Controversy Creates Cash (19 page)

I’d been held up before Ric did it, and I was held up later on.

The Honky Tonk Man tried to hold me up, and I kicked him out the door. There were a couple of guys who tried that technique, and it didn’t work.

Ric Flair was the exception.

Randy Savage

Sometime in 1994, Bill Shaw, Bob Dhue, and I went out to check the competition at a house show in Phoenix. (Bob, who was still with WCW at the time, was excited because there was a great golf course at the hotel where we stayed.) I put on a hat and some glasses, real 007 stuff, bought our tickets, and sat up in the cheap seats like everybody else and watched the show. It was fun, and gave me a firsthand view of what Vince was up to.

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It was at that show that I first saw Randy Savage perform in front of a live audience.

By that time Randy had been in wrestling for more than two decades. A former minor-league baseball player, the Macho Man first wrestled as the Spider in 1973 and had appeared with several promotions before beginning a long stint working for Vince in 1985. He’d had some memorable matches with Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair in the late 1980s and early ’90s. In 1994, he started working as a color commentator, implying that his days as a main event talent were coming to an end.

Several months after I caught the show, Hogan called me up and said, “Hey, brother, I think Randy Savage is available.” 142

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I won’t say Hogan pressured me, but he really did a sales job. He sold me on Savage. Not that it was too hard.

Savage wasn’t very happy with what he was doing. Randy is a very proud individual, and, like a lot of performers, just wasn’t ready to hang up his tights and put on a suit. He was much more interested in continuing to perform.

I talked to him over the phone. Then we met and worked something out. Randy was a spokesman for Slim Jim at the time, and I cut a deal for sponsorship with Slim Jim that offset the majority, if not all, of Randy’s salary. We got Randy, if not for free, close to it.

He went on to some memorable matches with Hogan and Flair, and did a memorable angle in early 1996 involving his ex-wife Miss Elizabeth, who “deserted” him for Flair.

Stealing talent

The Macho Man was the first of what seemed like a parade of WWE talent that would come to us over the next two years or so.

People have said that I was constantly looking for ways to hurt the WWE, and that signing wrestlers away from them was part of that strategy. That was not the case at all.

If the WWE thought that Randy Savage was valuable to their organization, they would have worked with him and come to an agreement with him. He was clearly unhappy with how he was being used, and given an alternative, it’s not surprising he jumped to WCW.

My job was to build WCW. If people were available, and they were an asset to me, we would go ahead and sign that talent. It’s no different than any other business or sport.

Hurting the WWE wasn’t my motivation. I just wanted to make my company better.

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Nearing the Black

A lot of great things happened in 1994. We figured out Disney. We brought on Hulk Hogan. At the end of the year, we got Randy Savage. We had Flair-Hogan matches that a lot of people in the wrestling community talked about for a long time.

There were still a lot of things we needed to fix, but we were gradually building the company. Any time that we stepped up, every time we took a risk, there was a return on investment. Ted Turner was starting to take notice.

By the end of 1994, we’d done enough to slow down the bleeding that I realized we could potentially turn the company around in 1995 and show a profit. No one prior to me had ever done that.

I knew that if I was the guy to show a profit, my stock as an executive in Turner Broadcasting was going to be pretty high. I also wanted to prove that Bill Shaw had been right when he took a chance on me. So the bottom line became my focus. I wanted to be the guy who did what no one else thought was possible.

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6

Prime Time

“He’ll Understand”

Ted Turner & the Turner Men

In late 1994, early 1995, Ted Turner was Turner Broadcasting’s alpha male. The company was really shaped in his image. It was very entrepreneurial, built as a unique combination of guts and vision. And it was growing. TNT and TBS were doing great. CNN was the recognized world leader in news. We owned the Hawks and the Braves, both of whom made it to the playoffs that season (the Braves won the World Series in 1995). We were acquiring New Line Cinema. A lot of great things were happening.

There was constant talk of Ted wanting to buy NBC or CBS.

Every time all of us at WCW would hear that, we’d chomp at the bit. We knew how Ted perceived WCW, and we knew that, at the very least, we’d be given an opportunity to talk about using a network as a platform, even if it was just for a yearly special to help build the WCW brand.

At the time, TBS had a
Clash of the Champions
special that we 146

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would run in prime time a couple of times a year. That was our opportunity to put the best of our people out there in prime time. If we’d had CBS or NBC, our exposure would have been several times greater.

Even though I was a vice president of WCW, I didn’t talk to Ted Turner on a personal basis at all. Once or twice I saw him at a company-wide meeting, but I never had any extensive dialogue with him. Quite frankly, I could have bumped into him in the hallway, and he might not have recognized who I was.

Harvey Schiller

Bill Shaw, and later on Harvey Schiller, were the ones who spoke directly to Ted Turner about WCW, and did so a regular basis. Harvey replaced Bill as WCW’s head during a company restructuring in early 1995. I was very disappointed to lose Bill as my boss, but the move made a lot of sense organizationally. Harvey headed Turner Sports and was a strong leader. He’d been a colonel in the Air Force and had a military straightforwardness. He was a very impressive guy, physically and intellectually; when he came into a room, he instantly commanded respect.

Ultimately, I think it was a mistake to have WCW answer to Turner Sports—we would have been better off on the entertainment side. But it certainly didn’t make any sense for us to be answering to the administration division where Bill Shaw was either. In any event, it wasn’t my decision to make, and I didn’t have a vote.

My first meeting with Harvey Schiller was very uncomfortable.

Harvey didn’t know a lot about wrestling. I think he looked at me and thought to himself,
This guy doesn’t look like the corporate, buttoned-up executive that I like to work with.
Early on I’d been coming to work in a suit and tie, but as things went on I’d loosened up, generally wearing jeans and other casual clothes to work.

We were first and foremost a creative enterprise, and although we were all professionals, I felt the attempt to dress and act like our PRIME TIME

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corporate peers kept us from thinking like entrepreneurs or people in the entertainment business. I was more interested in people’s energy and creativity and work ethic than in whether they wore wingtip shoes.

At first, I got the impression that Harvey had no interest in WCW

and that we were going to slide back into a situation where there was no real corporate support. But as I got to know him, I realized that his cold demeanor on the first meeting was just Harvey being Harvey. He didn’t show much emotion, even when he was enthusiastic about something. We ended up working together fairly well.

If you didn’t know Harvey very well, you didn’t realize he had a great sense of humor. He was willing to poke fun of himself. And by the way, he was a ham. Two years later, I asked him to go on air for a bit and threaten to fire me. I barely got the invitation out of my mouth before he asked me where and when he should show up.

One bad thing did happen when Harvey was named head of Turner Sports and WCW was put under his control. Some of the people around me helping run WCW began returning to their old political ways, trying to position their wagons, so to speak, because they weren’t sure how all this was going to shake out. We’d gotten away from that with Bill Shaw, but under the new regime we started to backslide.

One other thing happened when we reorganized—I became president of WCW. The truth is, I don’t even remember the exact month, let alone the day or moment. We were doing so much then that things tended to blur together.

A Dollar Bet

Quite frankly, by early 1995, I had a little bit of a swagger. Things were turning around. There was positive press about us. And then, toward the end of the first quarter, I went through the projections for the rest of the year. I realized that if we made a couple more good moves strategically, we could turn a profit.

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I voiced that opinion during a budget meeting. A short time later, I got a call from Bill Shaw, who introduced me to a guy named Harry Anderson. Anderson was one of the top people on the financial side of Turner. The way the company was structured, the accounting and legal sides of the business were autonomous. I had accountants in WCW, but they didn’t report directly to me. They had told Anderson what I said. Anderson, curious about how a company that had lost money from day one could be nearing the black, asked Bill to set up a meeting.

We met in Bill Shaw’s office. I walked Anderson through the numbers. He was friendly, but he was adamant—there was no way WCW could ever turn a profit.

I told him right in front of Bill Shaw: I will bet you a dollar that we will. And when I win this bet, you are going to get down on your hands and knees and hand me that dollar in front of WCW’s employees.

Harry was probably four levels above me in the executive food chain. He got invited to meetings and parties that I never even heard about. He was a button-down member of the executive committee of Turner Broadcasting. I wore jeans and cowboy boots, had long hair, and showed up to work in a leather jacket.

He laughed, and accepted the bet. He was unconvinced that there was any way in hell that WCW could ever turn a profit.

Star TV

Sure I could turn a profit, I started looking at our international distribution.

International distribution basically means reselling footage you’ve already shot for use in the United States. Once you’ve shot the footage, you’ve basically paid for it already. If you can sell it again overseas, whatever you make is pure profit.

WCW had never been very strong in international distribution for a variety of reasons, including the fact that we didn’t have recog-PRIME TIME

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nizable stars. But now with Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage, we had names that people in Europe and Asia knew. I started turning up the heat on the international sales department to create more revenue. They found an opportunity with Star TV in China.

Star TV was aggressively buying up programming and paying fairly high dollar for it at the time. They made an offer big enough to put us in the black for the year. I’ve forgotten the details, but I believe it was our WCW Saturday-night show, which was our flagship at the time, and all of our syndicated product. I don’t remember the number, but it was well into the six-figure range.

We wouldn’t have made a great deal of money, but we would have been profitable, and that’s all that mattered to me. I didn’t care if we made ten dollars or ten million, I just wanted to see black ink.

I was absolutely obsessed with getting that deal. There was only one small problem.

Star TV was owned by Rupert Murdoch. Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner hated each other. They had their own Vince McMahon–

Eric Bischoff thing going on in the press, and it was ugly.

How could I do a deal with a company that was owned by Rupert Murdoch, and not have Ted Turner ask for my head on a silver platter? Or just take it off himself, for that matter.