Controversy Creates Cash (9 page)

At that point, Ted Turner stepped in and bought Jim Crockett Promotions, ultimately renaming the company WCW.

Why He Did It

People unfamiliar with Ted Turner’s history may wonder why a bil-lionaire who first rose to national fame racing yachts bought a wrestling promotion. In fact, it made a great deal of sense.

When Ted launched the Turner Broadcasting System in the 1970s, he did it with very inexpensive programming, things that he could afford. None of it really got much of a rating—except for wrestling. For a variety of reasons, wrestling was one of the most popular things on the TBS network from its very beginning.

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In 1987 Crockett Promotions remained relatively popular on TBS. As original programming went, wrestling was also cheap to produce. That’s why Turner acquired the company.

I started watching WCW around 1991. While I’d heard of many of the wrestlers, I wasn’t familiar with most of them. The presentation was better than the AWA; they had more money and better production values. But the shows were still a far cry from Vince’s.

They had a national cable platform thanks to Turner, but WCW

seemed very southern in its orientation. The announcers had heavy southern accents, which worked great in the South, but didn’t play so well in the rest of the country. The rest of their presentation was very regional as well. The WCW didn’t look like much of a competitor stacked against Vince, and the fact that it had only barely escaped bankruptcy a few years before didn’t really inspire me.

Nonetheless, it was one of very few opportunities out there.

We Got Your Tape

About a month after I sent the tape to Jim Herd, I was sitting on the edge of my bed one morning when the phone rang.

It was Herd.

“Eric, we got your videotape. We want to get you down here.

How soon can you come for an audition?” I was very calm talking to him, very calm. From a point of pride and not wanting to embarrass myself, I didn’t want anyone to know how bad the situation was. It was pretty fuckin’ bleak, but I played the call very calmly.

“How soon do you want me?”

“We’ll send you some tickets right away.” I hung up the phone, turned around and looked at my wife.

Then I jumped about four feet in the air and yelled at the top of my lungs.

I knew at that moment I was going to end up getting that job.

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Sunk . . .

Two weeks passed in a blur. I flew down to Atlanta and got to the Omni Hotel, which Ted Turner owned. I got checked into my room, went down to the bar, had a beer, and kind of collected my thoughts. Life was about to get a whole lot better.

The next morning, I got up early. I was excited and couldn’t wait to get to the audition. I watched the clock in my room, and the second it hit 9:00, I called the number they’d given me to get the information for the audition. Keith Mitchell, the head of production,

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answered the phone.

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Diamond Dallas Page.

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“All right, Eric. Come on down around ten or eleven. You’re going to be working with Diamond Dallas Page.” Diamond Dallas Page?

Aw fuck!

The guy I almost came to blows with in Rochester, Minnesota, a few years back?

This is the guy I have to work with? He hates my guts. I’m toast.

I didn’t say any of this to Keith, of course. Even though I pretty much knew I was sunk.

You Look Like a Movie Star

I hung up the phone and proceeded to call Page, who already knew what was up. To my great surprise, he was very gracious. And not only gracious—Page went out of his way to tell me what he knew about what WCW was looking for in a play-by-play guy.

Page is a unique guy. He’s loud, he can be obnoxious as hell, and he’s the most relentless self-promoter you will ever meet. But he is also one of the most generous people you’ll ever know. Page would give you his last dime and not even ask why you need it.

Page had been at WCW for about a year and a half, and knew a lot about what was going on. He really stepped up when he didn’t have to. He could have just as easily allowed me to bury myself.

Or, if he was a typical wrestler, he could have told me the exact
opposite
of what they were looking for, so he could get a kick watching me go down in flames.

But he was honest and straightforward. He told me what they liked and what they didn’t like, and how to impress them. Page and I worked really well together in that audition and ended up working on camera a lot afterward.

Following the audition and lunch, I had an appointment with Jim Herd. He told me he liked what he’d seen on the audition tape, and offered me a job.

I can’t even describe how I felt. Relief, gratitude, enthusiasm—

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they all overwhelmed me. I couldn’t believe that the last year and a half was finally going to pay off.

Jim Herd was kind of a crusty, gruff character. He was a busi-nessman, but he was direct and to the point. He looked at me, and he said something like, “Kid, you look like a movie star.” I think that was a compliment.

“Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to hire you. I’m going to
bring you in. I’m going to pay you seventy thousand dollars a year.

Here’s your job. Your job is to put pressure on Jim Ross and Tony Schiavone. Schiavone and Ross need to know there is someone else here who
can take their jobs if they don’t stay in line. That’s why I’m bringing
you in here.”

I didn’t know Jim Ross, and I didn’t know Tony Schiavone. I couldn’t have cared less. If my job description was to make the Mar-quis de Sade miserable, I would have done that.

At Work in the WCW

Like Winning the Lottery

Seventy thousand a year was twice what I’d been making when Verne was still managing to pay me. The idea of making that much money in 1991 was just unbelievable. I remember telling my wife,

“Honey, this is how much money attorneys make. I’m making attorney money.”

By that time, we’d already filed for bankruptcy. I had a massive IRS issue. Nonetheless, our family’s situation changed literally overnight. Little things like making sure the house was heated properly and the phone bills were paid became possible again. The kids could get decent clothes. I could actually buy a dependable car.

We certainly didn’t live large by any stretch of the imagination, but considering what we had been going through, we felt like we had just won the lottery.

Plus, I only had to work two days a week, which meant I could WCW: THE EARLY DAYS

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commute from Minneapolis and not uproot my family. I’d leave Sunday night or Monday morning, fly into Atlanta, work Monday and Tuesday, and then fly home.

The Backup to the Backup to the Backup I was the backup to the backup to the backup announcers, but I still had a lot of work to do.

Each week WCW produced a Saturday-night show for TBS, a Sunday-night show for TBS, three or four syndicated U.S. shows, and a number of international shows. I did play-by-play on a couple of the syndicated shows, a voice-over on one or two of the international shows, and stand-up edit market interviews or promos.

There was a lot of on-camera work, but a lot of it was very low-profile—grunt work, if you will. It was the work that Jim Ross or Tony Schiavone didn’t have time to do or didn’t want to do because it was not as high-profile or seem as important as their main jobs.

Comparing the AWA production facilities to what the WCW

had was like comparing a go-cart that you build from scraps in your garage to a Ferrari.

WCW had phenomenal facilities. They were cramped, but phenomenal. The production offices were in the lower level of the CNN Center, right in the same building as CNN and Turner Broadcasting. When you were there, you felt like you were in a real network environment.

Often when I’d get done, I’d take a walk around. I’d pass the gift shop and I’d think, Wait a minute, I work for the company that has this gift shop. I work for Turner Broadcasting.

CNN at that time was really exploding. They were the international leader in news. To me, this was all just amazing. I was working for one of the biggest entertainment and media conglomerates in the world.

There were plenty of celebrity moments, with standout personalities from every walk of life. Every so often we’d get a glimpse of Ted Turner or Jane Fonda going through the atrium at the CNN

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Center. Once in a while you’d see a dignitary—or mostly their security people, guys with dark suits and sunglasses talking into their wristwatches. You knew something was going on, but you weren’t quite sure what.

A Role Player

When I was announcing, I didn’t look at myself as a character. I looked at myself as more of a utility player.

My role was all about getting information out in as entertaining a way as possible. It was never about driving a television show.

The truth of the matter is that, in wrestling, if the announcers become lead characters, there’s something desperately wrong. Announcers don’t wrestle. Announcers don’t drive television ratings.

No one pays money to come to an arena and watch an announcer perform. You’re garnish on the plate.

What you should be doing is making the talent look better, making the stories more interesting. Sometimes the best way to do that is to keep your mouth shut and say as little as possible. That was the way I was trained with Verne Gagne, and I still believe it to this day.

Getting the wrestlers over doesn’t happen by accident; you have to work at it. As an announcer, you’re very familiar with all of the characters and their storylines, and you look for things to bring up that will enhance the perception of these characters. Whether it’s their background or personal interests, or unique things about them physically, you look for that one thing that you can talk about that will make the character or the story more compelling.

When you’re sitting down to do play-by-play, you have a whole laundry list of things that have to be done. You’ve got to talk about the Pay-Per-View that’s coming up. You’ve got to sell each one of the stories that are involved in that Pay-Per-View. You need to sell magazines. You need to sell home videos, merchandise, and next week’s show. You need to keep people interested in the main event coming up at the end of the show. You’ve got a number of items to check off during that forty-four minutes of a broadcast hour.

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The best wrestling announcers are the ones people don’t even remember. There are exceptions. A guy like Jim Ross, who has been out there as long as Jim was out there, becomes a household name.

But one of the things I like about Joey Stiles right now is that Joey makes the show better without becoming a character himself. And I think that’s a great quality in an announcer.

Herd Is Out

I came to work one day in early 1992 and found out that Jim Herd had been fired.

I didn’t work with Jim a lot. Jim Ross was my immediate super-visor, the guy I answered to. But I felt really bad for Jim Herd. I saw him in the atrium as he was leaving the building. I told him I wanted to thank him for the opportunity he’d given me. “I don’t know what’s going on here,” I said, “but I want you to know that I’m very appreciative of what you did for me and my family.” He acknowledged that, but I could tell he didn’t really want to talk to me. He had tears in his eyes, and I’m sure now that he would have preferred it if I hadn’t found him walking out the door. But I felt I owed him, and still do.

Jim was pretty smart in some ways, but he could also be pretty gruff and painfully straightforward. He didn’t really have an instinct for the business. Toward the end of his tenure, things had gone bad enough long enough that the people around him knew he was coming to the end of his rope, and it was a pretty miserable time for him.

I don’t think that there was any singular thing that led to Jim being fired, but the Ric Flair affair was probably part of it. The conflict not only involved a contract dispute but saw the WCW Championship belt show up on a World Wrestling Federation broadcast, followed shortly thereafter by the Nature Boy himself.

I came in a week or two before Flair left WCW, so I can’t really address any of that. Ric is an interesting guy. People either absolutely love him or absolutely don’t. Those who were big Ric Flair fans within WCW certainly thought that his going to Vince was a 68

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big nail in Herd’s coffin. But there were others who for their own reasons didn’t mind the fact that Flair was gone.

Probably more important than the conflict with Flair were the things that were
not
happening, in terms of generating revenue and improving the brand and the ratings. When Jim left, there was a sense of renewal. People hoped Turner would bring someone in who could run WCW and turn it into a more profitable business.