Controversy Creates Cash (42 page)

The deal made sense on every level. But logic and common sense no longer had much to do with what was happening to WCW.

The Millennium Bomb

Believe it or not, there were a lot of people at WCW concerned that the world as we knew it would literally come to an end.

I have to admit, it wasn’t just the idiots at WCW who thought this.

The federal government spent a lot of money on different contingen-cies, and probably every large corporation in America had some sort of emergency plan just in case. But the people at WCW used it as an excuse to go around me and try and kill the idea. They told Harvey Schiller and the other division heads that they
really
didn’t want to do it. Partly because they were scared, I guess, and—mostly in my opinion—because they were lazy and didn’t want to work over the holidays.

Once again, I got vetoed.

The Pay-Per-View would have delivered three to five million dollars to the bottom line at a time when WCW really needed the revenue. We’d come up with a solution, everything was in place, and I was told no.

I told the committees that killed the Pay-Per-View that they’d just guaranteed that WCW was going to lose money. “When you come back to me and ask me why it happened, why WCW is in the red, I’ll remind you about this Pay-Per-View. If anybody else has a solution, grab a bat and step up to the plate. If not, I’d prefer it if you just stayed the hell out of my way.” Gliding Like a Brick

My finance guy, Bill Busch, told me I had to go over and see Vicki Miller, who headed Turner’s financial division. “Work with her,” he said, implying that she could help me find a solution.

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I flat-out refused. To me, Vicki Miller represented the people who never wanted WCW on the books to begin with. That may not have been reality, but it was certainly my perception. The people at Vicki’s level didn’t even try to understand wrestling. To me, it was a waste of time even having a conversation.

Bill ended up getting me on the phone with her. I ended up explaining to Vicki why I wanted to do the Pay-Per-View, and why it was a solution to our revenue problems. Her answer was, “Well, we need to find another way.”

Well, great. I needed to figure out how to grow wings and fly myself to work every day. But that wasn’t going to happen either.

They cut the promotional budget, cut the guts out of my staff, cut the guts out of everything we were doing, and on and on and on. And then said, And oh, by the way, make more money.

“Vicki, this is a unique business. It’s not like other business units where growth or losses happen very slowly and you can figure out a way to remanage the business over a six- or twelve-month period and reverse a downward trend. I’m telling you right now. This business has the glide path of a brick. Once these numbers start going down, you’re not going to have a chance to correct it.” She didn’t have an answer for me.

That was it for me. In my mind, that was the last straw.

Phantom “Losses”

A lot has been written about the losses that WCW was projecting at this point. None of these “facts” were supplied by anyone with firsthand knowledge of the real situation. Here are some facts: even though Time Warner was a public company, WCW’s finances were not made public. That’s because WCW’s revenues and expenses fell into a category referred to as “other income/losses” on the Turner and Time Warner balance sheets.

There were other divisions of Turner and Time Warner that were reported this way. This gave the accountants the ability to shift 324

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

some of the figures from the others around. GAAP—the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, a kind of rules of the road for accountants—allowed our accounting division to forecast losses in such a way that they could be estimated (or in some cases overesti-mated) and included in a forecast that might benefit the division or department in any number of different ways.

This was an internal issue and not necessarily an issue regarding public information. Intercompany allocations and forecasts were used and abused to help various divisions or departments position themselves internally for future budget considerations.

The bottom line here is that in August of 1999, WCW was facing the first quarter in eighteen or twenty where we were projecting a loss. This loss was in the neighborhood of $1.5 million. The numbers that were “reported” by the media later were many times higher.

When I saw those numbers months later, it appeared to me that management had decided to dump as much of a projected loss on the books as possible for fiscal 1999. This way, management could look as good as possible in fiscal 2000. I’d seen it before, and it didn’t surprise me.

People Weren’t Watching

In retrospect, people have claimed that our guaranteed contracts and my alleged (but nonexistent) romance with Hollywood doomed WCW. Or that I was “ATM Eric” and spent too much money on talent, sealing our fate.

The truth is, people weren’t watching our shows. Period. If we could have cut the contracts in half—and miraculously kept the talent—WCW would still have been doomed.

We had lost the audience. Period. If no one is watching your shows, they are not buying your Pay-Per-Views, they are not buying your merchandise, they are not buying tickets to your live events. It wouldn’t have mattered if the talent worked for free.

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We were dead. We’d lost our audience to WWE and weren’t allowed to do anything that had an edge to get them back. Because we had to be “family friendly,” we were stuck with a game plan that had nearly driven WWE into bankruptcy a few years before.

If you lose your audience, you lose your revenue.

I want to be objective, but that’s the bottom line.

Done

I said to myself, There’s no one above me who wants this company to succeed. The limitations they’re putting on us make it impossible for us to pull the nose up. They’re rejecting every opportunity to turn it around.

I thought back to the meeting a year before, where I’d been told to stop using the Leno jokes. I told myself I should have quit back then. I should have drawn the line in the sand when I had more leverage. Now I had no leverage. I had zero support. I was surrounded by people who were job scared and obsessed with their stock-option packages.

Thursday night, September 9, 1999, I called Harvey from home and told him I was miserable. I’d had it. I wanted out. I was going to do what I should have done a year before.

Harvey talked me out of it. He said I was just under a lot of stress. He was trying to be a friend and a leader, though in my mind I didn’t want to hear it. In the end, I agreed with him, reluctantly.

I was driving to work the next morning, and Harvey called me on my cell phone.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Meet me in my office.”

“What’s up?”

“Just meet me in my office.”

I knew right then what was up—I was gone. But the reality of it and Harvey’s sudden turn-around still surprised me.

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Et tu, Bill?

Here’s what I think happened:

Before calling Harvey at home, I had talked with Bill Busch in my office. I confided in him, telling him how frustrated I was. I told him I was pretty sure I was going to throw in the towel.

Bill gave me the impression that he was trying to talk me out of it. He feigned support. In doing so, what I think he was really doing was get me to open up and give him information that he could take back to others above me, including Vicki Miller.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but Bill actually wanted my job. He was a slippery little snake, and he blindsided me. He was an accountant, good at adding and subtracting. He wasn’t a strategic guy, didn’t have a creative strand of DNA in his body, and didn’t really understand wrestling, but he was good at navigating the finance side of the business. As a result he’d become a confidant of mine. I had no idea that he and a handful of others saw my unraveling as an opportunity to do what was best for them.

I don’t know for sure what Bill did that night. But
someone
called the top people on the financial side of Turner.
Someone
shared information on where my head was at and what I planned on telling Harvey. There was a high-level conference call, either late that night or early the next morning, which was why Harvey had to call me and ask me to come and see him.

It’s only my impression, but I think Harvey was told what to do by Vicki Miller.

Harvey told me that I had to go home. Not that I was fired. Just that I had to go home. He was really uncomfortable, and I could tell he didn’t want to do what he was doing.

“How can I go home, Harvey? I have a Pay-Per-View this Sunday.”

“Not this Sunday, you don’t.”

Harvey was very careful in what he said. He didn’t say I was
not
coming back, just that I had to go home. He didn’t fire me. I had two and a half years left on my contract.

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As much as I was disappointed with Harvey for not standing up for WCW earlier, I still trusted him, and do to this day. He’s an honest person—sometimes painfully so. There may be a lot of political DNA in Harvey, but I don’t think there’s a dishonest bone in his body. When he said, “Look, Eric, just go home,” I took it at face value.

I got in my car. I drove home. It was like ten-thirty or eleven o’clock on a Friday morning by the time I got home. I sat down with my wife and told her what had happened.

She was more relieved than anything.

I was eerily relieved as well.

We talked for maybe an hour or two. I decided to fly to Wyoming and go trout fishing.

By three o’clock that afternoon I had filed my flight plan, had clearance from air traffic control, and was rolling down the runway, headed west.

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Loree, Garett, and Montanna.

10

Return to Hell

Time Off for Bad Behavior

A Sign from God

Somewhere about ten miles outside of the east entrance of Yel-lowstone, on the Shoshone River, I found a little hole in the river where a monkey with a fly rod could have caught fish. I literally thought it was a sign from God that I should give up wrestling and have my own fishing show on Saturday morning on ESPN.

Not only was the fishing incredible, but the fall weather in the Rockies was great, and the scenery was amazing. I wanted my wife to share it all with me. I called her and said, “Loree, fly your mom from Phoenix to Atlanta to watch the kids, then hop on a plane and come out and go fishing with me.”

She did, and we had a ball. And it was the best fishing I’ve ever had in my life.

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A Break

I was relieved that I was out of WCW. I was disappointed that I hadn’t done it a year before. But there was also a level of disorientation. For the first time since 1993, I wasn’t working fifteen or sixteen hours a day. After having this company occupy my mind even when I wasn’t working—or even awake, for that matter, because I used to dream about it—it was all suddenly gone. It was like a chemical imbalance in my brain. I kept wanting to pick up the phone and tackle the next issue.

I wanted to keep working, but there was nothing to work on. I was under contract to WCW, and Time Warner wouldn’t let me out of my contract. I think in Harvey’s mind, the situation was tempo-rary. I think he felt I was just pushing too hard and needed a clear perspective.

I also think Harvey believed he was going to get the job of president of Turner Broadcasting. He understood that WCW was being hogtied, blindfolded, and put in the closet. He knew what was going on. He couldn’t change it, because he would have burned up too much political capital. But I think, looking back, that Harvey believed that when he won the battle to become president of Turner Broadcasting, he’d call me back, and then he’d be able to give us all the support we needed.

Let Me Out of My Deal

My first reaction to being sent home was, “Fuck you; let me out of my deal.”

They wouldn’t.

I asked them to let me out of the contract mostly because I was angry and pissed off. I didn’t have any plans or other offers.

Asking to be released was also a test to see where their heads were at. If they had entertained the idea of letting me out of the RETURN TO HELL

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contract, I would have known that they had absolutely no intention of bringing me back. It also would have been clear to me that they were going to pull the plug on WCW.

I was so sick of the company and pissed off that I didn’t want to go back, ever. I hated the politics, I hated the environment. On the other hand, the fact that they wouldn’t let me out of my contract meant that I had no immediate financial concerns. So I spent the time enjoying my wife and my children—and the fishing.

Now Batting for the Yankees . . .

I was in Montana at a fishing lodge when a friend of mine, Jamie Waldron, called. Jamie was an agent at CAA at the time, and he was plugged into what was going on at Time Warner.