Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (15 page)

Now that Hogan was being dragged through the mud, accused of being a steroid addict, Vince saw his company under the kind of attack from which it might not recover. If he wanted to save it, he’d need to go on a public relations offensive.

The opening salvo came with an op-ed piece in the sports section of the
New York Times
on Sunday, July 14, in which he announced that he was going to start testing his wrestlers for steroids. Three days after the media had a chance to mull that over, he walked briskly into the Terrace Room at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, dressed sharply in a gray suit and a green necktie. Wine-colored velvet curtains hung in the background, lit by eight-foot floor lamps that sprouted golden cande-labras from a marble base. Marble archways framed the stage with a flowered carpet underfoot. Before twenty reporters, he contritely conceded that yes, he’d used steroids. But it was only once, he insisted, and in the late eighties. As Associated Press writer John Nelson observed, “This was a place for high society and tea parties. Not Haystack Calhouns …. But there was no doubt that Vince was making a serious effort to gain our trust.”

McMahon would have preferred to leave things there, but Hogan insisted on making his own appearance later that night on a talk show hosted by the comic Arsenio Hall. Looking dewy-eyed at his host, Hogan also made a concession: He’d taken a synthetic hormone three times, but just to get over a shoulder injury. Incredulous that anyone might question his integrity, he took out a picture of himself as a twelve-year-old Little Leaguer. “I trained twenty years, two hours a day to look like I do, Arsenio,” he said. “I am not a steroids abuser and I do not use steroids.”

Ted Smith happened to be cooking shrimp at home when the show aired. Watching Hogan lie, he shook his head in complete disgust.

SEVEN

THE STEROID ALLEGATIONS CONSUMING
the WWF in the summer of 1991 were ratings death. The company’s Saturday night cable rating on USA declined by 16 percent, and, with Hulk Hogan in self-imposed exile, its house show attendance was down by a third. It was the perfect time for Turner’s two-year-old investment in Georgia Championship Wrestling, which had been renamed World Championship Wrestling, to pay off. But as everyone from Turner on down in his organization had learned, wrestling wasn’t like any other kind of programming they did.

For one thing, it fit uneasily in a corporate culture where the heads of CNN, the Headline News Network, TBS, and TNT already felt as if they had to fight for respect among the big three networks. Men like Tom Johnson, the former
Los Angeles Times
publisher who ran the Cable News Network, blanched at sharing an organizational chart with wrestlers. While McMahon drew most of the heat for running a company built on steroids, Turner’s top executives only had to look in the commissary line to see men like Rick Rude, a surly shitkicker who took so many steroids that his heart would give out when he turned forty. Turner had just sunk $44 million into the 1990 Goodwill Games as part of a continuing quest to fashion himself into a global ambassador of athletic ideals. Those executives weren’t about to have men slicing their heads open with razors and gushing blood on the Super-station. And, to some extent, Turner agreed with their caution. Wrestling was a source of ratings for him, not a crusade. That was why, soon after taking over the company in 1989, he had asked his vice president of syndication, Jack Petrik, to run it. On paper the appointment made sense. Petrik was a turnaround expert and knew the syndication world. But he was just four years away from retirement and had little interest investing much of his personal or budgetary capital in the little orphaned division. So he’d handed WCW to an old friend by the name of Jim Herd, who’d once run the St. Louis television station KPLR. Since KPLR carried Sam Muchnick’s
Wrestling from the Chase
, Petrik assumed that Herd knew about wrestling. Herd assumed the same thing, projecting a well-mannered assurance when he met Turner for the first time. They’d barely sat down to lunch in October 1988 when Turner said, “Why don’t we get some big broad and have her whip the hell out of all the guys.”

“You can’t do that,” a slightly stunned Herd replied. “We need a legitimate look.”

“You can’t?” Turner replied, disappointed.

Herd ushered the show out of its cramped home in TBS’s studios and into a warmer Shakespearean theater a few blocks away. He also paid for a more elaborate set complete with indoor pyrotechnics—the first time they were put to such use. But as the weeks passed, Herd came to realize that he had few allies at TBS beyond his old friend Petrik. When he asked Turner Sports to run promos for his pay-per-views, he was given a cold shoulder. When he requisitioned time on one of CNN’s sets so he could film a mock wrestling news show, he got a call from a furious CNN executive who yelled, “You will not belittle our organization.” Any request for cross-promotion was a war. The welcome mat was out, but the door was closed.

Herd decided that he needed a way of getting Turner’s attention, not to mention a locker-room emissary who could keep the twenty wrestlers who hated him away from the twenty who didn’t. For that he turned to Ric Flair.

Flair had rolled into Charlotte in 1974 after driving in from Minnesota and never looked back. He seemed to come fully formed, with a trademark war cry that once heard was unforgettable. It started deep inside of him, and by the time it rose through his lungs, his cry of “Whooooo!” sounded like the whiskey-drenched scream of a hillbilly who’d shot himself in the foot. Playing every small town from Atlanta to Miami, Flair picked up nicknames like Nature Boy, Slick Ric, and Space Mountain (as in: “Space Mountain may be the oldest ride in the park but it still has the longest line,
whooooo!”)
.

When Jimmy Crockett started gaining power in the NWA and demanded that his position be recognized by having a world champion drawn from Charlotte, the NWA’s bosses agreed to vote in Flair. A hard-line believer in kayfabe, he didn’t acknowledge to anyone, not even his to kids, that what he did was fake. He figured that there was nothing fake about the blood blisters he left the ring with every night, the gashed foreheads that streaked his blond hair red, or the cartilage that rattled around his knees.

But despite the years he’d invested in the NWA, Flair was ambivalent about remaining in Atlanta. The star makers in Stamford had helped get Hulk Hogan a line of lunch boxes, a cartoon on CBS, and a movie. What had the NWA given Flair? A reputation as the all-time greatest wrestler among an increasingly irrelevant audience of little old ladies and lunch-bucket true believers. Herd’s internal research told him everything he needed to know about where the business was going. The new war was being waged over eight- to ten-year-old boys. The question was whether a forty-year-old man from another era could adapt.

Surprisingly, Flair and Herd started off the year of 1989 with promise. Flair talked up one of his oldest friends, the veteran Ricky Steamboat, and Herd flew to Charlotte to sign him. Steamboat was what bookers called a
cherry
, a handsome, wholesome babyface with wide-set eyes and chiseled muscles. He was a student of the craft, too, an artist who studied boxing matches so he could imitate what it looked like to stagger back after being hit, with air whooshing from the lungs and the eye squinting from being poked. As the two men came to know one another in the seventies, their plays became increasingly intricate, jockeying between sadism and surrender.

When Herd reunited them it was as if no time had passed at all. They started with a match in Chicago that included twenty-four two-counts over twenty minutes and reached a crescendo when Steamboat climbed to the top rope and flew off, twisting his body in midair so that he took out Flair
and the referee
when he landed. They went at it so hard a few weeks later in New Orleans that by the end of the fifty-five-minute match, Steamboat feigned being unable even to stand over the laid-out Flair, letting his legs give out beneath him.

Once Herd saw that Flair and Steamboat had reached their absolute peaks, he added a new character—a forty-five-year-old Texas brawler named Terry Funk. Where Steamboat was pretty and athletic, Funk, who’d held the world title fifteen years earlier, looked like a ferret, with a body covered by scars from barbed-wire slashes and one too many chicken-wire matches. Knowing his job was to get down and dirty, Funk waited until Flair had pinned Steamboat to reclaim the title in Nashville in May 1989, then rushed into the ring, grabbed Flair by his trunks, and drilled him headfirst with a
piledriver
into a table at ringside. Chaos ensued as Flair was carted off to a local hospital. Over the next few weeks, fans saw brilliantly taped spots of Flair in his recovery bed, threatening every manner of revenge. Herd was so excited about Flair’s return in July that he went to the Maryland Athletic Commission to ask for a waiver of an AIDS-inspired law that banned excessive bleeding from sporting events. He got what he wanted, and so did the 150,000 fans who bought Flair’s return match on pay-per-view. After the men spent a half hour pummeling each other from pillar to post, Flair limped to victory covered in blood.

Herd was on a roll and started experimenting with ways to make the violence seem more real. In a famous bout that would come to be known as the “I Quit” match, he gave the referee a cordless microphone, and when Funk gave Flair one of his piledrivers, the sound of Flair’s head crashing to the mat reverberated into the cheap seats. The two went on to whip each other like dogs until finally, as Funk slid through the ropes, across a table, and to the cold concrete floor, he screamed, “I quit.” The match was seen in 3.3 million homes, tying a record for the most-watched match in cable.

Unfortunately, not everyone at CNN Center shared Herd’s euphoria about the ratings. At TBS, an executive who allowed the word “damn” to go out over the air could expect to find a reprimand in his or her personnel file. When Funk pretended to asphyxiate Flair with a bag in another of their struggles, Herd found a memo on his desk the next morning telling him to come to the fourteenth floor posthaste. “You can’t goddamn choke people with plastic bags, “Turner yelled as soon as Herd walked in. “We have kids watching.”

But by then, Funk was also starting to run his course. And because the WWF was in the midst of a muscular offensive—in effect daring the WCW to match it bicep for bicep—Herd decided Flair should lose to Lex Luger (Larry Pfohl), the biggest body in his arsenal. Unfortunately, Flair had a clause in his contract giving him final say over how he dropped his title belt. Insisting that it was beneath him to lose to Luger, Flair demanded that Herd either scrap the idea or release Flair from his contract, freeing him to sign with the WWF.

Herd was furious. After an aide got into a screaming match with Flair, he asked how it had ended. Told that the two men had settled their differences, he groused, “God damn it, none of my prayers are ever answered. I was hoping that son of a bitch would get his lights punched out.” Still, Herd couldn’t fathom explaining to Turner how he’d let his favorite wrestler fall into McMahon’s hands. So he folded, agreeing to let Flair drop the belt to Steve “Sting” Borden, a budding superstar from California.

If the misadventure taught Herd anything, it was that you needed more than just a couple of big names to avoid being held hostage by your talent. But creating wrestlers was a more subtle science than it first appeared. Herd gathered focus groups. He commissioned surveys. He even tried creating a few acts of his own. (One day he stunned his booking committee by saying, “Let’s get a tag team with humps. We’ll call them the Hunchbacks. It’ll be great because they’ll never get pinned!”) After the July 1990 match that moved the title from Flair to Sting, Borden was finally paired with what looked to be a promising creation—a masked ghost from his past who appeared from the rafters in puffs of fire and smoke to taunt him. Inexplicably, a different actor played the masked Scorpion at each taping. (At house shows it was worse; the mask was handed to any available body without regard to talent.) A bogus cliff-hanger promising an unmasking didn’t help: Sting ripped off Scorpion’s black mask to reveal a red one while the “real” Scorpion cackled over a loudspeaker from the wings. By the time of
Starrcade
in December, there was so little life left to the angle that Flair was hastily inserted to end it. But even that surprise ending was a bust. There was no mistaking that the long flowing blond hair beneath the mask belonged to Flair. A month later at the Meadowlands in New Jersey, the Scorpion angle was history and Flair was given the belt back for a seventh time after pinning Sting.

Frustrated beyond measure, Herd did something he would sorely regret. He picked up the phone and called Dusty Rhodes.

Rhodes failed to make the transition into TBS with the other Crockett alumni (he was fired), and he blamed Flair for it. The men had barely spoken since the last days of the Crockett empire, when Rhodes kept Flair on an embarrassing losing streak with the notorious
Dusty finish
. In the interim, Rhodes went to work for Vince McMahon and allowed himself to be cast as a buffoon. When he wasn’t being portrayed as a plumber with his head in toilets, he was sent into the ring wearing unflattering polka-dot suits, often with a chunky fifty-five-year-old African American valet named Sapphire beside him. It wasn’t just a matter of Vince indulging his passion for humiliating ex-NWA belt holders whenever he could. It was, Rhodes’s friends decided, the worst case they’d ever seen of someone willing to mortgage the last bits of his pride to stay in the limelight.

But the call from Herd proved there would always be a hapless executive who could be conned. So Rhodes arrived in Atlanta early in 1991 with a bevy of his own acolytes to run things. He quickly holed himself up in an office down the hall from Herd and, like a writer possessed, started throwing off ideas. He sent three wrestlers out into the West for location shoots where they met odd and often funny characters. He dressed a six-foot-ten, 305-pound former Tennessee basketball center named Kevin Nash as Oz and introduced him into the ring with midgets as Munchkins and a monkey that couldn’t control its bladder.