Controversy Creates Cash (5 page)

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time to quit playing around and start thinking about the things I needed to do to build a life for myself.

The Middle of Nowhere, Minnesota

My father had an acquaintance who ran a company called Dahlman Manufacturing. I think largely as a favor to my dad, he offered me a sales job.

Dahlman made agriculture equipment, particularly potato harvesters, in a small town about an hour and a half north of Minneapolis called Braham. To go from living in downtown Chicago and working in the modeling and nightclub industry to a 1,500-person town selling potato harvesters; that may define culture shock.

For the first few months, I lived alone. Loree was back in Chicago, finishing up some modeling gigs. It was cold, stark, uncomfortable reality. A wood stove supplied the only heat in the small house I rented.

I didn’t like the job. It was okay, and it was in sales, which I was good at, so that portion of it I didn’t mind. And the people I worked with were good people. But they were so different than me that it was hard to fit in.

Most of the people in Braham had probably only left town a handful of times over the course of a year. To them, driving an hour and a half south to the big city of Minneapolis was a major excur-sion. I didn’t relate to any of them, other than the fact that I liked to hunt and fish, which was about the only thing to do up there other than drink.

But the job provided a weekly check and was a step in the right direction. It was necessary to transition into a more traditional job so I could move on to something better.

In the summer of 1983, I went to pick up Loree back in Chicago. We had a great celebration our last night, and then headed back to Braham. She was even more shocked than I was when she got there. But she tried real hard to adapt and make the most of it.

That’s the way she is.

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Baby on the Way

Not too long after Loree settled in, we found out she was pregnant, probably thanks to our little soiree that last night in Chicago.

Until that point, I had no intention of being married. I knew that Loree was the woman I wanted to be committed to, but marriage just wasn’t something I really gave a lot of serious thought to. Neither of us had any intention of having a child. When she found out she was pregnant, that was a defining moment of our relationship.

She wasn’t sure what I was going to do or suggest what she should do. It wasn’t anything we had discussed.

I remember the day vividly. We were at my parents’ house, and Loree got up and took a pregnancy test. I was outside target-shooting with my bow. Loree came out and told me the test was positive. Time stood still.

We went to a Perkins restaurant not far from my parents’ home, and sat together at the counter. She looked at me and said, “What do you want to do?”

“You first.”

We’d both decided, without knowing how the other one really felt, that we wanted to have the baby.

That changed everything quickly. For me, that crystallized where I was at in my life. I couldn’t keep fucking around. I had to get serious.

Wrestling Is Serious Business

The Purest Form of Entertainment

We didn’t have a lot of money. We were living in a two-bedroom house in the middle of nowhere with a wood stove for a furnace. It was very
Little House on the Prairie.

We did little things to treat ourselves. On Sunday mornings, we would go to the supermarket, get some fake crab legs, a bottle of THROWING ROCKS

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cheap champagne, some eggs, and have ourselves the nicest little brunch we could have for under twenty bucks. And typically we would watch Verne Gagne’s AWA wrestling on Channel 9 out of Minneapolis.

My wife tolerated a lot of things regarding me and my personality and the things I liked to do. (She still does.) But I remember her looking at me one day and saying, “Why do you watch this?”

“Honey,” I tried to explain, “in my mind, wrestling is the purest form of entertainment, and therefore the purest form of marketing that there is.”

Wrestling as Marketing

Maybe it was because of my sales background, but where my wife saw big guys in their underwear hitting other guys over the head with chairs, I saw a marketing opportunity. Intuitively, I knew that professional wrestling worked on a lot of different levels for a lot of different reasons. I saw story, I saw psychology, and I saw a unique way to connect with an audience.

I studied wrestling. I’d ask myself what people liked about a particular character. I pondered the ways it was
different than
everything else people watched. It was obviously successful and popular, and I thought often about why. I tried to understand why it worked so well.

The early 1980s were a time of big change in the wrestling business, even though I wasn’t aware of it. Vince McMahon was revolutionizing the business, using cable to deliver a national program.

Cable was still very new, but Vince used it in what was then a radical way for wrestling. Until then, regional promoters like Verne Gagne and Vince’s father (called Vince Sr., though their middle names are different) made local television deals and, for the most part, stayed out of each other territories. They didn’t compete directly.

Vince changed all that by syndicating his show across the coun-30

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try and distributing the his wrestling show on nationwide cable. Instead of being confined to markets in the Northeast, it reached all over the United States, which among other things allowed advertisers to buy spots on his show and reach the whole country as well.

He made a lot of other changes, but that was the big one. No one else would ever catch up—though maybe only Vince realized that at the time.

Back to Minneapolis

We spent about a year or a year and a half in Braham. Most of that time, people looked at us as if we were space aliens. We were that young couple who moved
into
Braham. No one ever moved
to
Braham. They might move out, but not in.

Soon after our son Garett was born, April 20, 1984, we decided it was time to move down to Minneapolis. We found a house to rent near my wife’s parents in an older section of north Minneapolis. I went back to Blue Ribbon Foods as sales manager, managing a sales force of fifteen people. It was another step in the right direction, résumé-wise.

My daughter Montanna was born in November 1985. By that time, Loree and I had married. While Montanna’s arrival was also unplanned, we both looked forward to having another child.

Irv Mann, my boss at Blue Ribbon, became—I don’t want to say a father figure, because that would be going too far—but certainly he was a mentor. We developed a very close relationship. He and his wife would spend weekends with us out at the lake during the summer.

We were enjoying ourselves and our young children, and life couldn’t have been better in many ways. Then one day a close friend of mine named Sonny Onoo came to me with an idea for a kids’ game. I had no idea, but my life was about to take a very unex-pected turn.

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Ninja-Star Wars

Sonny and I had first met back in my martial arts days. Born in Tokyo, Japan, he ultimately ended up in, of all places, Mason City, Iowa. He owned a couple of karate schools, was a top amateur martial arts competitor, and turned pro in kickboxing in the late 1970s.

One night he and I were sitting at a bar and drinking way more beer than we should have. We started talking about the games we’d played when we were kids. Sonny told me about a tag game they called ninja. He and his friends would take milk bottle caps or whatever they found in the street and fling them at each other like five-pointed martial arts stars.

From that conversation, he proceeded to invent a game based on the game he’d played as a kid. We called it Ninja-Star Wars.

Players wore a ninja uniform: a black felt vest and a headband.

Each player had five ninja stars, which were made out of Velcro and weighted down with a two-penny washer in the middle. The stars stuck to felt on the vest. Kids would put the ninja uniform on and chase each other around until someone got all five ninja stars on his opponent.

We thought it was the greatest idea in the world and were sure we’d make millions of dollars selling it. We were so convinced that we each put every penny we had (and some that we didn’t have) into manufacturing the game. We found a manufacturer in Korea who would make these games for us, put them in boxes, the whole nine yards. But the economy of scale required meant our initial order was something like ten thousand games. We had a lot of friggin’ games manufactured.

We didn’t have a warehouse to keep them in. They were literally stuffed in every room of my house.

Sonny and I spent a couple of months trying to take them around to retailers, trying to get them on the shelves. That’s when we learned how the toy business really works. Stores allocate square footage to toys based on the distributor’s success in the market-32

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place. If you’re Mattel, you’re might get 60 percent of the shelf space. If you’re Hasbro, you might get 30 percent. If you’re Joe Blow’s toys, you get whatever’s left. And anyone else—Eric Bischoff and Sonny Onoo, for example—doesn’t get squat.

We decided to try and create a buzz. Every Saturday my wife and I stood in front of independent toy stores, throwing these ninja stars at each other. People would come up and ask what we were doing, and we’d tell them about the game. The stores wouldn’t inventory the game, but they would sell them that day while we were there.

It would have been years before we moved all that inventory.

Fortunately, I came up with a better idea.

Wrestling to the Rescue

One afternoon while I was between appointments at Blue Ribbon, I stopped in at home. I happened to catch an AWA wrestling show on ESPN. Verne Gagne had recently begun airing his show on the sports channel, which was still relatively new.

While I was watching Verne’s show, I saw some PI spots—

Christmas albums and that kind of stuff. PI stands for “per inquiry” and is direct-response sales. As an ad or an infomercial for a product airs, a number flashes on the screen. You call the number, you get the advertised item.

I said to myself, Wait a second. Here’s a guy who’s got a wrestling show that I know a lot of kids watch. It’s airing right in the middle of the afternoon. It’s the perfect way to sell Ninja-Star Wars.

The AWA is obviously in the PI business. Why don’t I go to Verne and cut a deal?

I knew that if I dropped the amateur wrestling card on the table, I’d get an appointment with Verne. And that was all I was hoping for, an opportunity to pitch him. From there I could rely on my sales skills to close the deal.

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I picked up the phone, called directory assistance, got the number, and told whoever answered the phone at AWA that I was an amateur wrestler and wanted to talk to Verne Gagne.

Sure enough, she put me through.

“Mr. Gagne, my name is Eric Bischoff. You may not remember me, but I graduated from Minnetonka senior high school, I wrestled at 138 pounds my senior year tournament, I met you,” yada yada yada. “I’ve got this idea I really want to run by you.”

“Sure, kid Come on over. Let’s see what you got.” Whether he was just the kindest person I ever met or what I had to say was interesting to him, I’ll never know. But I went over the next day.

The Man Himself

The whole idea of being in the office of the AWA, even at thirty-two, was really cool.

Verne had this table that was probably twenty-five feet long, and could fit maybe fifteen people around it. He sat at the far end.

Greg Gagne, Wahoo McDaniel, Ray Stevens, a couple of secretaries, the accountant—everyone who worked in the office—gathered around the table to hear my presentation.

I put on one of the vests and headbands, gave another set to the receptionist, and started throwing stars around.

Verne got a big kick out of it.

“How does this work?” he asked.

“I cover the cost of the commercial out of my own pocket. You run the commercial on your show. I handle all of the fulfillment.

The games cost me $8.45 each. We’ll sell them for twenty bucks each. You and I will split the profit, fifty-fifty.”

“Jeez, now that sounds like a great idea.” I shot a commercial that was horrible, got an 800 number, and within a month we were selling games on ESPN.

It was relatively successful, but the economics weren’t as good as we 34

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wanted. No one was losing money, but no one made enough to make it really work. Ultimately Sonny and I decided to pull the plug.

But by then, I’d become somewhat familiar with Verne and Greg, and in particular with a guy by the name of Mike Shields.

Mike had come up with Jerry Jarrett and had done everything from running cameras to helping with booking. He handled advertising and syndication for Verne, heading up the production department.

The AWA production department wasn’t much—it was like three people and one camera. But they did a lot with what they had.

Mike and I developed a pretty good working relationship. He got a sense of what I was all about, and appreciated my energy and sales ability and just the way I operated.

For my part, I was extremely interested in what he did. I would ask a lot of questions, and he would explain for hours how something like syndication worked. I found it all very fascinating. One thing led to another, and a few months after I’d come to Verne with the Ninja-Star Wars idea, Mike offered me a sales job.

I snatched the opportunity in a heartbeat.

A Tough Place to Work

My first day was August 15, 1987. I didn’t start selling right away, though. First, I needed an office.

Verne’s operation was located in a one-story building that had once been a church. There were offices on one side of the building; the other was a large, open studio. The offices were all taken, so there was no place to put me. The only thing to do was to build a little office on the television side.