Controversy Creates Cash (43 page)

“Have you heard the rumors about Harvey?” he asked.

“No. I’ve been fishing. I don’t even have a TV in my room.”

“Schiller’s out. He’s going to the Yankees.” Harvey had lost his battle to become president of Turner Broadcasting, and had moved on, taking a position with George Stein-brenner. Steve Heyer was named Turner president. In retrospect, Harvey was probably hurt by the fact that he had been Ted’s guy, though I have no insight into what actually happened. I do know that Harvey was very much caught up in the political machinations of the restructuring of Turner after the AOL Time Warner acquisition. Harvey was probably the only executive in Turner who made more enemies than I did.

When I heard that Harvey was gone, I thought that my situation with WCW was pretty much over and done with. I didn’t think that Steve Heyer or anybody else at that executive level would be interested in bringing me back.

Jason Hervey and I were talking about different opportunities, but the WCW contract had me pretty well tied up. So I just kept taking things easy.

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Meanwhile, Back at the WCW

While I Was Gone

I had a great fall. I spent a lot of time in Wyoming. Then I took my plane and flew up to Montana for some more fishing. We had a great Thanksgiving, a great Christmas. I quit thinking about wrestling. I’d watch it, and sometimes get a phone call from Hulk Hogan or Diamond Dallas Page or another wrestler, but for the most part I put it out of my mind.

I watched
Nitro
a few times. It was just miserable to watch. My personal view was so tainted that they could have produced the best shows in the history of sports entertainment, and I would have thought they sucked.

Bill Busch was running the company. That was a joke. I can’t even begin to describe how ill equipped he was to be in the situation he was in. I sat back and laughed when people told me about what was going on. Busch looked a lot like the character Gomer Pyle. He commanded all the respect of a Cub Scout leader in a room full of gangbangers. I knew it was only a matter of time before he was eaten alive.

Then Bill brought in Vince Russo from WWE to book the shows and run the creative side of the company. I laughed even harder.

The only positive thing that I heard was that a reorganization brought WCW under Brad Siegel, who headed Turner’s entertainment division. Not only was Brad a competent executive, but it made a lot of sense to have WCW under the entertainment side of the business.

Brad was a rational guy. I respected him. He would try to make things work and give people the opportunity to succeed. But he was also smart enough, and under enough pressure, that if something wasn’t working, he’d try to fix it. I’d had a lot of success with Brad, RETURN TO HELL

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and we thought alike in a lot of ways. Knowing that, I told my wife in January that it was just a matter of time before WCW called me back.

Did I want the phone call?

I guess so. I had mixed emotions.

By that time, I’d been away from it long enough that my spirit was coming back. After a few months off, the part of my personality that would rather fight than have sex came back to the surface. I was looking at the gloves hanging in the corner and thinking,
Hmmm.
With Brad in place, I thought there was a reasonable chance that I’d have support. We could do some things that we hadn’t been able to do before.

But another part of me said,
No way—I don’t want to go back to
that mess.

A Train Car Full of Options

While I was away, AOL and Time Warner made public their plans to merge. The dance would continue for roughly twelve months, but the deal was essentially closed by January 2000. Quite honestly, when I heard that there was going to be a merger, I thought Time Warner was going to acquire AOL, not the other way around. It made no sense to me that Time Warner, this American icon of the business community, was going to be absorbed by a dot-com company. I didn’t get it.

The merger wasn’t on my radar screen at all—until one day in January when my wife and I took my daughter to a dance class. We went to a nearby Applebee’s to grab a quick bite to eat. While we were sitting down, I got a phone call from Bill Shaw.

“Congratulations, Eric. Have you heard the news?”

“No, Bill, I haven’t. What are you congratulating me for?”

“Remember when I told you one day I’ll make you a millionaire?”

“Sure.”

“Well, congratulations.”

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I had no idea what he was talking about until he explained: the stock options I’d gotten while working at WCW were about to make me rich.

Early on, Bill made sure that what he couldn’t pay me in salary was made up for in stock options. But I never thought about them, and didn’t even know how they worked. As far as I was concerned, it was paper money I couldn’t spend.

The price of Time Warner stock shot skyward because of news of the merger. My options entitled me to buy stock at a relatively low price. If I exercised the options, the difference between the option strike price and the market price would be my profit once I sold the stock.

When I got home, I pulled out my file and saw how many I had—

a train car’s worth.

I went,
Oh, my God. This is great! I get it now.

The options immediately vested because of the merger, which meant that I could exercise or use them whenever I wanted. The strike price of the majority of my options were in the $14 and $15

range; the stock was now trading for several times that.

Life was great.

I’d get up every morning and watch CNBC. I’d sit there for hours, watching the little ticker at the bottom of the screen. Every time I saw Time Warner, my heart would skip a beat, because it kept going up and up and up. I had a whole different view of the world.

Touching Base

I called Brad not too long after that, probably around mid-January.

It was a social call, though I wanted to get some insight into where his head was at as well.

Sure enough, I could tell from the tone in his voice that he was under tremendous pressure and things were not going well. We both danced around the issue of whether I would come back or not without mentioning it.

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A few weeks later, I was in Minnesota with my wife, having dinner at a restaurant. There was a TV in the corner turned to
Raw.
I was trying to carry on a conversation with my wife, watching out of the corner of my eye and trying not to let her know I’m watching
Raw.
Suddenly I saw Eddie Guerrero, Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, and Perry Saturn all come out. Those were my guys, on
their
show.

Now I knew how Vince McMahon felt.

I looked at my wife and said, “They’re going to call me.” She said, “I know.”

Forty-eight hours later, I got a call at home from Brad.

“What if you were going to come back? What would it take?”

“Let me give it some thought.”

As I was saying that, my wife walked by the room. She stopped, turned around, and looked at me.

I could see in her eyes that she didn’t want to hear what she was about to hear.

“You’re going back, aren’t you?” she said when I hung up the phone.

“I don’t know. I might. I’m going to give it some thought. But I’m not sure.”

“You’re going back.”

She didn’t want it to happen. But it did.

Same as the Old Boss

An Aggressive Deal

Things at WCW were deteriorating at such a fast pace that they really didn’t have much choice but to bring me back. The whole Vince Russo experiment was an unmitigated disaster. Vince was a one-trick pony and pretty much full of shit. He was sent home in mid-January because of all the problems he’d caused. And Bill Busch didn’t have a clue how to turn the company around.

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But politically, Brad couldn’t bring me back as the president of WCW. That would have been too controversial for him. He wanted me back, particularly as a guy who understood the wrestling business, the entertainment business, and someone who had a strong creative point of view. But he also knew that putting me in charge of the company would have burned up a lot of his political capital.

At the same time, I didn’t want to go back as the president of the company.

I played it pretty aggressively.

“Brad, you’re going to pay me one hundred cents on the dollar on my existing contract.” The company had been trying to buy people out by offering lump sums up front for less than the entire contract, and I wasn’t going for that. “This company is more screwed up than when I left. I will not be an employee of AOL Time Warner. I will be an independent contractor. I’ll provide you many of the same services, overseeing the creative direction of the company and all that. . . . In addition to paying me off on the old contract, you’ll write me a new one.”

I think it was a two-year deal, for a pretty substantial amount of money.

“And in addition to all that, you’re going to guarantee three movie contracts.”

That’s called a “put deal” in the entertainment industry. I was asking for a guarantee that I would have three slots for television movies on TBS. Producers covet those commitments. What I wanted to do was take these commitments and walk into a meeting and say, “I have a put commitment at TBS. Come to me with your ideas.” As a producer, it puts me in the driver’s seat. It was a great piece of leverage to have.

I kind of threw that out there, being very aggressive.

They took it all. I basically got everything I wanted. My contract called for me to manage and oversee the creative process. I had nothing to do with contracts, finance, or anything else. I was, in effect, the executive producer again.

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Vince Russo

After we’d agreed on terms but before I officially came back to WCW, Brad asked me to go meet Vince Russo.

“Tell me if you think you can work with him,” Brad said. “If you think you can, I’d like to try and make that work. The two of you might be able to make some magic.”

I called Vince. He probably knew when they sent him home that they’d end up calling me back. He wasn’t surprised at all.

We met at a restaurant far enough outside of Atlanta where I didn’t think either one of us would be recognized. I didn’t want anyone putting two and two together.

I liked him. Vince can be a fairly charming guy. He can come off kind of humble when you first meet him. It’s anything but the truth, but he comes off as a pretty sincere guy. Prior to our lunch, Vince had said a lot of stupid shit to the dirtsheets about me, trying to put himself over. While I should have been pissed off enough to reach across the table and pull his tongue out of his skull, instead I took it in context.

I called Brad back that afternoon and told him that I had no problem working with Vince. I don’t have to like someone to be able to work with him. I just have to be able to trust him, and I thought I could trust Russo.

By the way, we were never coequals, as Vince later claimed. The dirtsheets never seemed able to get that right. Vince reported to me, which was another reason I didn’t think there’d be a problem.

Bill Busch resigned right before I came back, probably because he knew I’d chew off my leg before I worked with him again. Not only was he was a miserable failure as head of WCW, but he knew that I knew what he had done to me.

An Unhappy Millionaire

Once I signed the deal and was no longer an employee, I got a letter in the mail telling me that I had thirty days to exercise my stock op-338

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

tions. I went,
Wait a minute!
My stock was going through the roof—

every day it went up. I thought in a year it could be at $150, which would mean a much bigger profit if I waited to sell.

I called my attorney. “How can we fight this? You’ve got to find a way.”

“Eric, there is no way. Just sell your stock and be happy.” I was the most miserable millionaire on the planet.

Fast-forward twelve months: the stock was worth less than half of what it had been when I sold, and heading south. Even to this day, it’s worth less than twenty bucks. A lot of guys who held on to their options watched millions of dollars evaporate into thin air. In retrospect, that I was forced to cash in my stock options was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

He’s Back

As bad as things were at WCW when I left in September 1999, now it was worse in ways that are hard to describe.

One of the raps on me was that I focused on the big names, the Hulk Hogans and Ric Flairs and Roddy Pipers and Bill Goldbergs and Stings. In my mind, a handful of big names drive the majority of the business. That’s been proven countless times.

The dirtsheet community always criticized me for that. They claimed I didn’t let the “young guys” get their opportunities, or said that I held them down. That sort of criticism has always been around, and always will be around, in the entertainment business.

The difference is, I admitted it.

Vince Russo, more than anybody, loved to see his name in the dirtsheets. He would do an interview with anybody, anytime, anywhere. He maintained a dialogue with the Internet and dirtsheet community that was almost obsessive-compulsive. To get them to talk about what a great guy he was, he decided to bring a bunch of no-names, journeymen, and rookies to WCW. He wanted to prop them up them in high-profile roles. But the guys he thought should RETURN TO HELL

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be stars didn’t project much charisma. They didn’t dress like stars.

They didn’t look like stars. It was like he went to a biker bar in New York, found some big guys who looked tough, and said, “Hey, follow me; I’m going to make you a star.”

The storylines that went along with them had the same feel.

They were unsophisticated and dark. There was no apparent arc or purpose.

Vince’s particular take on interesting characters, interesting storylines, and interesting
anything
was generally very dark. His storylines had a dark, angry—I don’t want to say trailer park feel, but they were dark. It was more the tone than anything else.