Countdown To Lockdown (13 page)

So it was with that Powers-imbued confidence that I spelled out Russo’s scenario to my oldest son, after picking him up at 12:30 a.m. — his latest night out ever — following his junior prom.

“Dad, that’s all wrong,” he said. “That story line is kind of like a carousel at an amusement park; people might enjoy it, but that’s not why they buy the ticket. They want to ride the roller coaster.”

I looked over at my son, who was wearing an all-white suit, a hot pink tie, and his Alex Shelley haircut. He looked completely ridiculous. But he was right. Now how do I explain all this to Russo?

March 29, 2009

On board Continental Flight 786, en route from Houston to Orlando

10:50 a.m.

“It’s the haircut, stupid. The haircut is the answer — the answer is the haircut.”

I spent most of my Houston hotel downtime desperately trying to get ahold of Russo. A couple of detailed voice messages — a soliloquy about not mixing in the casts of
Platoon
and
Tropic Thunder
because
two good movies about Vietnam would turn into one lousy one. Even a mention of Mike Brady’s (Robert Reed) rules of comedy; it’s okay to have a soldier with a brain injury who
thinks
he’s a superhero on the old seventies classic
M*A*S*H
, but the moment a real superhero shows up on the battlefield, all credibility goes sailing down the pipes. I threw in a little
Happy Days
as well — how the show was never quite the same for me after the bucolic Wisconsin town from the fifties received a visit from a real alien from the planet Ork. I know the Fonz has received a ton of heat over the years for that unique moment in time when he jumped the shark — yes, literally jumped a shark — while waterskiing in his traditional aquatic attire of leather jacket and white T-shirt. Although, if I really think about it, the show’s true shark-jumping moment for this particular
Happy Days
enthusiast involved a weight-training session in which the Fonz, arguably the toughest fictional guy on the planet, was seen bench-pressing somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 to 75 pounds of those cheap, plastic, sand-filled weights, sporting a set of pipe-cleaner biceps and what appeared to be the slightest hint of man boobs beneath the iconic plain white T-shirt. Heyyy!

Okay, where the hell was I? Oh, yeah, haircuts and phone messages. Well, I finally got a call from Vince, just as I was heading out to Booker’s show. I thought about talking over the whole thing in the car until I verified that the guy driving me was a huge wrestling fan who probably shouldn’t hear such extensive information about upcoming
Impact
episodes. So I said I’d call him from Booker’s show, hung up, and did my best to shrug off the emotional blow of seeing a Whataburger on the highway, only minutes after settling for Taco Cabana. Man, I love Whataburger; the mere sight of that majestic W reaching up into the Texas sky is enough to make my mouth water. It might just be my favorite thing about Texas — excluding, of course, my memories of a buxom thirty-nine-year-old Australian woman who worked the front desk at a little motel in Fort Worth, back in the winter of 1988. She’d be sixty now. Cool.

I did get through to Russo, and we had a solid talk. I think the memories of my last big creative battles — the ones detailed in
The Hardcore Diaries
— left such a negative impression on me that I forgot how the give-and-take with the writers and other powers that be can actually be fun, and beneficial, and invigorating.

I offered up my idea in detail. I knew from past experience that Russo dreaded — and rightfully so — the wrestlers who demand changes an hour or so before cameras roll. Back in the late nineties, when Russo helped pioneer (hey, I’m not kissing his butt; this is historical fact here) the action-adventure format for WWE, those two-hour melodramas that got people talking and eyeballs viewing, some of the biggest stars in the business would question Russo’s creativity, even his integrity — thinking in some cases that a segment or two not to their liking was some grand conspiracy to make them look bad. I remember seeing Russo despondent at the
WrestleMania XIV
after-party, usually an event of great celebration, due to an intense tongue-lashing he’d received from Shawn Michaels (remember, this was back in the “bad Shawn” days) in regard to a match on the show (which happened to be mine) that he felt made DX look weak. One night later, on a live
Raw
where Terry Funk and I were left battered and beaten, DX was stronger than ever. I don’t really know if any post-
Raw
apologies came Russo’s way, but if so, I doubt the apologies arrived with comparable vociferousness.

Russo liked my idea but wondered which opponent could take the place of Matt Morgan, who he had originally suggested.

“I don’t think it really matters,” I said. “Just as long as it’s a guy who’s been here since the beginning — a guy who wouldn’t like me trying to usurp Jeff [Jarrett]’s authority.” Yes, I really do use words like
usurp
occasionally.

Russo thought about it momentarily. “You know who’d be perfect, Mick?” he said.

“Who, Vince?”

“You really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

“You wanna know?”

“Yeah, I wanna know!” I yelled.

“Okay, I’m gonna let you know,” Russo hissed. “Because you had the talent to be a good fighter. But instead of that, you became a tomato; a leg breaker for some cheap, second-rate loan shark.”

“It’s a living,” I said weakly, unconvincingly.

Russo paused, dropping a verbal hammer: “It’s a waste of life.”

Okay, I went off on a wild
Rocky
tangent, refiguring dialogue that Burgess Meredith and Sylvester Stallone had shared in 1976. Actually Russo just wanted to suggest Alex Shelley as my opponent on
Impact.

The idea clicked right away. Shelley and I had a little history on the show, a little generational misunderstanding where I didn’t think he was showing proper respect to the Hardcore Legend. That little issue hadn’t gone anywhere, which was fine, because in my mind not every hint has to merit a full answer, just like every flirtatious line or gesture from an older Australian woman doesn’t have to end in unrivaled physical pleasure — even if in my case, it certainly did twenty-one years ago. Yes!

But was my limited history with Shelley enough of a reason for fans to tune in to our main event? Was it going to be a big enough issue for kids like my own, all around the country (no, I don’t mean that I have kids all around the country), to ask for just a little more
Impact
before they go to bed?

For some reason, I don’t think children’s bedtimes are factored in when discussing and analyzing ratings trends in wrestling. As I write this, we’re on something of a ratings roll in TNA — hitting 2 million U.S. fans a week for a few weeks running. Sure, it’s a way off from the heyday of the Monday Night Wars, where WWE and WCW were regularly pulling in a combined 10 million fans on Monday nights. Then again, back then, YouTube, the Internet, and digital video recorders weren’t such staples of the viewing diet. These days, it’s so easy to punch in a few letters on a keyboard and see the highs and/or lows of
a two-hour show in a matter of several minutes. So, I understand that it’s a continual weekly challenge to engage our fans with the proper mix of action/drama/comedy.

Ideally, a two-hour show will peak in the last ten minutes so that the maximum number of possible eyeballs are tuned in at the most vital time — the big win or loss, the surprise, the swerve, the turn, the cliff-hanger.

I think, in truth, most wrestling shows build an audience as they progress. Let’s face it, by now fans know the deal about those final few minutes. But these shows undoubtedly lose an audience, too — kids like my older ones, who have to get up at 6:15 in the morning, who would love to see what happens but simply can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to. Wrestling shows aren’t like
CSI
or
Law & Order
; they can be enjoyed on their own merits for ten minutes, fifteen, an hour, without seeming like a waste of time should the conclusion not be seen. The secret, then, is to gain more viewers than you lose throughout the course of those two hours.

Sometimes I think too much emphasis is placed on the ratings at the expense of wrestlers who might have a valuable niche audience, like Shelley or Sabin, or Jay Lethal or the Curry Man. Okay, not him. I remember a time several years ago when Jeff and Matt Hardy were almost thought to be ratings poison, especially when featured in television main events. Yet in a live setting, fans went absolutely crazy for them. Maybe they weren’t connecting with every demographic, but certain slices of our audience loved them. My former publicist at HarperCollins, Jennifer Robinson, told me that their book signings felt like Beatles concerts, yet the powers that be always seemed hesitant to really get behind them. I don’t want to sound mean here, but maybe they should have figured out that many of the Hardys’ die-hard fans were in bed way before the show ended.

I see the Machine Guns and guys like them as a new wave of Hardys, guys who may not appeal to every demographic but certainly should be given a shot at climbing that ladder of success. I’m hoping
that this match on
Impact
will be one step up that ladder for them, even if the real goal of the match is to get me one step closer to Sting at
Lockdown.
So here’s the challenge — how do we keep the ratings rolling with Sabin and Shelley in the main event when much of their fan base is tucked up in their bedrooms fast asleep?

It’s the haircut, stupid. I need to convince our fans that those faux Machine Gun Foley haircuts make this situation very personal — like it’s a parenting failure on my part. Like the Motor City Machine Guns have invaded my house and I don’t like it. I’m thinking of throwing in the line, “Even Ted Nugent wouldn’t want
those
guns in his house” — my attempt to reach out and hook those Second Amendment enthusiasts who stopped watching
Raw
when Stone Cold retired.

Here’s my big tagline. Ready? “When I’m done tonight, no child will want to look like Alex Shelley again.” Hopefully that line, delivered at 10:00 Eastern, will be enough for the Guns’ base to beg for another hour of TV time. If not, maybe it will entice those kids to willfully disobey their parents.

Hey, do you mind if I pat myself on the back a little here? Back in 1998, when I had the chance to do
The Three Faces of Foley
, my first video with WWE, I asked the director, Steve Cooney, if I might get a couple of the wrestlers to sit around in the seats at Nassau Coliseum, listening to my exaggerated stories of personal glory, instead of just talking to the camera. Cooney liked the idea. “Sure, who were you thinking of?” he said. I told him I was thinking of Matt and Jeff Hardy. “That’s funny,” Cooney deadpanned. “Really, who were you thinking of?” I told him I was serious; I wanted the Hardys in the video. “Okay, why?” Cooney asked, his face a mask of dread, as if these two kids were going to single-handedly ruin the shot simply by being in it. Keep in mind that in 1998, the Hardys were talented but underutilized extras, guys who did a great job making other guys look good. I looked at Cooney and said, “You know, Steve, I think one day these kids are going to be really big stars.”

Sure, I might have had doubts when I heard that Jeff missed a show
because his pet raccoon had gotten out of the house, climbed up a tree, and refused to come down, but overall I think time has proven me to be correctomundo — a little Fonzieism for you. Now about that time when I thought that Dwayne Johnson kid just wasn’t going to cut it? Well, I might have been wrong about that.