitros
and at the Sturgis Pay-Per-View that August.

Whether it was a good idea with the wrong person, or a wrong idea with the right person, it wasn’t effective. We didn’t execute it well at all.

I think now it needed to have been a long-term, more fully integrated relationship. For rap to have worked as a co-branding opportunity, Master P—or maybe someone more suited to wrestling—would have to have been involved in more aspects of the show instead of just a single wrestling angle. We treated the whole hip-hop and urban phenomenon as a short-term storyline, rather than embracing it and weaving it into the show. We treated Master P like we treated Dennis Rodman, and it never took hold.

Not that it wasn’t fun. We had a rap-versus-country feud. Master P’s people, the No Limit Soldiers, took on Curt Hennig and the West Texas Rednecks. I believe it was Curt’s idea—though as I’ve said, it’s sometimes hard to say who came up with specific storylines, and even more difficult to remember. Curt and the boys cut a song that got some decent airplay in the South. But we didn’t use the rap thing very well, and it just didn’t take hold.

And not to bust Curt’s cover or anything, but he’s the only Texas redneck I know who was born in Minnesota.

Savage Sabbatical

Randy Savage and Hulk Hogan had always had a bizarre relationship. Hogan originally brought Randy to my attention and really sold him. But I noticed early on that there was an undercurrent of hostility between them. They managed it, keeping it out of view and working together. But as time went on, it gradually became more intense.

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Randy could be intensely jealous and insecure. He was one of the most paranoid people I have ever met in my life. To this day, I haven’t met anyone as intensely paranoid.

And I
liked
Randy. We got along personally. I had no business problems with him either. He was very much a straight shooter. He never played games, and you never had to play games with him.

You knew exactly where he was coming from at all times. I really respected that.

But he was always worried about someone being out to get him.

He thought someone was always trying to embarrass him. Someone was always setting him up for failure. It was a constant, constant challenge to manage those issues. They weren’t real—except in Randy’s mind.

Whatever the situation was between Hogan and Randy—there were rumors about personal issues related to Randy’s divorce—their issues finally boiled to the surface in the summer of 1999. The two argued pretty fiercely at Sturgis. And when Randy started doing his paranoid thing, I sent him away for a few weeks. I was sick of dealing with the situation. Not Randy, but the situation. Everything was starting to get to me.

The Kiss of Death

Heading for Red Ink

Turner and Time Warner were massaging their books to satisfy Wall Street, and doing that meant hitting projections that called for double-digit growth. Each division had to do its part.

WCW’s revenues had grown phenomenally since 1994. But by the summer of 1999, the mandates of “kid friendly” programming, budget cuts, and the brick wall I kept running into each time we were presented an opportunity to turn things around had taken their toll. People quit watching our product and were sold on the

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WWE “attitude.” While our revenues were still very high, they started to slide. By August, I believe, we were projected to lose money. It wasn’t a lot by corporate standards—a million or a million and a half. It was a big number, but not enough to keep me up at night. Because there were a lot of ways to make it up.

And I came up with one: Kiss.

Kiss

I’d met Gene Simmons of the rock band Kiss earlier in the year. We threw around different ways for us to work together. A lot of our ideas involved different licensing deals. Though the band had its heyday in the 1970s and ’80s, it still had a large following. To this day, Kiss has a fan base that will buy just about anything that has the Kiss name on it. It’s a little like the
Star Trek
thing.

Gene Simmons is a licensing and marketing machine. I have never met anyone who understands promotion to the extent that Gene Simmons does. We said if we’re going to work together, we UNRAVELING

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need a line of merchandise and collectables. If we could do that, the licensing end alone would be a good return on our investment. As part of our deal to work together, I brought Kiss onto
Nitro.
I overpaid for their appearance, but in the big picture to launch the Kiss/WCW merchandise, it made good sense.

And by the way—it’s been reported that I paid Kiss $500,000.

The number was actually $250,000. As always, the numbers that were and still are thrown around, whether in dirtsheets or online or even in other books, are all bullshit. WCW and Turner never released financials on WCW, and no figures are available in the public records. What people have seen are guesses based on bad “inside” information and hearsay at best.

As the Kiss relationship evolved, some people Harvey Schiller knew approached me about doing a WCW event on New Year’s Day at the Fiesta Bowl. That gave me an idea.

This was in 1999, and everybody was talking about the “millen-nium bomb”— the supposed disaster that would strike when the clock struck midnight and the calendar rolled over to the year 2000. If you remember, there was a lot of craziness and paranoia about the computers and other electronic systems being unable to accommodate the new digits. I thought
Wow, what a great way to
take advantage of this—a Pay-Per-View that would air from nine to
twelve on the West Coast.
People could watch what happened as the clock struck midnight all across the different time zones.

The Pay-Per-View would combine a Kiss concert with a WCW

wrestling event. We’d call it
New Year’s Evil.
It would be incremen-tal revenue hitting our books, and more than make up for any short-fall we were projecting at that time.

Two or three years earlier, I wouldn’t even have had to send a memo informing anyone of my decision. What a difference a merger makes.

We worked through the majority of the logistics. I told Gene we’d cover his expenses and give him a percentage of the net profits, which meant there was no real cost to us to having Kiss. The Fiesta Bowl 322

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guys loved the idea. They knew we’d draw a big gate because there were a lot of people in the area for the Fiesta Bowl anyway.