Controversy Creates Cash (48 page)

“Hey, Eric, when we get in that ring, I’m a little stiff anyway,” he told me. “But don’t worry, I’m not going to take advantage of you.”

“Stiff” in wrestling terms means that what’s supposed to be fake is sometimes real by accident. A punch might connect a little harder if a stiff guy throws it.

“Steve, don’t worry about it. As long as I can walk out to the car when it’s over, we’re in good shape.”

The match turned out exactly the way it needed to turn out. He pretty much beat me up.

Much better to get potatoed, and walk out with a broken nose or black eye, than to have someone so careful with you that the match ends up looking phony. I’d rather have my ass kicked than come out without a scratch and have the audience shit on the match.

Steve got a great reaction. I had a tremendous amount of heat

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and he was a big babyface, and the match worked perfectly.

We became pretty good friends after that. Although we don’t socialize and hang out now, I’ve spent a fair amount of time reliving some memories with him after the shows.

Out with the Trash

In early December 2005 I got a call from Stephanie McMahon.

“Look, Eric, we want to do an angle with you. You’re going to overreact to this thing and think it’s really bad, but it’s not. We really like working with you. You’re a great performer. We have every intention of keeping you on. This is not the end of your contract, and we’re not going to close your deal.” MEET THE DEVIL

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I was about to be fired.

She laid it out and I said,
Hmmm, that could be fun.

The writers in WWE are some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met. Brian Gewirtz, Ed Koskey Michael Hayes—they have the most thankless jobs you can have in the entertainment industry.

The number of hours of content they write and the travel that they have to do for the job make network sitcoms look like a vacation.

Because of negativity on the Internet, these guys take a tremendous amount of criticism. The fact that they’re able to do it day in and day out, year round, amazes me.

Brian Gewirtz is a great guy, but he’s kind of a nervous little character. He tiptoes around a lot. Brian called me about it, and he was kind of tentative. “Take a look at it. If you have any concerns, we’ll talk about it.”

I got the script and I thought it was funny as hell.

They had to get my character off the air to give it a rest. I’d been doing the general manager for three and a half years. For all that time I’d been the evil dictator who was angry at the babyface performer, because he wasn’t giving me my respect. It was the underlying premise for every angle I was in.

Honestly, in the last angle, when we were doing everything we could to get the belt off of John Cena and onto Kurt Angle, there was nowhere else to go with the character. It was time to give the character a rest and an overhaul.

The angle built over a couple of weeks, until finally I was put on trial and my fate “decided” by Vince in a kangaroo court sequence revisiting my sins as WWE’s weasely general manager. The way things were originally laid out, I would go back to the ring for judg-ment. There, John Cena was going to hit me with his finishing move, propelling me into a garbage truck so that I would be taken out with the trash.

I went to Vince and told him that it would make more sense if he did it.

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“You’re the chairman of the board. The storyline has been that I haven’t met your expectations. It makes more sense to have you throw me in the garbage truck.”

And that’s the way we did it.

In Character

They had steam-cleaned the truck, and you probably could have performed surgery inside it. They’d welded two giant stops to keep the scoop from crushing me in the back. The idea was that after I got bodyslammed into the back, I would keep my eyes closed until I heard the scoop closing. We’d talked through it, but we didn’t actually rehearse it.

I waited until the thing closed and tried crawling up into the

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back. Vince jumped into the driver’s seat and drove out of the building. Within seconds the truck was moving too fast for me to get anywhere. It was so dark I couldn’t see, and on the way out of the building, Vince hit some cable covers that bounced my face against the compactor. When I finally got out of the truck, I had a three-inch gash under my eye.

Vince hopped out of the truck and was looking at me like,
Oh,
my God, are you all right?

We were out in the parking lot. There were fans all over the place.

I didn’t want to come out of character. So I started yelling at him.

“You don’t give a shit if I’m all right. You brought me into this company to embarrass me, to humiliate me. What the hell do you care?” I screamed at him the whole way back into the building.

Professionalism

My character has a lot of heat. It’s a natural character. I don’t have to force it. It’s not at all who I really am, but there’s enough of who I really am to make up for my lack of acting ability. I can reach into my personality and find those elements that the audience reacts to.

Then I turn up the volume and act them out in a way that works.

One of the reasons why me coming to WWE has worked has been the professionalism of WWE’s staff and talent. I’ve tried to be just as professional. I show up on time. I do my job to the best of my ability. And I mind my own business.

I made up my mind early on that I was never going to get myself involved in politics. There are politics in WWE. I will tell you, though, they’re not
anything
like the politics that existed in WCW.

Despite the fact that WWE is a public company, in a lot of ways it’s still a family-run business. Vince McMahon is the only head of WWE, and everybody recognizes it. There’s not a lot of jockeying for position in WWE. My sense is, that it’s frowned upon. There is a corporate culture of professionalism. But there are politics. Any human enterprise has them.

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I’m as apolitical as possible. I don’t hang out with too many people. I’m a loner. For the most part, when I show up, I read a book or work on my computer, and stay out of everybody else’s way.

The Bigger Picture

Good Guys, Bad Guys

Professional wrestling has prospered greatly in the last fifty years, despite the many changes the world of entertainment has gone through. If you look at WWE today, it’s the most-watched program on ad-supported cable television. I think that really says a lot for the basic psychological and emotional attraction of sports entertainment and what it has to offer.

It’s simple. It’s good guys, it’s bad guys. It’s storylines that keep you coming back for more. It’s characters viewers aspire to be.

Scott Hall once told me, if you look at all of the really successful characters, they have this one thing in common: they’re characters that guys wish they could be, and that women wish they were married to.

He used different terminology, but you get the idea.

Stone Cold Steve Austin is a great example of why wrestling works. So many people sitting at home, men and women, wish deep down inside they could be someone who stands up to the boss, gives him the finger, and basically says, “Screw you.” I don’t think there’s anyone who works in a factory or office, in a brokerage firm, anywhere, who doesn’t wish they had the opportunity to walk up to their boss and tell them that.

Steve Austin became that cultural icon that we all wished to be.

At other times, different characters and storylines catch the mood of the country and reflect it back at the viewer. That’s a time-tested formula for success, and I think it will continue in the future.

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If I Were in Charge

Sometimes I watch Monday night
Raw
or
SmackDown!
and I think about how I would do it if I were running things now. I go back to that formula we used with
Nitro
—SARSA. Story, anticipation, reality, surprise, action.

Action is pretty easy to create in wrestling. But it’s not the only thing in wrestling—it’s just one of those five elements. The others are just as important and usually even harder to create.

One of the things that I’ve noticed these days is that the bookers and writers often think they can force-feed conflicts to the audience without bothering to make them believable. The story suffers as a result.

Is it plausible that wrestler A is going to have an issue with wrestler B? If not, you have to make it believable before it happens.

You have to ask yourself what kind of backstory to create to get the audience to believe it, and spend the time creating it. We don’t take the time, and the story suffers.

The story is suffering because the reality is suffering. And if you have a weak story and no reality, then you don’t have anticipation—

because no one really cares enough to anticipate it.

The sheer amount of product that we have to produce each year means that we don’t have the time to make every story real or believable. But I think it can be done more often than it is.

Entertainment Buffet

One thing that makes wrestling so unique right now is its appeal to different demographics. It’s a little bit like an entertainment buffet.

There’s something there that everyone’s going to like. If you’re a ten-year-old kid, you have characters and personalities that you’re attracted to. If you’re sixteen or eighteen, there are different characters you’re attracted to for different reasons. If you’re twenty-five to 380

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

forty-nine, you relate to different people for different reasons. And if you’re someone who’s sixty-five who used to watch wrestling when you were young, there are things that remind you what wrestling was back in the day.

When you look at the television landscape today, and the prolif-eration of cable channels, the networks have largely become niche programmers. Nearly all have narrowly defined audiences, and therefore narrowly defined content. Wrestling reaches across all of those demos. That’s one reason it’s so powerful on cable. It’s literally attractive to a whole range of audiences.

Breaking New Ground

For me, surprise has always been an important element in wrestling.

It’s tough to achieve that now, I think. There’s so much television programming out there, and there has been so much over the past ten years or so, that there is very little possibility of doing something that hasn’t been done before in one way, shape, or form. The good news is, we’ve pushed the envelope and come up with many different ideas. The bad news is, we’ve just about scorched the earth, leaving no creative possibility untried.

The audience knows that. They’re so smart, so sophisticated—

not too many people use the words
sophisticated, wrestling,
and
audience
in the same sentence, but it’s true—and it’s hard to surprise them.

People outside the industry don’t realize how sophisticated the wrestling audience is, how dedicated and diverse the viewers are, how demanding they can be. Those things are great, because they tend to create brand loyalty. But they’re also a challenge, because it’s very hard to sneak something past that kind of audience. They know when you’re tilting an old idea five degrees one way or another and trying to palm it off as something new and fresh.

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Better-Defined Characters

In my opinion, over the next three to five years, rather than trying to pretend that we’re coming up with new ideas, we re going to go back to the future in some respects. I don’t think that wrestling will ever return to the dark, dingy, and small wrestling arenas with very basic wrestling formulas and stripped-down presentation. But I do think we’re going to go back to some of the fundamental things that worked. And one of those things is going to be more clearly defined characters.