Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (16 page)

Most of all, Rhodes decided he wanted a whole lot less of Ric Flair. First he told Flair that he wanted him to cut his hair and change his act, turning from a heel into a babyface. When Flair resisted, Rhodes paired him with a clumsy, seven-foot-five Argentinean named El Gigante. And finally, when Flair was starting negotiations to extend his contract, Rhodes told him he needed to think about cutting back. How much? Flair asked suspiciously. In half, came the answer.

Flair balked and once again threatened to decamp to the WWF. This time, Rhodes told Herd, “Let him go. We’ll be stronger without him.” Herd was getting uncomfortable with the power Rhodes was amassing, but he agreed they had no choice. Calling Flair’s attorney, he said there would be no more negotiations. He was free to leave.

It never occurred to Herd to ask Flair to return the WCW title belt first.
¹

When Flair turned up on the USA Network the following October wearing the WCW belt in a WWF ring, Herd got a sinking feeling. He knew Turner would hear about it first thing in the morning, if not sooner. He also knew he had a contract of his own that was due to expire in two months. The next morning, Herd took the CNN Center elevator up to the fourteenth floor and marched into Jack Petrik’s suite.

“Jack, this has gone too far,” he started, summing up his view that Flair’s defection was part of a larger pattern of costly power plays and misjudgments by Rhodes. “Dusty is out of control. It’s either him or me.”

Looking at his old friend’s face, Herd knew that the decision had already been made. He’d lost $19 million in three years.

“Okay,” he said finally. “I guess it’s me.”

BILL WATTS
walked into CNN Center seven months later, in May 1992, dressed in blue jeans, cowboy boots, and his Stetson. Looking up the atrium that rose all the way up to Turner’s office, he thought, “Wonder what it would be like to take a piss off there.”

Watts was invited to Atlanta by the new man Turner had selected to run World Championship Wrestling, Bill Shaw. A young-looking fifty-three-year-old, Shaw had worked his way up the ladder of the human resources department and now oversaw all of Turner’s buildings, including the Omni Coliseum, where wrestling shows were held. His office was precisely 143 feet away from Turner’s, and that was exactly the kind of fact that a man who specialized in running operations would know.

Shaw may not have been steeped in wrestling, but he knew the name Bill Watts. The Cowboy was still a giant in the business and probably the best television producer for wrestling around. If anything, that reputation had been burnished by the five years he’d spent in exile in Tulsa since selling his ill-fated Universal Wrestling Federation.

In someone’s attic lay old black-and-white photographs of the Cowboy when he had a cleft chin, Charles Atlas muscles, and a corn-fed smile. But that wasn’t the man who was sitting before Shaw—the man who’d spent the past five years peddling insurance and marketing vitamins. This one had a wide patch of baldness running down the middle of his head, glasses that magnified his narrow eyes, and a desk-job belly.

Those looks, however, were deceiving. Watts was a soldier stuck in peaceful society and had the hungry look that Shaw had seen before. It was the desperate look men get in their fifties when they worry they’re no longer in control of their own destiny.

Shaw was prepared for Watts to be an atypical Turnerite. He rode his motorcycle to work, flouted the starched-shirt-and-tie dress code, and farted in the middle of his sentences, just to show that he could. There were also things Shaw wouldn’t anticipate, such as the fact that Watts would call women cunts, smoke a joint or two on his balcony, and take the occasional piss into the parking lot. But Shaw was on a mission to turn a sick company around. The typical WCW arena event attracted fewer than twenty-five hundred fans and grossed just $25,000—roughly a third of WWF shows. He’d promised the TBS board of directors that WCW wouldn’t “lose over a million eight again this year,” and he was serious. He needed a bastard to get things in order. And Cowboy was the biggest bastard around.

Watts reported for work in early June and, before his first television taping, gathered his wrestlers at the Center Stage Theater to tell them how things would be changing. Real wrestling was reactive, he told them. It was thinking on your feet, throwing in surprises, being spontaneous. It wasn’t memorizing the same damned dozen moves night after night until the whole thing looked choreographed. This New York style was a fad. If they just stayed with him, they’d all win in the long run. Then he began describing what he called his Ten Commandments. The first thing to go was going to be mats outside the ring. Not only did they make the show look fake, they encouraged guys to throw each other through the ropes and waste time. There would be no low blows or lewd hand gestures, no guests in the dressing rooms, and no fraternization among heels and babyfaces in public. Acrobatic leaps off the top of the ring rope were out, too. He wanted his boys to stay inside the ropes. He wanted them hungry. They found out how literally he meant it when they showed up at the next taping on Saturday afternoon to find that the usual preshow buffet had been scrapped in favor of boxed airline lunches.

If surveys guided the brass at TBS, faith and vanity guided the Cowboy. If he was going to reinvent WCW, he needed young wrestlers whom he could mold, teach, and bloody up for cheap. He needed men who could help him remake WCW in his image. In other words, he needed his son, Erik Watts.

The quarterback from the University of Louisville had earned his bachelor’s degree in three years and was halfway to an M.B.A. when he decided to take a summer off and enroll in the WCW’s suburban Atlanta training gym, the Power Plant. He still had nine days to go in its thirty-day program when the call came from the front office, telling him he was being sent on a Tennessee swing through Knoxville, Nashville, and Bristol for the weekend. He’d barely unpacked after coming home when the front office called again, this time with a contract to appear on television.

Wrestling locker rooms are full of second- and third-generation grapplers, and no one begrudged Cowboy’s kid a shot at the big time. But the Boys were understandably resentful when Erik showed up at the Center Stage Theater with one weekend’s worth of experience. They were being asked to bust their asses to help make the neophyte into a star while the cost-cutting ax hung over their own careers. Some were better natured about it than others. A five-year veteran of the business from Dallas named Steve Williams may have groused, “Goddamn, you’re not ready for me.” But once he saw himself penciled in against the boss’s son, the man better known as Steve Austin muttered, “As long as I have to fling your sorry ass around all night, we might as well get it right.”

Rick Rude wasn’t that patient. The surly Minnesotan was as big a star as the industry had in the mid-eighties; he was among the first to chisel his chest and sculpt his arms with steroids. Part thug, part gigolo, he once entered the ring with the face of Jake Roberts’s wife painted on the crotch of his spandex pants. But Rude fell into the trap of believing his own act. By the early 1990s, he was taking so many steroids that he was as miserable out of the ring as he acted inside it.

In New Orleans one night, Rude was sitting in the corner of the locker room, dressed in a silk shirt and slacks, his trademark cigarette dangling from his lower lip. “I’m sick and tired of hearing all this bullshit about amateur wrestling,” he grumbled to no one in particular. Then he mentioned that the evening before, a friend who’d once been a champion amateur wrestler couldn’t tip him when they sparred. “No man can turn me over,” Rude boasted.

Out of nowhere, the following words welled up in Erik’s throat: “Well, your friend must not have been very good.” As soon as he said them, he instantly regretted that he had. The locker room was filled with men who wanted to kick the shit out of him in the best of circumstances. Now he noticed them slowly gathering around, backing him toward Rude.

The young Watts tried backpedaling as fast as he could, but Rude would have none of it. He tossed off his expensive leather loafers, got on his hands and knees, and challenged the rookie to turn him over. Erik wanted to be anywhere else at that moment, but he also realized that he’d do himself far more damage by retreating. So he rolled his arm under Rude’s belly, counted to four, and flipped him completely. Rude rose, his face crimson, and insisted that he wasn’t ready. Watts did it again with the same result. This time Rude placed his shoes back on, brushed himself off, and left the room. To hear the young Watts tell it, Rude was so mad that night that he picked a fight with a fan and broke his jaw. Of course, it’s entirely plausible that one had nothing to do with the other. Rude carried around enough rage that he could break jaws when he was in a good mood. But when he got back to Atlanta, he had a screaming match with the Cowboy, insisting he wasn’t going to be a baby-sitter anymore. He even packed a revolver in his boot for the meeting, mindful that Erik’s father carried a loaded pistol in his briefcase. Watts didn’t need to fire his gun. He fired Rude instead. He wasn’t about to be bullied by any has-been steroid hag.

With each new week, another star followed the same path. Scott Steiner quit after Watts ran out of patience with his costly fetish for hurting newcomers by dropping them on their heads from the top rope. Paul E. Dangerously (the stage name of Paul Heyman), leader of the Dangerous Alliance, was fired for expense fraud. (He strenuously denied the charge.) Arn Anderson, a veteran heel, was axed because he was told he looked too old. By fall, Cowboy Bill had cut the company’s payroll by 25 percent, and he was just getting warmed up. Paranoia was starting to creep in everywhere—which, of course, was just the way he wanted it. He was going to burn the village to save it.

He might have, too, if it was truly his village to burn. But the regular phone calls from Shaw reminded him otherwise. Without Rude or Steiner, Lex Luger or Sid Vicious, the average Saturday night rating had fallen to 2.04 from its 2.53 mark of a year earlier. Pay-per-view buy rates were down by 40 percent. Watts was sure that if he could just get to Turner—just get past Shaw’s office and bridge a few of those 143 feet—he could make Ted understand that they were on the right track.

But every time he tried to get close, he found a door locked, an aide shunting Turner in another direction, or Shaw standing in the way. And on February 9, 1993, a fax came into Henry Aaron’s office at CNN Center that made sure he never would.

Aaron was already in a horrible mood when his secretary handed the fax to him. He was stewing about an interview in which Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott called two of her ex-players “million dollar niggers.” After Schott’s comments made national news, Aaron argued loud and hard that baseball needed to take a clear stand. He wanted Schott banned from the sport and baseball to make a clear commitment to its minority players. Toward that end, he lobbied for himself to be named to the vacant commissioner’s post. So it stunned Aaron when a panel of owners recommended a slap on the wrist for Schott: a one-year suspension and $25,000 fine. Aaron saw it as an insult to himself and to all black players. The sting of that insult was only ten days old when he started to read the fax sent to him by a sportswriter working on a story about Bill Watts.

A year before Watts came to TBS, he allowed an extensive interview to be published in a weekly wrestling newsletter called
Pro Wrestling Torch
. Few who knew Watts believed he was a racist. At worst, he affected a kind of frontier libertarianism that allowed him to bluster on about free will. Except this time, he blustered too much, lapsing into a phobic stream of consciousness.

“If you own a business why shouldn’t you be able to discriminate?” he asked rhetorically. “I mean, why should I have to hire a fucking fag if I don’t like fags?” On the subject of African Americans he hardly sounded more enlightened: “If I don’t want to sell fried chicken to blacks, I shouldn’t have to. It’s my restaurant.”

It’s hard to believe the interview was not read before Watts was hired, though Shaw insists he never saw it. Watts insists it had been vetted and excused. But maybe he just assumed that since there always seemed to be someone around to defend him as an eccentric genius. Unfortunately for the Cowboy, there was no one left to apologize for him when Aaron finished reading the interview.

Since Aaron reported to Shaw, he walked the interview over to Shaw’s office. He did not ask that Watts be fired. He simply asked that Shaw look into the matter. That’s when Shaw called Watts and asked him to stop up and see him.

“I don’t deny what I said,” Watts said calmly, “but anyone who thinks I’m a bigot is an idiot.” Then, seeing Shaw’s cool expression, Watts realized he’d never get closer to Ted Turner than he was right now. “You know what, Bill?” he said. “I’m done with this damned business. You take it from here.”

1.
Through the politics of the business, Flair ended up keeping the original NWA belt, for which he had posted a $25,000 deposit with the secretary-treasurer of the NWA, like other champions had done in the past. However, when Crockett sold the remnants of the NWA to Ted Turner, the money that Flair had put up—wherever it resided on the accounting ledger—was considered part of the sale. From day one, Flair had insisted he was owed the money with interest, since it was traditionally returned when the champion lost the belt. But since he never received the money, he kept the belt.

EIGHT

A MONTH BEFORE BILL
Watts left Atlanta, an assistant U.S. attorney from New York drove down Interstate 95 to meet his federal colleague, Ted Smith, in Pennsylvania.

After Smith had won the conviction of George Zahorian, he’d thought long and hard about whether he had enough evidence to mount a case against Vince McMahon. And he’d decided against it. First, there was the venue issue: Nothing happened in the middle district of Pennsylvania, centered in Harrisburg, to tie McMahon to a crime. But just as important, the whole thing had become a circus that he felt no need to join. Superstar Billy Graham, for one, had given him fits by telling reporters that Smith had begged Graham to wear a concealed body recorder wire in an FBI probe of mob links to wrestling. To quell the bogus rumor, Smith’s boss took the rare step of authoring a letter to Vince’s attorney in which he denied being “aware of any connection between McMahon and the Mafia.”