Controversy Creates Cash (49 page)

For the last couple of years, we’ve embraced a philosophy that lets the audience decide whether they like a character or not. We’ve had a lot of characters who are ambiguous, not completely good and not completely bad. You can see some of that with Triple H and John Cena. Triple H is a character who is theoretically a heel. But he’s not really a heel. Guys kind of like him. John Cena is a character who’s supposed to be a babyface—but he’s not really a babyface.

It’s up to the audience to decide whether they like the characters or not.

Flattening Out

That works when the industry and your brand is firing on all eight cylinders and you reach the WCW 1997 fever pitch, or the WWE

1999–2000–2001 pitch. But as you start to soften up a little bit, as things get more competitive or the numbers level out, you don’t have that luxury of letting the audience decide. You have to take control of your product more. I see that starting to happen. We’re maintaining the audience very well, but it’s harder to grow the audience. And one of the responses, I think, is going to be a trend toward more clearly defined good guys and bad.

If you make things too ambiguous, you end up with that gray area. You tend to fall into a problem Verne Gagne warned me about years ago: People won’t care. It’s not important whether the audi-382

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

ence loves you or hates you, Verne used to say. But they have to feel strongly one way or another.

Corporations and Creativity

The Turner–Time Warner–AOL serial mergers were a recipe for disaster, in particular for WCW, for two reasons. First, WCW was a square peg in the round hole that Time Warner wanted their networks to fit. They wanted golf, HBO-quality movies, and high-end programming. To 95 percent of the executives at Time Warner, WCW was an embarrassment. Once the people who really wanted it off the books took control, it was a foregone conclusion that WCW was never going to be successful, regardless of what Eric Bischoff did or didn’t do.

But WCW was also strangled by a corporate mentality that was strongly anti-creative. We were an example of what’s still happening across the board in entertainment today.

With the exception of HBO, risk is not rewarded in the entertainment properties that are part of the vertical integration of corporate America.

Creativity—real creativity—depends on risk and chances. In entertainment, if you don’t take chances, if you don’t reach out for the most creative people in the marketplace and give them an opportunity to be unencumbered and as creative as they can be, you end up having a bunch of bankers and accountants and people who are anything but creative making the creative decisions. Nothing can be more devastating for entertainment.

Look at the television networks and the programming on those networks. Most of the programming decisions are made by the most noncreative, unimaginative, nonvisionary people I’ve ever met in my life. When it comes to instinct and vision, they’re woefully inept.

But they’re great in a meeting. They’re great corporate suits.

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The Warrior at Peace

Sometimes I look at the people around me in the WWE, and I realize how ironic it is that I’m there. The fact is, I’m the guy who almost put them out of business. There were a lot of people—some of whom I’m now friends with—who were worried that they were going to lose their jobs, their houses.

Much like any war, we were both fighting for a just cause. They were fighting to survive. To them, I was the devil incarnate.

We felt it was important for us to be number one and to be successful, and we were willing to do just about anything we needed to do to achieve that. We were not worrying about how employees at WWE were going to feed their families.

I oftentimes wonder if Vince, Kevin Dunn, and the others really understand and appreciate that many of the things that have led to WWE’s success—in some ways more obviously than others—are really tied to the things that I either created or did first.

I don’t want to suggest that I’m responsible for their success, because no one is responsible for their success other than them. But I forced them to embrace a course different than the one they were on before
Nitro.
If you look at the live television component, the fact that they’re a two-hour show, that they went from cartoon-type characters aimed at children to a formula I created for
Nitro,
that they feature a cruiserweight division—why did they do all that? Who were they reacting to?

Look at WWE log pre-nWo, and look at it now. Where did it come from?

You tell me where
attitude
came from.

So many of those things were born on
Nitro.

I often wonder if they realize it.

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EPILOGUE

Never Say Never

Writing this book and chronicling the events that led up to the sale of WCW to WWE required me to write about some of the negative things that happened to me over the last few chapters.

But make no mistake about it. Eric Bischoff is not a bitter man.

From a purely financial point of view, my family has benefited tremendously from pro wrestling. Every parent hopes to provide opportunities for their children, and this business has helped me achieve that goal. This business and my role in it have given my family an opportunity to see the world and experience things that most families can only dream about. I am very grateful for that.

Often when people recognize me, or realize who I am, they start asking questions about the business. The first one or two start off:

“Hey, whatever happened to . . . [insert famous wrestler here]?” After they get through the who’s-who of past and current wrestlers, the questions are along the lines of: “Do you think anyone is ever going to challenge WWE the way
Nitro
did?” Inevitably, they get more specific and ask if I ever want to compete with Vince McMahon again. More often than not I have fun with those questions. I tease them by saying something like, “Absolutely. As we speak, I’m scheduled for a meeting next week with 386

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

network executives, planning a new program.” I’ll get them all excited, and then I’ll let them in on the joke.

More seriously, a number of times every year I’m approached by individuals or companies who want to launch a program competing with WWE. Some are not legitimate at all, some are very legitimate.

Invariably I tell them the truth, because I don’t want to waste anyone’s time, especially my own: the conditions have changed so much over the last five or six years that in my opinion, there will never be another situation like the one that existed in the mid-1990s when WCW and WWE went head-to-head.

The most profound change is the vertical integration of the media industry. Cable television is no longer competitive in the same way it was ten years ago. When you look at the television landscape and the cable networks now, while there may be hundreds of channels available to the viewer, and dozens and dozens of cable companies or networks, the truth is that most are owned by one of the big four media companies. Viacom has a large piece of the cable industry. NBC-Universal has a big piece of the cable industry. ABC has a big piece. And so does Fox.

Very few, if any, of these companies have the kind of entrepreneurial spirit and vision that Ted Turner and Turner Broadcasting had back in the mid-1990s. Most are managed by committees and focus groups. The majority of media executives make decisions now based on fear, not vision. The television business today is extremely risk-averse. And once you eliminate the cable companies that are controlled directly or indirectly by one of the big four, what’s left are niche networks that don’t have the resources to compete on the level necessary to launch a competitive product. Those conditions more than anything prevent anyone from taking on WWE.

That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be better for WWE and the business overall to have true competition, because it most certainly would—I proved that—but the conditions as they exist today don’t provide that opportunity.

And just as the business conditions have changed, I’ve changed NEVER SAY NEVER

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as well. While I am still an extremely competitive person, I tend not to be as hyperaggressive as I was ten years ago.

Part of that may be because I’m just getting older. But another part is simply the fact that I’ve already been there and done it. No one else in the history of the business has been able to compete with Vince McMahon and beat him at his own game. That was a very powerful motivation for me. To this day, there’s only one person in the history of this business who’s done it, and it’s me. Because I’ve already been to the top of that mountain and achieved that goal, it’s now less important. I have other goals, other things I’d like to achieve.

Don’t get me wrong: I would have liked to camp out on that mountaintop a lot longer than I did. But I’m proud of what I achieved, nonetheless.

Another thing that has changed for me is the fact that I can now attach faces, and in some cases families, to the names at WWE. Even if all of the conditions I’ve described changed, and there was a huge competitive opportunity, I’m not sure that deep down inside I could do some of the crazy things I did at WCW that made us so successful. Back then I didn’t worry about whether or not the employees at WWE would be able to feed their families. I didn’t know them. They were names I didn’t recognize, faces I couldn’t pick out of a crowd.

Now, it would be hard to do anything that might hurt them. I wouldn’t want to jeopardize people for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect, and in many cases feel real affection for.

These days, when I think about sports entertainment and professional wrestling, I’m grateful for the opportunity I have right now.

In many ways, I have the best of all worlds. Thanks to wrestling, I have some great friends, people like Hulk Hogan, who’s probably one of my best friends to this day, and others both from the WCW

days and now WWE. Jason Hervey, the actor who spent six or eight years as a star on ABC’s
Wonder Years
and whom I met fifteen years ago through wrestling, is now my business partner. Together we have created and produced both network and cable reality projects, 388

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

launched a licensing business, and are partners in a gaming company and an energy drink company with international distribution.

And I’m still involved in the wrestling business, which is something that’s been a large part of my life for the last twenty years.

And I can still perform. I am grateful for that.

I love performing in front of a large audience. I love manipulat-ing them. I love the challenge of getting the reaction necessary to advance a storyline, however big or small my role may be. I love the challenge of trying to get better every time I go out in front of an audience. It’s all part of my DNA.

Did I make mistakes building WCW? Of course I did. I don’t think there is an executive in America that can look back and say they did everything right while building their company. But does the criticism by so-called experts, or by wrestlers who didn’t have a clue about what was really happening behind the scenes, bother me? Not a bit. The very fact that Ted Turner himself, as recently as about a year ago, helped me secure a deal with one of the biggest names in NASCAR by providing a personal reference (something he rarely if ever does), confirms to me that the people who were actually in the trenches, who really understood what was going on, know what I accomplished and know why WCW ended up where it did.

More importantly, I know what I achieved. When you make a list of the people who have had the most positive impact on the sports entertainment business as we know it today, it’s a very short list. The list of people who have actually
changed
the business is even shorter. Clearly at the top of that list is Vince McMahon. Inar-guably, he is the individual who took professional wrestling from the regional territory business and rolled it out nationally on cable and network television and subsequently changed the business forever. Below Vince McMahon, there’s probably only one person who has had anywhere near the impact on the
way
the
business
is conducted today—and that’s Eric Bischoff.

I take a lot of pride in that. The things I did to make WCW competitive changed the business fundamentally, from a creative and NEVER SAY NEVER

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strategic point of view. Today I watch
Raw
and
SmackDown!
and see things that originated at WCW. I know where WWE and the wrestling business were prior to the launch of
Nitro.
I’m convinced that the competition I created grew the audience to such an extent that networks were willing to compete for the business, which gave Vince the opportunity to move WWE from USA Network to Viacom and ultimately back to USA Network. I believe that if it weren’t for that competition, WWE would have continued along the path it had been on. The wrestling business would have gotten flat—so flat that the WWE might not have had the opportunities it’s had over the past several years, including becoming a public company.