Controversy Creates Cash (40 page)

Fortunately his hair’s always been long enough to cover up the ear that’s no longer there, and he chooses to walk around with half of his teeth missing, so I don’t think it had any psychological effect on him. It was just another case of Mick being Mick.

I was never a big fan of that kind of high-risk crash-and-burn performance. But as the guy running WCW and responsible for the people who worked for me, it was just too much of an exposure. If we were to allow him to do some of the things that he wanted to do, they’d be on my conscience as a person, forget the corporate liability.

What I tried to do was say,
Mick, you can’t go as far as you want
to go here.
And that was one of the reasons that he left and went over to ECW. Because I was this rising star that people hated, Mick kind of used me to get himself over. By burying me, using my character as a tool to be the babyface, he got himself over.

That ECW crowd lived on the Internet. Ninety-eight percent of the audience were the kind of guys who stock shelves at Kmart part-time. The Internet and ECW were the only social lives they had.

But they loved the crazy shit that Mick did. And when Mick came out and said, “I left WCW because Eric Bischoff is an ass-hole”—the roof blew off.

It was an automatic way to get himself over as a character. And then before you know it, in the minds of a lot of people, it was all true.

NBC

The real turning point for WCW came in August 1998, when I lost control of my company and its future. But even by the end of the 308

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year, you couldn’t see it in the ratings. You couldn’t see it in the financial books. You couldn’t tell by the number of people coming to events. But our fate had been sealed.

I didn’t want to accept that, but the NBC fiasco that took place during the end of 1998 and beginning of 1999 left no room for doubt.

At the time, the NBA and its players were involved in a labor dispute. NBC ended up with some holes in their programming schedule. Gary Consadine called me, and I flew out to L.A. to discuss some ideas for a special. It was a fantastic opportunity; WCW

had never had a prime-time special on one of the big three networks. We could use a special to bolster our image and reposition WCW, growing our audience just at the point where the ratings were really starting to slip.

We came up with an idea that we called the
St. Valentine’s Day
Massacre.
The special would end with Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra getting a divorce in the middle of the ring. Everyone else has weddings; we were going to go the other way!

I got the green light from NBC and went back to Harvey Schiller for his approval right before Christmas.

“Harvey, here’s what we’ve got. We can do a two-hour special on
NBC. It’s prime time. It’s a great way to reposition ourselves and do
something out of the box—bigger than and different than WWE. What
do you think?”

Unfortunately, Harvey was no longer in a position to make that kind of decision on his own. He had to take it to a committee of Turner execs. I got a call back right after the first of the year from ad sales. I was told, “Yeah, that’s a great opportunity, but we don’t want to do it.”

Ad sales.

Ad sales!’

They apparently felt that by putting our brand on NBC, we would put Turner salespeople at some kind of disadvantage.

I was fucking livid.

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Anyone who knew anything about building a brand and running a business should have recognized that a prime-time special is one hellacious opportunity. Worse, they didn’t even call me as soon as they’d made their decision, dragging matters along until well after the first of the year. I had to put off the NBC people, which of course didn’t make them particularly happy.

It still pisses me off.

Off the Books for Good

The only way to explain that decision is this: there were people at a very high level in the Turner/Time Warner organization who absolutely did not want WCW to succeed. They did everything they could, from early 1998, to lay the groundwork for WCW’s failure, so they could get WCW off the books.

They couldn’t do that when Ted Turner was in firm control, but by now his grip had slipped.

They couldn’t attack WCW directly, either. They had to play the corporate game, waiting until the time was right. As Machiavellian as that may sound, I can’t think of any other reason why such a great opportunity was sabotaged.

Fresh Perspectives

A Trip to Paris

This was one of the most miserable times of my life.

What I really needed was to be as far away from WCW as I could be to gain perspective. During the late winter and early spring of 1999, I stayed away as much as possible. I still had responsibility for the division
on paper,
but I cut back as much as possible—no more seventy-hour workweeks. I did a lot less travel, and disengaged emotionally as much as possible.

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One good thing did happen to me in early 1999; I took my daughter Montanna to Paris for spring break.

She was a high school student at the time, and very interested in French, which she’d been studying since the sixth grade. Going to France was something she really wanted to do, and it was an opportunity to spend time with her that I’d rarely had since taking over WCW.

My son and I share a lot of similar hobbies and interests. I like to ride motorcycles; most young men like that as well, and he’s no exception. I took him hunting and fishing with me from the time he was five. We’d fly out to Wyoming and fish together, hunt together, just do a lot of things together.

I didn’t have a lot of those kinds of bonding opportunities with my daughter. Fathers and daughters are just different. But when she expressed an interest in seeing Paris, I thought that was a great opportunity for us to do something together. It was one of the first times in a long time that I put her before everything else.

We had a wonderful time. We had a great guide who really knew Paris very well. She took us to parts of the city that tourists rarely see, explaining the culture and history. But most importantly, I got very close to my daughter. We still make an effort to carve out father-daughter things.

Mishmash Set

In April 1999 we unveiled a new
Nitro
set. It was part of a broader TNT initiative to revamp the brand. It started as an attempt to freshen up our look, but ended as a new-retro tech stale mishmash clusterfuck. It was a perfect example of the old saying that a camel is a horse created by a committee.

A guy by the name of Jay Hassman, our vice president of marketing at the time, headed up the redesign. It was a collective effort that included focus groups and test marketing. The result was a perfect example of what happens when corporate committees try to handle creative.

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Some things, particularly things of a creative nature, have to be done only by people who have a demonstrated talent or instinct for creativity. When you involve noncreative people in a committee environment, the result will inevitably be muddled. Committee decisions are made by consensus and compromise, which is not the way creative decisions need to be made.

It was typical of what was going on at Time Warner at the time.

Everything was created by committee, and everything was compromised. None of WCW’s creative people had a say in the redesign.

By then, from Harvey Schiller on down, we had little input in our company.

Nitro Monologues

At one point in May I started doing monologues on
Nitro
that spoke frankly about the fact that we were no longer on top in the ratings. I took a fair share of the blame for that, and asked the audience to give us a chance as we tried harder. The monologues acknowledged my dual role as a performer and as the head of the company, and were an attempt at breaking the “invisible wall” between the audience and the performers.

Pro wrestling fans have a voracious appetite for information.

That’s one of the reasons the parasitic life forms that call themselves writers and editors have been able to make a living off dirtsheets. The wrestling audience loves inside information. Many fans are more interested in what’s going on behind the scenes than what’s going on inside the ring.

These spots were my attempt to recognize that. I felt that by avoiding talking about what was going on with the ratings or not acknowledging it, we would further antagonize that fan base. I thought that if I came out and said, “You’re right. We suck. But we’re going to fight, so give us a chance,” we might get one.

The spots didn’t have an impact, though. By that time, the audience had already voted with their TV remote. We’d gone from
Nitro
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doing 4s and 5s while
Raw
did 2s and 3s to
Nitro
doing 2s and 3s and
Raw
doing 4s and 5s. The disparity between the two brands was clear.

Viewers had embraced what Vince was doing—cutting-edge shows aimed at adults, with plenty of titillation—and had rejected what we were doing, a weak show aimed at being more “family-friendly” and handcuffed by the “vision” of corporate clones who didn’t know what night we aired. No amount of contrition or explanation was going to change that. People liked the competitor better. They voted with their remotes and gave a landslide victory to WWE.

WWE had conceded that the formula we’d invented was better and embraced that formula. They took our formula and did it bigger and better. For Steve Austin to stand up and flip off the audience, then chug a can of beer in the middle of the ring—that was a bold, bold move. They turned the volume way up.

By that point, we probably couldn’t have turned things around without going to extreme measures. Even now, the only thing I can think of that might have worked was to turn the volume up even higher, get even more outrageous and more real. But that wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t even a fantasy.

Tragedy & Dissension

Owen Hart

In the spring of 1999, Bret Hart began generating some interest with a new storyline that had him pretending to quit WCW. In March, he challenged Goldberg to a showdown in Toronto and was speared for his trouble—only to reveal an iron plate under the hockey shirt he was wearing. He denounced WCW and walked out.

Bret continued the angle over the next few weeks, at one point telling the Canadian press that he now had “more time to watch the Calgary Hitmen” in the hockey playoffs. A lot of fans and most of the media bought the storyline as real.

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Bret was scheduled to go on
The Tonight Show
May 24 to continue the angle. I forget the details now, but somehow Jay Leno’s interview on that Monday-night show was going to launch the next phase of the storyline. Bret and I planned to meet in L.A. the Sunday night before the show. We would work out the details of what we wanted to accomplish, and then I’d introduce him to Leno.

I got into L.A. a few hours ahead of time Sunday and was watching an NBA game when someone called me to tell me that Bret’s brother Owen had just died at a WWE Pay-Per-View. He’d fallen to his death during a stunt where he was supposed to rappel down to the ring.

I was shocked, and I didn’t believe it.

A couple of months before, as a twisted practical joke, one of the wrestlers in WCW had made a prank call claiming that Bret’s father had passed away. I’d been informed and told Bret he needed to call home. Bret did so, finding out that it wasn’t true at all.

It was a pretty disgusting joke, or rib, as the wrestlers liked to call it. So you can imagine what went through my mind this time. I had no doubt that the person who called me thought it was true, but they could have been easily fooled as I had been earlier in the year. So I placed three or four phone calls to people I knew I could trust. They confirmed that Owen had really died.

Bret was already in the air on his way to meet me. I knew I had to go to the airport and tell him.

As it turned out, I wasn’t the first one to tell Bret. He was on an Air Canada flight, and when the news broke, some people at Air Canada gave the information to the captain of the flight, who had it passed along to Bret.

I met Bret at the airport and could tell by the look on his face that he already knew. I spent several hours with him, trying to con-sole him as best I could. Then he went home. It was a tough time for Bret.

I canceled the deal with NBC. There was just no way I could ask Bret to go on the air. We also canceled a bit on
Nitro
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supposed to rappel to the stage. We were confident that his stunt was safe—we’d been doing it for a long time and had all sorts of precau-tions in place—but we wanted to be sensitive to the situation.

Even though he wrestled for us a few months later, I don’t think Bret ever really came back from his brother’s death. He was injured during
Starcade 1999
and soon after retired.

There are a lot of things I like about Bret. I was happy to see him up on the stage at the WWE Hall of Fame inductions at
WrestleMania 22.
It was a step in the right direction. Bret is carrying around a lot of baggage, and I hope he finds a way to lighten that load. Whether his issues with Shawn Michaels or Hulk Hogan or Ric Flair are real or imagined—or maybe a little of both—there’s a time when you just have to let those things go. Those issues are in the past; no one can go back and change anything. But the future, the opportunity to share moments like Hall of Fame dinners and the other events that happen from time to time, are in valuable.

People in the sports entertainment industry, especially those select few who have performed at the levels of Bret Hart, Hulk Hogan, and Shawn Michaels, share something that is special. They can find a lot of joy and laughter in the positive memories and experiences if they just put some of those past issues aside. I hope that happens some day.