Controversy Creates Cash (7 page)

It’s a real skill. And I didn’t have it.

Cracking Up the Audience

My first interview was with Larry Zbyszko, who by the way happened to be married to Verne Gagne’s daughter. All the wrestlers were kind of standing around watching, waiting for their interview with the new guy. Anything that would give them a laugh was a good thing, and they were all at the edge of their seats waiting for this new little “Ken Doll”—as they referred to me—to break into the business.

I don’t know what I said or how I screwed it up, but as I opened up the interview and turned to feed the microphone to Larry, he looked at me for probably four or five seconds (which seemed like an eternity) and then just busted out laughing. Loud, eye-watering, KEN DOLL

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cramp-inducing, belly-laugh laughing. At which point everyone else in the room busted out laughing with him.

For a very long time.

I got through the day. How, I don’t know. I’m sure it was painful to watch, and painful to produce, because it was painful for me to do. But we got through it.

Verne immediately went out looking for someone who could really do the job. I was more than happy to go back to my office and not embarrass myself.

Getting Better

They hired someone else right away.

Quite honestly and incredibly, he was worse than me.

They gave him about two weeks. He got worse instead of better, and then he was gone.

They came back to me.
We’re going to look for someone else, but in
the meantime, you fill in.

I did a little better this time, thanks to some coaching from some of the guys who worked with me at night after everyone went home—Brad Rheingans, Sgt. Slaughter, and Sheik Adan El Kaissey are the ones I remember. I was still painful to watch, but may be not excruciating.

We got through the day, and everybody thanked me—not pro-fusely, but at least they weren’t laughing. I went back to my office and selling. Verne continued looking for another announcer.

They found another guy who washed out after a few weeks, and I filled in again. This time I did a little better. They kept looking. I kept filling in.

Eventually, maybe because they just got used to the pain, they stopped looking for somebody else. And I became the AWA’s announcer.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

The Old School’s Last Holdout

Burning Cash

My new role as on-air talent may have had as much to do with the economics of the AWA as improvement in my announcing skills.

At the time Verne was burning cash trying to stay in the business. He was losing money every week trying to hold on to his dream and compete with Vince McMahon.

I only know one side of the story—Verne’s. I heard that Vince came in and tried to buy Verne out, but Verne would have nothing to do with him. I can believe that. The AWA was Verne’s baby. Selling it would have felt like stomping on his legacy. And Verne was a stubborn guy.

When Verne Gagne was in his heyday in the sixties and seventies, there was an unwritten code that regional promoters stayed out of each other’s territories, nobody tried to steal anybody’s wrestlers, and that kind of stuff. They were all happy making their money in their respective territories. Then Vince Jr. came along and bought out the company from his father. He said, “You know what, I’m not going to operate the old way. I’m going to take it all. I’m going to take over the entire country and aggregate the best talent from different regions. I’m going to take this thing nationwide.” Up until that point, no one had ever thought of becoming a national product. The television business didn’t allow it. With the advent of cable television, and with the cable networks reaching the entire United States, you could. When Vince did that, the old territorial model began to crumble.

Verne held on to the belief that what Vince was doing would fail. And when it failed, Verne would be in a position to take advantage of it.

Or, if it worked, he could compete, thanks to his ESPN connection and syndicated show.

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The problem was, Verne didn’t really have an understanding of what it would take to compete. He was an older guy at the time, in his mid-sixties. Verne had a certain understanding or philosophy of how the business should be operated, and I don’t think he could adapt to the changing television landscape. He didn’t have the vision. He was still thinking about territories and wrestling as small-town entertainment.

He wasn’t able to go to another cable network and say, “Look what Vince McMahon is doing over here; why don’t we do the same thing with your network.” The ESPN deal wasn’t enough of a platform to compete on a national level. His show felt small, with production values that were severely lacking compared to Vince’s.

He also couldn’t hold on to the top talent. Vince was making a lot of extraordinary deals with wrestlers, effectively luring them away from the regional promotions.

Ironically, years later Vince would accuse me and Ted Turner of stealing his talent, when in fact that’s exactly what Vince did to these regional promoters in the 1980s. A lot of the big names who had been at AWA had moved on to work for Vince. Even the wrestlers who were there when I arrived, like AWA World Champion Curt Henning and Kevin Kelly, had their eyes on a World Wrestling Federation career.

Most of the guys who were left were, quite honestly, guys Vince wasn’t interested in. There’s not a kinder way to say that. I wish there was, but it’s true. Baron Von Raschke had been a big name, but he was in the twilight of his career; Sheik Adan El Kaissey, the same thing. Jerry Blackwell, kind of along the same lines.

The rest of Verne’s talent tended to be young guys who hadn’t gotten a lot of attention. For most, it was a great opportunity to break into the business—it certainly worked out for me—but it made the AWA feel less than World Wrestling Federation.

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What McMahon Did Right

Vince McMahon didn’t get to be the king of professional wrestling simply by skimming the best talent from the other promotions. He did a lot of things right. He brought a lot more production value to his television product—a lot more. Even the earliest
WrestleMania,
Pay-Per-Views, and weekly television shows were clearly better in terms of production and entertainment value than anything Verne or the other regional promoters produced. Vince’s shows looked bigger, used more cameras, and had more elaborate costumes. Its characters were more colorful and attractive. Everything was bigger, louder, sexier, more entertaining than what we as fans had recognized wrestling to be.

But to Verne, Vince’s product wasn’t what wrestling should be.

He thought it was too cartoonish, with too much emphasis on characters and costumes, too much emphasis on entertainment. Verne was a lot more wrestler than showman. Vince McMahon was all showman. Like a lot of old-school wrestlers, Verne was stuck in the mud. Audiences preferred Vince’s product, but Verne didn’t realize it, or if he did, he refused to accept it.

By the time I joined the company in 1987, the nose on Verne’s airplane was already in a steep dive, and it just kept accelerating, quite honestly, into a death spiral. Verne burned truckloads of his own savings trying to keep it in the air.

I really didn’t have a good understanding at the time just how bad off the AWA was financially. I was insulated from that. But it was probably one of the reasons Verne kept me on board as the announcer. I was cheap. Using me didn’t cost him any extra money.

Night Shift

The AWA may not have been doing well financially, but I was having a ball. Besides my announcing and my sales job, I became fascinated by television production. I’d literally spend my nights and KEN DOLL

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weekends from eight P.M. to eight in the morning “dubbing” or duplicating tapes. I liked being in the control room running those one-inch machines and having a real hands-on experience. As silly and insignificant as it may sound in retrospect, just learning how to thread a one-inch tape machine and operate the duplicating equipment was a big deal to me. I wanted to be part of the process.

The technology in the late 1980s was nothing like today’s. Verne had one switcher, two one-inch machines, and two three-quarter-inch machines that we used to dub tapes. It could take the better part of a weekend to get what takes a couple of hours to get today.

I also started promoting some live events. Shawn Michaels and Marty Jannetty—I believe they were called the Midnight Rockers at that point—were on the very first card I ever promoted in Mason City, Iowa.

Promoting, even on the small scale I got involved in, was a lot of work. You had to find a venue, and find local radio stations to help you promote the event. Oftentimes you’d tie into a local fund-raising event to help move tickets. It was Promotion 101. Working at the AWA for me was really like getting a master’s degree in professional wrestling while getting paid to do it.

Again, if the AWA had been successful, I would never have been able to get these opportunities. There would have been other people much more qualified than I was. But because Verne was on his last legs financially and couldn’t afford to pay anyone who was more experienced or talented than I was, I had the unique opportunity to be involved in every aspect of the wrestling business that I was interested in.

Lessons Learned

The Energy of the Live Show

Besides the technical aspects of producing a wrestling show and running events, I learned a great deal about wrestling itself from 50

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Verne Gagne and the people around him. Wrestling isn’t just a sport and a business. In many ways, it’s an art form.

When you watch wrestling, what you see looks fairly simple. It looks like a staged, choreographed fight between two people who supposedly have an issue, something that they’re fighting over.

What you don’t see is the psychology that goes into creating that story. What you
really
don’t see is the skill and the art that’s required to engage the third person in that ring.

The third person in the ring is the audience.

The audience has always been the most important ingredient in a wrestling show, but it’s really critical in a television show. If the wrestlers are not connecting with the audience, no matter what they do, the match doesn’t translate to the viewer at home.

Try this experiment. Pick the two best wrestlers you know of—

take Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat, just as examples. Put them in a Broadway—a sixty-minute match that ends in a draw—that’s the best match of their careers. Put that match in front of fifteen thousand people who know Ric Flair and Ricky Steamboat, real fans who have followed their careers, are caught up in their storyline, and know their moves.

Close your eyes and imagine what that match is going to look like. Imagine what that crowd is like.

Now open your eyes.

Take the fans out of the building. Close your eyes and have that same match in front of empty seats.

What’s the viewer at home going to do ten minutes into the match?

Change the channel.

The crowd validates what the viewer at home feels. If the crowd isn’t there, most viewers aren’t going to feel the same way about what they are seeing. The audience is one of the most important ingredients in wrestling, much more so than in most other forms of entertainment.

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Where the Art Comes In

Truly accomplished wrestlers read the audience. They learn to “feel” the audience and work to get the reactions they want. They have a whole arsenal of tools to utilize to tell their story. Therein lies the art.

An accomplished wrestler is a little like a Broadway actor who appears in the same play over and over again during a two-year run.

The Broadway actor is going to get the same reaction at a Wednes-day matinee that he or she gets on a Friday night. He may have to go about it in a different way, but he’ll get it.

The same is true in wrestling. The really good wrestlers—whether it’s Ric Flair, Triple H, Hulk Hogan—they know how to get the reaction they want. They can read and manipulate the audience.

People criticize Hulk Hogan because he doesn’t have a lot of physical tools, but I don’t know anybody who can read an audience better than Hulk Hogan. He knows when to give that special look to just the right person at ringside, so that everyone else in the arena thinks Hogan’s looking right at him. Hulk Hogan can get more of a reaction with a single look than many more athletic performers can get during an entire match. Sometimes the changes are subtle—

sometimes they are over the top. But he knows how to get the reaction he wants to get. That’s an art form. That’s a skill.

Good Guys and Bad

In wrestling, you need a good guy and you need a bad guy. The problem these days is, no one wants to be a bad guy.

We all want to be liked. It’s human nature. We all have egos. I have an ego—a fairly large one, at that. There are things that Vince McMahon has asked me to do that, as a person, as Eric Bischoff the real person, I didn’t want to do because I didn’t want to be perceived a certain way. That’s ego. But as a
character,
it was the right thing to do. I’ve matured enough, and am comfortable enough, that I can separate the real person and the character. You’d be surprised 52

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

how many performers have a hard time separating their self-image from the character they are asked to play.

A lot of wrestlers who are supposed to be bad guys don’t have that ability. Sometimes I see it in guys who are really experienced—

they don’t want to be the bad guy. They don’t want to be booed.

But for a story to be successful, there
has
to be a villain. You have to have the characteristics that people truly hate. You have to be a liar, a cheat, a sneak, a coward—and the fans need to believe it.

Most performers are uncomfortable with that.

And sometimes it’s not just ego. In today’s environment, much of your income is determined by your ability to sell merchandise.