Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (11 page)

Before he lost it all, Watts picked up the phone to call Vince McMahon with an offer to sell out. But Vince already had more stations than he knew what to do with. Moreover, Watts’s UWF looked like it wouldn’t last through the summer. Why should Vince pay for something that he could get for free just by waiting?

On the way back to Dallas, Watts decided he had one more card to play. Vince may not have been interested, but Watts decided that Jimmy Crockett didn’t have to know that. So once he got back to his office, Watts had Jim Ross call Crockett with a deception, saying that McMahon was close to buying the UWF. Watts followed up the call personally a week later.

“Vince is just about at the table, Jimmy,” Watts purred. “If he buys us, he’s gonna put you guys out of business.”

Crockett had recently expanded into Florida, giving him a presence from Philadelphia to Miami. Watts was offering him arena contracts and local TV deals in the mid-South, the Midwest, and parts of the West Coast. And the more markets that he had for his show, the more he could promise advertisers a large single block of exposure. In March 1987, he flew to Tulsa to buy the UWF from an exhausted but relieved Cowboy Bill Watts.

“It was our downfall,” Jimmy’s younger brother David would say years later. “If we’d just sat back and let him go under, we could have had his TV contracts for free. Instead, we spent a million and inherited all of his past-due bills. And what the hell did we need with an office in Texas?”

FEWER THAN
a million homes were wired for pay-per-view when the first
Wrestlemania
was produced in March 1985. By 1987, the figure was 10 million, and Jim Troy, McMahon’s right-hand man, thought the time was ripe to test the new technology.

Troy realized it in 1986, after they’d drawn one hundred thousand pay-per-view buys to the second
Wrestlemania
, a three-city event broadcast from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. At the cable conventions he subsequently visited, cable operators were coming up to him to say that they had done unparalleled numbers. The technology was still primitive, and to enable it customers had to go to the office of their local provider and rent a cylindrical device that unscrambled the event’s signal when inserted between the television and the cable jack. Still, cable operators who served as few as ten thousand customers were renting the devices to as many as 18 percent of their viewers. That
buy rate
“made them superheroes in their markets,” Troy says. “It also created a buzz among the bigger cable providers.”

In anticipation of the third
Wrestlemania
, Troy started bringing Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, and Macho Man Randy Savage to the conventions, creating even more of a stir. By early 1987, the
Saturday Night Main Event
was pulling in strong ratings on NBC,
All-American
Wrestling
was placing in the top fifteen of the new Nielsen cable ratings for USA, and the WWF’s syndicated offerings were being seen on three hundred stations from coast to coast. Looking at the remarkable forces arrayed in their favor, Troy walked into Vince’s office one day and said, “I don’t want to scare you, but we’re on track to do five times what we did last year.”

Affiliates of the fledgling Fox television network were the biggest buyers of WWF’s syndicated shows. The largest among them was in Detroit, home to the ninety-three-thousand-seat Pontiac Silverdome, where the pope had delivered Mass on his tour of the United States. Vince joked that since he was nearly as big as God, he should play the Silverdome, too.

To fill an arena of that size, he’d need the industry’s two biggest draws as the main event, that much was clear. Hogan, the number one gate attraction in the business, was the obvious choice as the baby-face. The choice of the heel was more problematic, because the only other man who Vince knew could guarantee a sellout was waiting to die in England.

Andre Roussimoff was the most traveled act that Vince’s father had ever booked, a gentle giant from the French countryside who’d risen up to six-foot-three before reaching his teen years. His size lent him a precocious confidence, and he used it to leave home well before the other boys in his village, making his way to Paris, where he was discovered by a troupe of wrestlers. They took him to see Algeria, South Africa, Morocco, Tunisia, and most of western Europe, all before he’d reached his twenty-first birthday. Sadly, that was the midpoint of his life. The doctors who’d diagnosed Andre as suffering from gigantism had told him that he probably wouldn’t reach the age of forty. Once he understood that he had to live twice as fast as other men, he indulged all of his appetites for alcohol and food, frequently driving with a trailer hitched to the back of his car that was filled with beer. World Wrestling Federation referee Tim White recalls having the unenviable task of helping to drag the six-foot-eleven wrestler (who was always advertised as being seven-foot-five) to his room after he drank a hundred of those bottles in a single sitting. During the late 1970s, he was the industry’s biggest international box office attraction. Dubbed “Andre the Giant” by Vince McMahon Sr., he was sent to virtually every territory in the world until the wrestling war broke out in 1984 and McMahon refused to allow the Frenchman to work outside the realm of the WWF. Andre was beloved by his fellow wrestlers because of the money he earned them. As “Superstar” Billy Graham put it, “We drew great together, but if you couldn’t draw well with Andre, you might as well get out of the business. He was always paid much more than the average Boys, but you couldn’t get mad about that. Whenever we went to eat or drink, he’d never let me buy a thing.”

By 1987, when he’d finally reached forty, Andre’s drinking wasn’t fun anymore. Instead, it masked the excruciating back pain that was the result of his sustained growth. He’d given up wrestling and was in England filming Rob Reiner’s
The Princess Bride
when Vince called to beg him to come back to the States.

The Giant knew why the promoter was calling before he could even ask the question, and he told Vince to save his airfare. But McMahon wouldn’t be that easily dissuaded, flying to England to make his case in person. As he’d later recall, “When I got over there Andre was in such a state of depression, I thought he really was looking for a place to die.” Vince persisted in making Andre believe that he had one great performance left.

Before he left England, Andre would have to undergo back surgery so complex that the medical team was required to build customized surgical equipment just to operate. The most baffled member of the team was the anesthesiologist, who didn’t want to administer so much to the five-hundred-pound patient that he’d kill him, or so little that Andre would wake up in the middle of the operation with his back laid open. Asked what he thought, Andre simply shrugged his shoulders and said that it usually took two liters of vodka to give him a warm feeling. Eventually, he came through the operation well enough to return to the United States so he could hear the one thing he hadn’t yet heard in his fabled career: the sound of seventy-eight thousand people screaming his name.

Gerald Brisco, who was running a closed-circuit viewing of the show, remembers getting goose bumps when the first live feed from Detroit came over the screen at the Civic Center in Lakeland, Florida. He’d packed venues in towns like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Tampa in the seventies and eighties, but they weren’t a tenth the size of the Silver-dome. Aretha Franklin was singing “America the Beautiful.” There were gimmicks like wrestling midgets, Alice Cooper, and Brutus Beefcake shaving Adrian Adonis’s head bald after the four-hundred-pound Adonis lost his match. And there were serious wrestlers, such as Ricky Steamboat and Randy Savage, who turned in a match for the ages. But at the top of the ticket lay the pairing that caused traffic to snake for miles around the Silverdome.

Forced to wear a back brace beneath his long wrestling tights, and with numbness below his knees, Andre was a shell of his former self. That meant Hogan had to carry the match, or
sell it
, making it seem that Andre’s plodding was part of a strategy and not just painful immobility. Hogan resurrected Andre’s better days for ten nostalgic minutes, generously selling all of his chops and headbutts, after which he moved into his patented finisher, the
Superman
comeback—a familiar series of moves in which Hogan would throw his opponents into the ropes, put a boot to their faces as they repelled back into the ring, and then drop his leg across their upper torsos when they went in for the winning pinfall. Andre didn’t think much of the finish, but as the two clenched, he whispered into Hogan’s ear, “Slam me, boss.” And at that, Hogan scooped up Andre’s massive frame and ended the Giant’s career by sending him to the mat.

In Pontaic, $1.6 million worth of tickets sold that day, but it was the pay-per-view sales that dropped jaws across the industry. According to the WWF’s figures, more than half a million other fans parted with $19.95 to watch the three-hour event, adding another $10 million to the bottom line.

Jim Troy was right. Pay-per-view was the future of the business.

AS JIM
Crockett was the first to admit, he couldn’t write a story to save his life. That’s why he needed someone creative at his side. Someone like Virgil Runnels Jr.

Runnels was the son of an Arkansas plumber and a graduate of West Texas State, a pipeline for football players turned wrestlers. He began his career in Dallas in the late 1960s as half of a tag team called the Texas Outlaws, weighing 275 pounds of nearly pure fat and having dark, silent-movie actor circles around his eyes. But with bleached blond curls, sequined clothes, and a love of Western props like cowboy bells, he was just eccentric enough to catch on in the Lone Star State and become a staple of the pulp magazines.

Runnels, who wrestled as Dusty Rhodes, was a fast talker, and when he spun a story about a hardscrabble childhood in Austin “where I got my first paycheck at eight diggin’ ditches,” it delighted working fans. He said that he grew up in a “colored neighborhood” in Austin, and he spoke like it. His rapid-fire dialect was part Mississippi and part Mexico, but he called it Texas jive. Wrestlers grow stale repeating themselves, however, and in the mid-1970s Rhodes dropped the outlaw image to reinvent himself, using his real-life rags-to-riches story to create a character he called the American Dream. It was a canny move, cementing his role as the plodding workhorse foil for glamorous heels like the sequin-wearing Ric Flair. As Rhodes’s lunch-bucket celebrity kept rising, he kept growing more eccentric, wrapping himself in mink coats that reached down to his spurs. His act reached its zenith in 1981, when his forehead was a puffy mass of scar tissue and the NWA’s bosses briefly let him wear their heavyweight belt.

It was Rhodes’s burgeoning reputation as a booker, however, that caught Crockett’s eye. In Florida, where he’d gone to work in the seventies, Rhodes invented several memorable storylines, or
angles
, the last of which involved a feud with a Satan-worshiping wrestler named Kevin Sullivan. In their bloody final blowout in the fall of 1983, Sullivan entered Lakeland’s Civic Center chanting, “The American Dream will die!” Rhodes was bitten, beaten, and ultimately pounded into the mat that night. But soon thereafter, he turned up in Charlotte, where he helped create the first of a new generation of multimatch supershows, which he named
Starrcade
.

This was still two years before the first
Wrestlemania
, and the maiden
Starrcade
drew fifteen thousand fans to the Greensboro Coliseum, while twice that number watched via closed-circuit in theaters in three states. Its 1984 successor was an even bigger affair, with stages in Greensboro and Atlanta equipped with closed-circuit screens so fans in one place could see the action happening in the other. By 1987,
Starrcade
was larger and more established than
Wrestlemania
, and its architect was considered the idea man who’d turned Crockett into the only promoter in the country with the wherewithal to mount a challenge to the WWF’s hegemony.

McMahon and Crockett both grew up in their father’s wrestling companies with dreams their daddies dared not have. But Crockett didn’t have the burning ambition that it took to fuel those dreams. He took on McMahon for the same reason he’d run for the North Carolina state senate those many years earlier: because it was expected of him, and he was a man who’d always done what was expected.

So Crockett went to New York and hired consultants to vie for the same national ad accounts that the WWF was going after. He also decided, much as Bill Watts had, that it made sense to move the family’s headquarters to Dallas. After all, he was recently remarried, and the cliquish social circles of Charlotte were making him feel claustrophobic. And so it was that in the summer of 1987, Jim Crockett picked up stakes and moved into the old Dallas office of the UWF.

If Crockett liked Dallas for the change it provided, Rhodes loved it for the money it let him spend. One could only be so flashy in Charlotte, but in Dallas the native Texan bought a red convertible Mercedes and a house in a pricey suburb where several of the NFL Cowboys lived. He also had Crockett sign the checks for lavish perks, like a ten-seat, state-of-the-Falcon jet that reached a top speed of seven hundred miles per hour. “We were living like Frank Sinatra,” says Arn Anderson, a member of Dusty Rhodes’s inner-circle. “Your wife would drop you off at the airport and two captains would be there to pick up your bags. Then you’d fly to the date in this private jet, and a limo would be waiting to take you to the show. When you were done, it took you to a four- or five-star hotel. I remember there was a little guy who worked for Jimmy, he must have weighed a buck-and-a-quarter, and one day he walked out of an outdoor show in Florence, South Carolina, with his coat so stuffed with money that he probably weighed three hundred pounds. We did $45,000 that night, all cash and carry. But did we need two planes? Did Ric Flair need to run up a $60,000 limousine bill one year? No.”