Controversy Creates Cash (22 page)

Now, if I thought they would look at us and say,
Oh, wait,
they’re onto something—let’s look at it and do it better.
Then I would have been worried. Ultimately, that’s what they did—but it took them two and a half years of getting their brains beat out to really catch on.

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Go Ahead, Try Our Competition

We usually knew what was going to happen on
Raw
ahead of time because their shows were taped in advance. We had no problem getting information on what had happened. We had various people whom we knew in the markets at the events who told us what had happened, but mostly the results were available online or in the dirtsheets where anyone could pick them up.

As part of my “screw the rules” formula, I began telling our viewers what WWE was doing on its show. I convinced Brad Siegel to let me start my show a couple of minutes before
Raw,
and I encouraged people to tune in to the competition because our show was so much better on every level, from production values to talent to storytelling, that I was confident people would prefer us. I
hoped
people would switch over—they’d see something very flat, and come back over to us for good.

It’s like having two restaurants on the same corner, charging the same price but offering food of vastly different quality. If I have the better restaurant, I don’t care if someone goes to the competition and tries it—they’ve just reinforced the quality of our product.

That’s exactly what happened. Telling people what was going on positioned WCW as being supremely confident in its quality. I forced a taste test I knew we would win. I also started ending my show five to ten minutes after
Raw
went off the air (a strategy that WWE adapted and uses to this day) to achieve the same thing. And by breaking the rules, I reinforced the idea that we were the brash, take-no-prisoners bad boys of Monday-night TV.

New Audience

The dirtsheets and other media commentators at the time said we beat
Raw
by “stealing” their audience. We did certainly get a lot of
Raw
viewers, especially as the weeks passed. We also brought many of our Saturday viewers to Monday night. But looking back on
Nitro
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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

from, as I like to say, 32,000 feet, it seems to me that a lot of what we did was develop a new audience.

WWE at the time had a core audience that was pretty young.

We went after an older group, eighteen- to thirty-nine-year-olds, and we got them. The buzz we generated got a lot of new people sampling us. That’s why I believe the majority of our growth came from an audience that hadn’t been watching. It got to the point where ABC took out a full-page ad in the
Wall Street Journal
during the “up-fronts” (the period during the year when most ad sales decisions are made), trying to convince advertisers not to “Wrestle with Their Ad Dollars.” This was because we were taking a big chunk out of
Monday Night Football
’s ass.

Among the other benefits of our television success, our house show business started to increase. We went from failing to draw five thousand people at an arena to drawing ten, fifteen, and twenty thousand people. It actually got to a point where people scalped tickets out in front of the arenas. The house show business, which had been losing money since day one of WCW’s existence, became extremely profitable.

This period—from the moment Ted Turner threw Monday night into my lap, and for the next two or three years—remains the highlight of my professional life. There was no point where I felt anything other than elated. I felt there was nothing I couldn’t do, nothing I couldn’t achieve. I was working like crazy, putting in ridiculous hours, but it was all out of passion. The work I’d put in before had finally paid off. The risks, the sacrifices—even those cold winter nights with no heat when I’d fed my kids beans and venison while my cars were repossessed from my driveway—were all suddenly worth it.

To sit down and watch something like this grow before your very eyes was intoxicating. We went from being Turner Broadcasting’s redheaded stepchild to being on top of the world.

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Corporate Realities

Mr. ATM

Nobody in WWE would want to say, “God, Eric Bischoff and that crew down at WCW, they’re more creative than us, they’re smarter than us. They’ve got a better feel for the business than us.” It was a lot easier for people to stomach what was going on by saying, “Oh, those motherfuckers, they don’t really understand anything. All they did was steal our talent and spend money. They didn’t outsmart us; they outspent us. They have deep pockets. They have the resources.”

Part of that was true. We
did
have financial resources that they didn’t. But what was more true was that we knew what to do with it. We reinvented the business. That’s what turned the tide.

Now, granted, I couldn’t have gotten Hulk Hogan, I couldn’t have gotten Scott Hall, we couldn’t have gotten Kevin Nash—we couldn’t have done the things we did at
Nitro
if we didn’t have the money. We—Turner—also owned our own network; there’s no question that was a huge advantage.

But there were some big disadvantages, too. As far as the corporate side was concerned, we were a pimple on a hamster’s ass, despite the fact that Ted Turner liked us. For a lot of people at Turner Broadcasting, we were a lot more trouble than we were worth.

We had a high visibility when it came to lawsuits and injuries and issues related to violence on television. We attracted a lot of negative attention because of the nature of the business we were in.

We were constantly getting memos from the legal side of Turner Broadcasting trying to prevent us from making some of the same mistakes that had been made in the past.

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Violence & Blood

WCW had a policy forbidding the deliberate use of blood at matches. In other words, guys weren’t supposed to cut or “blade” themselves during shows, even though it was a time-honored technique for adding a little drama to the matches.

People would write in or call and say how terrible it was that they saw blood. Media reports about how AIDS could be transmit-ted through blood made the network sensitive to the issue. Turner Broadcasting’s legal department said, “Look, it’s an unnecessary risk.

Don’t do it.”

Turner Broadcasting then tried to tell us that under no circumstances—even if it was an accident—were we to show blood. I thought that was stupid and overreacting, and wrote my own policy.

Personally, I was never a big fan of blood. Blood isn’t something that makes people enjoy the product more. I think if occasionally it happens in the course of a match by accident, it happens. You show it. But if the match has so little drama that you’re forced to cut your head open, you probably messed up earlier on.

Several of the wrestlers, especially the old-timers, were upset.

Blood was part of the formula that they had grown up with. They felt that by not being able to do it, they were at a disadvantage. But I think it’s overrated, and I don’t see how not adding it into the storylines ever hurt us.

Sharing Production Teams

Another negative of being at Turner had to do with our production people.

Wrestling is a unique business. You can’t put an ad in the paper and expect the best people to walk through the door with their ré-

sumés in hand. The talent pool just isn’t that deep. This is true even for the midlevel production people. If you’re looking for the best ENG crew to do a football game, you can find plenty of qualified PRIME TIME

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people just by putting an ad in the trades, and find five or ten of the very best in the business. The same is not true in wrestling.

Wrestling is a unique product even to produce.

Our problem was that most of the people producing our shows weren’t WCW employees. They were Turner Broadcasting System crew members who did everything TBS did—the Hawks and the Braves, for example. We would get them as they became available.

Because of the status of WCW within the Turner organization, we didn’t always get the cream of the crop. If the question was,
Are
the Hawks going to get the A list or is the WCW going to get the A list,
the answer was a no-brainer.

That’s not to say that we didn’t have good people. But on any given week or month we might have two or three or four different guys doing the same job. They’d get transferred around based on the needs of the company. Oftentimes, we’d have cameramen posted on the ring corners who were phenomenal shooters when it came to basketball or baseball, but didn’t have a clue about wrestling. Unless you’ve been around a wrestling ring for a long time, and you know how to anticipate what’s going to happen, by the time you get your camera to the action, it’s gone. And that made production challenging.

Not only did that remain a problem as we grew successful, it became more challenging in different ways. When we were that small company on TBS producing a weekly show in front of 750 winos in downtown Atlanta, our matches weren’t that hard to shoot. But when you start producing complicated shows in front of 30,000

people in prime time, not having the best in the business becomes a real handicap.

The Downside of Success

When a small business makes the right moves and starts to grow, it can become a real American success story. But that success can bring problems as well, especially if the growth is too fast. The work 170

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

that needs to be done increases exponentially. Mistakes that your customers might have overlooked or not noticed when you were small become major disasters when they’re multiplied by a thousand. People who might have been okay at a job when there wasn’t too much pressure may suddenly be in way over their heads when the screws are tightened.

We had a lot of the those problems as we became successful. A number were at least partially due to my lack of experience. Others were due to the politics that were so prevalent in the wrestling business. The culture of the business encourages backbiting, maneuvering to get ahead, and plain old foolishness. Layer that on top of a corporation with its own potential for political skullduggery, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

One lesson I learned too late: when you buy out a company—or in my case, when you take over a company—it’s often better in the long run to start from scratch, rather than trying to work with people who were part of the problem in the first place. We didn’t do that, partly because it was hard to find qualified people, and partly because I believed I could rehabilitate some of the cancer that I in-herited. But in hindsight, I really should have cleaned house when I took over the company early on.

I learned another very valuable lesson during this period: managing success is sometimes much more difficult than creating it in the first place.

Pulling the Trigger on

Jesse & Steve

Firing the Governor

Ironically, I may be best known in some circles as the guy who fired Jesse Ventura and Steve Austin, two guys who went on to considerable fame after I let them go.

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Jesse Ventura came into WCW from WWE as a color commentator in January 1992, when I was still a third-string announcer. At the time, he was a big star. He got a lot of attention. Every time he came into the CNN Center, he got the red carpet treatment. He was a big fish in a little pond.

When Jesse heard that Hogan was coming in, he started thinking about what that meant to him. As they say in the wrestling business, he started stirring the shit behind the scenes, badmouthing Hogan at every opportunity, talking about things that had happened in the past that put Hogan in a bad light.

Whether they were true or not true, in my opinion, was irrelevant. When a guy like Jesse Ventura, who was making a lot of money, started pissing and moaning because he was jealous—and no longer the biggest fish in our little pond—it really irritated me. It made me lose a tremendous amount of respect for Jesse.

The situation just kept deteriorating. It got to the point where Jesse would come in to do his work and literally pout like a child.

He’d have a bad attitude and mope around the studio. He’d treat people badly, show up late, and just in general behave like a spoiled brat.

One day in 1995, I believe, we were between shows at a Disney taping. There was always a little downtime between shows, an hour or maybe a half hour. All of a sudden we couldn’t find Jesse, who was supposed to be doing color commentary. We were ready to start taping—the crowd was there, Schiavone was at the play-by-play desk, the wrestlers were ready—but we had no Jesse Ventura.

Now mind you, this is a guy we’re paying close to a half million dollars a year to basically work a day or two a week. By anyone’s standards, that’s a lot of money for a talent who doesn’t have a lot of impact on the product.

We scrambled all over the place, looking for him while the audience and crew sat twiddling their thumbs. I finally found Jesse in another sound stage, sleeping in a dressing room.

I looked at him. He had three days’ growth on his face and