Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (12 page)

With their expenses ballooning, the Crockett family needed an especially good showing from
Starrcade ′87
which shouldn’t have been a problem with 10 million homes wired to get pay-per-view. To lend it a more cosmopolitan air, Jimmy decided to move the production to Chicago. Fans in Greensboro, who felt responsible for the successes of the prior four events, were stunned. To them, it was no different than Walter O’Malley moving the Dodgers out of Brooklyn. But Crockett was looking west, not back east. From where he sat in Dallas, there wasn’t time to worry about bruised feelings in Greensboro. Two hundred cable systems had signed up to carry
Starrcade
. If he did anything remotely close to a buy rate of 10 percent at $19.95 a show, he could buy half of Greensboro with the eight-figure take he expected.

In retrospect, he would have been better off with a more developed sense of paranoia. Because Vince McMahon had no intention of letting Crockett crash a party he’d started.
Wrestlemania III
had turned into the mother of all pay-per-view events up to that point. On the heels of its success, Vince announced that he was going to air a new event called
Survivor Series
on Thanksgiving, the very same day as
Starrcade
‘87. A cable company that wanted
Survivor Series
, not to mention future WWF events, had to promise it wouldn’t air any other pay-per-view that day.

It was a bloodbath. Only five cable companies out of the original two hundred stayed loyal to the Crocketts.
Starrcade
wound up being bought by just fifteen thousand homes, leading the company to take in just $80,000 after expenses. Crockett might have weathered it if he had a strong base. But as he looked around, he realized that the twin revenue streams he’d hoped would carry him to the top—pay-per-view income and national advertising sales—were bone-dry. What he needed was a sales force akin to the one Vince had built. Instead, all he had was a few fast-talking consultants in New York and a bunch of grateful wrestlers driving Mercedes in Dallas.

As he turned to his bankers to make up for cash flow problems, resentments in the family began to flare. David, who’d grown up sharing the same room with his brother, had to choke back disgust every time he flew to Dallas and saw the suite of marble-floored offices bearing his father’s name. Big Jim always told them never to flaunt their money before the public, which is why he ran things out of his house until his wife got a new white carpet. Only then did he move his office to a boarded-up convenience store. Marble floors? David was sure their father was turning in his grave.

Like many of the wrestlers, David also believed that Rhodes was running on fumes. For one thing, he’d all but given up on writing. The days of his half-hour classic matches were gone, replaced by bland, blink-and-you-miss it playlets. Rhodes argued that he didn’t want to give away the best material free on television because he needed to save it for pay-per-view. Either way, the Saturday night show on TBS that McMahon had left with a 5.3 rating was doing a 2.9 in October 1987.

The ennui extended down to the arena shows, where Rhodes insisted on penciling himself in as Flair’s challenger long after the fans stopped caring. Worse, he’d fallen in love with a transparent trick ending: Dusty would win their matches, only to have the referee disqualify him on a technicality after the bell tolled.
²
The scheme allowed Flair to retain the NWA belt but at a cost: his title was diminished while Rhodes, whose weight problem was becoming embarrassing, clung to the limelight.

At Christmas of 1987, Rhodes launched a last-gasp series of
Bunkhouse Stampede
events in which two dozen wrestlers started in a ring and got eliminated as each was thrown over the ropes, until one was finally left standing. Rhodes had wrestlers flinging garbage cans and tire irons while dressed in Stetsons and spurs, and after eight successful shows he decided to turn the whole thing into a pay-per-view. The main event was to be a cage match—literally, a match held inside a locked wire cage placed over the ring—among the prior eight
Bunkhouse
winners. Once again, he penciled himself in to win the main event.

The January 24, 1988, show might have done business in Atlanta or Dallas. Yet Crockett inexplicably decided to stage it at Long Island’s Nassau Coliseum, a place that owed more to Billy Joel than Billy Jack. Making matters worse, McMahon once again counterprogrammed another show aimed to hobble Crockett. This time, he decided to attack via cable, creating a battle royal of his own and airing it free on USA. More than three million homes tuned in to see his show, called the
Royal Rumble
, a record up to that time for the network and the most homes ever tuned to a wrestling show.

Jim Cornette remembers sitting in the coliseum’s locker room for the Crockett show and looking around at the long faces. “We wanted to be there like we wanted to have our mothers hooked up to a machine. The crowd was dead. They hated everything because they’d never seen it.”

After it was over, several wrestlers climbed into a limousine to head to the Helmsley Palace hotel in Manhattan. Tully Blanchard, who was in a foul mood, was one of them.

“Dusty should just book himself against Dusty,” he muttered.

At the hotel bar, Blanchard’s mood got worse with every new drink that got poured. Finally, he and Crockett exchanged words.

“Dusty’s a genius,” Crockett insisted and walked away.

“This thing is going to hell and he can’t see it,” Blanchard said to no one in particular.

Through the late winter and spring, the hard travel and small audiences made it difficult for everyone to keep going. Rhodes and Flair started feuding, causing matches to be rewritten at the last minute because they wouldn’t work together. In one instance, Crockett had to go to Flair’s Charlotte home and beg him to work just to keep things afloat. Guaranteed half-million-dollar contracts with balloon payments needed to be paid.

Gasping for air, Crockett decided to take one last vindictive swipe at the WWF. In March 1988, he created a show called
Clash of the Champions
that he decided to air on TBS at the same time as McMahon’s
Wrestlemania IV
. It turned out to be an exceptional show with two matches that earned
Wrestling Observer
’s best-of-the-year honors.
³
But it was a Pyrrhic victory. The morning after it aired, Crockett was called into the office of TBS’s president, Jerry Hogan. He’d never been anything but kind to Crockett, but there was nothing kind or gentle in his voice now. The cable operators who’d abandoned Crockett’s
Starrcade
the prior November were irate at what was viewed as a malevolent move designed to rob them of millions in pay-per-view revenue.

“You will never, ever do anything like that again,” Hogan said. “Understood?” The blood drained out of Crockett’s face.

The dam burst the next month. His family’s accountant, who also worked for the company, came to him in a panic. He’d spent a long weekend studying the books and had discovered they needed a million dollars quick. Crockett’s word was still good with a few banks, so he went out and borrowed it. Two weeks later the accountant was back in Crockett’s office, his face grimmer than before. It was worse than he’d first projected. They needed another million just to make it through the summer. Crockett let out a long slow whistle. Then and there he knew he’d lost. The only question was whether he could find anyone to bail him out.

In a curious twist, the same man who’d helped him buy Georgia Championship Wrestling so he could get on TBS three years earlier now worked for him. So he went to that man, Jim Barnett, and asked for advice.

Barnett had just come through a terrible personal ordeal. While he was working for McMahon in Connecticut, he quietly kept in backchannel contact with Crockett. It was a stupid thing to have done. Barnett knew he was duty bound to McMahon, who was obsessive about secrecy. But Barnett had a faith in his ability to play both ends against the middle. When Vince found out he was talking to the enemy, he called Barnett into his office, demanded his resignation, and ordered him out of the building. Barnett was one of Vince’s father’s best friends and was distraught at being so summarily cut loose. That night, he went home and overdosed on sleeping pills. The McMahons sent flowers to their old friend in the hospital, and Linda sat at his bedside. But they didn’t invite him back. After he recovered, he picked up, moved to Dallas, and started working for the Crocketts in the fall of 1987. As the cash crisis loomed, he asked his new boss, “How would you feel about selling to Turner?”

The weary reply he heard was “I wouldn’t mind that.”

After months of negotiations, Jimmy gathered the family in their home back in Charlotte to discuss the inevitable. His mother and his sister Frances were there, as were David and their youngest brother, Jackie.

David pleaded the case for hanging on. He was incensed that his bullheaded brother squandered something that wasn’t only his.

“Let’s take the thing Chapter 11 and start all over again with the core of people we have,” he pleaded.

But Jim Crockett was well past that. After having his grand dreams crushed, he couldn’t see starting all over in a small town like Spartanburg, South Carolina, listening to Ric Flair complain that he wasn’t going to work with Rhodes and trying to manipulate Dusty into letting someone else star in a script that he’d written for himself.

“If we don’t sell,” he told David finally, “our mother is going to be out of her pension and on the street.”

On November 21, 1988, the children of Big Jim Crockett gathered in their lawyer’s office to sign over their assets to Ted Turner for a package that included guaranteed jobs for the brothers and some cash. The brothers barely spoke to one another. They just glared.

After it was over, David went home and kissed his family. “Okay, I guess I’ll work for crazy Ted now,” he said.

A few days later, the phone rang in Vince McMahon’s office in Connecticut.

“Guess what, Vince,” Turner said when McMahon got on the line. “I’m in the rasslin’ business.”

1.
In later years, Vince would claim that he told Crockett, “You’ll choke on that million.” But Crockett remembers that he wasn’t at the Helmsley Palace in Manhattan when the ownership transfer was made. According to his memory of the transfer, just Linda showed up, and their meeting was cordial.

2.
Although not invented by Rhodes, he used it so often that it would become synonymous with his name and come to be called “the Dusty finish.” There were variations on the theme, but a common Dusty finish would feature the babyface challenger scoring an apparent pinfall on the heel champion after the referee had been knocked out. In the meantime, a second referee would be summoned to the ring to count the apparent pinfall, awarding the title to the babyface and sending the fans into a frenzy, thinking they had seen a title change hands. Then the catch would come: the original referee, now “revived,” would overrule the second referee’s decision.

3.
One was an all-out brawl pitting the Midnight Express against the Fantastics. The other was a star turn for Sting, in which he wrestled Flair to a draw after forty-five minutes.

SIX

THE CANARY YELLOW SUIT
was something to behold. Vince liked to tell people that “you have to wear your promotion on your back.” And tonight on a balmy May evening in 1989, he was doing just that at the premiere of the first movie he’d ever produced. Walking up to the screen of the State Theater, a second-rung movie house in Springdale, Connecticut, he thanked everyone for coming and told them that what they were about to watch was the realization of a dream for him, as well as a new beginning for the WWF.

Everyone in the audience knew they’d been invited to be cheerleaders for a boss who’d just sank $20 million into an action vehicle,
No Holds Barred
, for the company’s biggest star, Hulk Hogan. And two hours later, when the lights came up, they gave the boss a standing ovation.

Ever since
Wrestlemania III
, the WWF had been on a roll. The company was doing nine live shows a week, had three hundred stations carrying its three syndicated programs, dropped jaws at the USA Network with an 8.2 rating for a
Royal Rumble
special, the highest in its history, and was having its licensed merchandise flying off toy store shelves. So much cash was flowing into the little private company—it generated in excess of $125 million—that it was becoming a struggle to spend it all.

He wildly outbid HBO and his old friend Bob Arum for the rights to promote Sugar Ray Leonard’s fight against a journeyman named Don-nie Leland. (The $9.5 million in guarantees to the fighters guaranteed that Vince lost money on the November 1988 bout.) He spent another fortune testing a WWF perfume he was sure women would love. (It never left the lab.) And he was pouring tens of millions more into a monument to himself—an eight-story Stamford office building off the interstate that would come to be known as Titan Tower.

But
No Holds Barred
was the most personal of the projects. Since Turner called him to announce “I’m in the rasslin’ business,” McMahon had become obsessed by the billionaire. Vince’s last real setback was when he had to give up the Saturday night time slot that he held on TBS and watch Turner give it to Jimmy Crockett. In the four years since, he had vanquished the Crocketts, driving them out of the business. Now he was out to prove that he was in Turner’s league.

In some ways, the men were strikingly similar. They were both willing to take companies they’d inherited and expand them to the brink of bankruptcy on mere intuition. Turner had done it with CNN, Vince with a very different gamble,
Wrestlemania
. The men also shared a history of womanizing. In the late eighties, the WWF was awash in cocaine. (According to one Titan Tower intimate, Vince liked to brag with apparent justification that “I can snort as much of that stuff as anyone can put in front of me and never get hooked.”) And in the haze, the divide between work and play crumbled. Marriages broke up as bosses slept with their secretaries. “There were no boundaries, and little by little, since we all knew what Vince was doing, the barriers just wore away,” says a onetime family friend.