Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (20 page)

It was a good thing that Bischoff’s hair had already gone gray because he quickly discovered that the best-laid plans meant nothing when you dealt with wrestling. In October 1993, he sent a WCW crew that included Sid Vicious and Arn Anderson, who’d been hired back after his firing by Bill Watts, on a flight to England. A chartered bus then met the plane to take them on a seven-hour ride to a show in Cardiff, Wales. After the show, the group started drinking on the bus ride home and good-natured ribbing turned into bickering. Vicious in particular got on Anderson’s nerves by bragging that Bischoff was going to make him the company’s new marquee attraction.

“You guys should retire so we can do business,” he said, alluding not just to Anderson but also to Ric Flair.

When the group reached their hotel in Blackburn, England, and the drinking continued in the lounge, Anderson finally had enough. “You’ve never drawn a decent house in your life,” he told Vicious. “If you weren’t so juiced up maybe you could work a decent match.”

Vicious started removing his watch.

“What are you going to do, beat me up?” Anderson asked.

“No, but if you don’t get out of my face, I’ll get you away from me,” the six-foot-nine Vicious replied.

Anderson backed up a few steps, then threw a beer mug at Vicious’s head, sloshing him with backwash. “I’ll cut your guts out with that bottle,” he told Vicious as the wrestler wiped his face.

Had things ended there, the night might not have been much different from the other three hundred they’d spent on the road. But on this night, after the men had been pulled apart and sent to their rooms, Vicious couldn’t sleep. He sat in his room, staring at a hotel chair until it occurred to him that with its legs broken it would make a fine weapon. After he sheared them off, he went down the hall and banged on the door of Anderson’s room.” Come on out, motherfucker,” he yelled.

Hearing just silence on the other end, Vicious started away. Just then the door flew open, and Anderson lunged at him with a pair of scissors, nicking his hands but penetrating his stomach. Vicious managed to absorb the blow, and the scissors fell in the ensuing scuffle. Sid picked them up and started stabbing Anderson in the back. A pint of blood spilled from more than a dozen incisions in Anderson’s chest and a five-inch gash across his throat. Anderson muttered, “You’re killing me,” and passed out.

The banner headlines in the London tabloids the next day forced Bischoff to suspend Vicious, which had the ripple effect of requiring him to find a new combatant for his top heel, a four-hundred-pound ex-lineman named Leon White, who used the stage name Vader. Vicious had been penciled in to take the belt away from White at the tenth anniversary of
Starrcade
. Since they’d booked Charlotte’s Independence Arena, Bischoff decided to use Ric Flair, the city’s most famous son, to wrestle Vader for the title instead.

The hastily rearranged program on December 27, 1993 showed the executive to be a resourceful producer. To intrigue the press, he’d announced that Flair had agreed to retire if he lost, and he opened the show with a soft-focus testimonial, complete with old headlines and slow-motion highlights. After a warm-up match, a closed-circuit interview with the dewy-eyed Flair reflecting on his possible retirement was piped into the arena from his home a few miles away. By the time the second undercard bout ended, the impeccably tailored wrestler was seen pulling into the arena in a stretch limousine, his arrival timed to coincide with a shot of Vader destroying a punching bag in his locker room. When Flair finally entered the ring, Bischoff’s choreography had worked wonders, creating the kind of primal anticipation that WCW hadn’t seen in some time.

Flair spent the early going absorbing what looked like every manner of pain from a monster who was nearly twice his 230 pounds, making sure he milked all the ardor the crowd had to offer before they reached their inevitable reversal of fortune. It came late in the match, when Flair mounted the tops of three turnbuckles, let out a wild
“Whoooo!”
and flung himself through the air, clipping Vader on the way down. The next series of moves—a flying forearm followed by five stiff chops that Vader shook off before swatting Flair back to the mat—built to the finish. With blood flowing from the split lip he’d gotten by running into one of Vader’s clotheslines, Flair ran headfirst into Vader, trying to tackle the big man. Vader knocked him back, but the pace of the match now seemed to exhaust him and his right knee suddenly buckled. Seeing this, Flair moved in for the kill. Spitting blood, he leaned on the “bad” leg until he toppled Vader and pinned his shoulders to the mat with what little strength he looked to have left. Backstage, even the most jaded Boys had to admit it was a bravura performance.

The next day, Flair was icing his muscles at home when the phone rang. He picked it up to hear Hogan say: “You old SOB. You nearly had
me
crying last night.”

Flair and Hogan weren’t the best of friends, but they had worked together briefly during Flair’s two-year stint in the WWF. Since Hogan had been putting out feelers that he might be interested in returning to the ring, he asked Flair what was going on in Atlanta. “We have a new guy who’s got some ideas,” he replied. Hogan said he was glad to hear that and told Flair that he should pass along his home phone number. Bischoff’s phone rang at two o’clock the next morning. “Hogan here,” said the voice on the other end. The two proceeded to talk for more than an hour.

While Bischoff continued his phone talks with Hogan over the next few months, he also presided over a move of the company’s television tapings to MGM studios at Disney World. The move went over wonderfully with the Boys. Not only did they love the warm weather and nearby strip clubs, they went from being outcasts at CNN Center to theme park attractions in Orlando. As one of them remembered, “Half of us spent the time stoned out of our minds. Out of the ten days a month we filmed down there, we’d be on the beach for seven.” Because the set was always air-conditioned, parkgoers grabbed up the free tickets to get out of the heat. It didn’t matter that they didn’t know a thing about what they were seeing: signs flashed to tell them when to cheer and boo.

In early April 1994—three months before McMahon’s trial was to start—Bischoff flew down to Disney with an additional mission. His overtures to Hogan had developed to the point where they agreed they should meet, so he rented a car, picked up Ric Flair, and drove to the
Thunder in Paradise
set, where they found Hogan dressed in camouflage fatigues with greasepaint on his face. They watched him film for a short while, then, when the director yelled “cut,” retired to the star’s trailer. Bischoff opened by saying that he wanted Hulk Hogan to return to wrestling, and he wanted him to do it at WCW. The producer knew that Hogan wanted his future to be in film and episodic television and said that he was only looking for a six-month commitment. Hogan looked at Flair, wanting to know if the idea had his support. Flair nodded his approval.

Bischoff’s power, however, was still limited. So he arranged for Hogan to meet Ted Turner, the only one who could approve a deal of the size they’d spoken about. The mogul’s eyes lit up when he saw Hogan get off the elevator at CNN Center dressed in his yellow trunks, a pink shirt, and a bandanna. (When traveling, he made it a point to always leave home in costume.) And it was a look of genuine glee. As they retired into his corner office, Turner started talking about the old days, how wrestling saved the old Channel 17, and how much he’d always admired Hogan. The man was really a fan, Hogan thought. Turner showed how true that was when he turned to Bill Shaw and said, “Make this man a deal.”

When Hogan left CNN Center that day, he didn’t see how he could lose. Not only was the money sensational—$2 million for six months plus a cut of the pay-per-view take—a brief tour through WCW would give a huge promotional boost for
Thunder
, which had declined in ratings every week since its debut.

McMahon was at his weekend home in Boca when Hogan faxed over the contract to give him a chance to match it. On a quick read, it was obvious it had been loaded with ridiculous incentives that McMahon couldn’t afford in the midst of preparing for his costly trial. Leaning into his living room couch, he shook his head and told one of his aides, “Let Ted have him. He’s not worth it.”

If Vince considered Hogan old news, Bischoff was mesmerized by the forty-year-old star. The two spent hours talking on his Viper boat and in the bakery he owned with his wife on exclusive Indian Rocks Road. With three movies and a TV show under his belt, Hogan was fond of saying that he was “bigger than the show.” And from the moment they started working together, Bischoff treated him that way. He arranged a ticker-tape parade for his new attraction on the New York set of Disney World to announce his signing, hastily outfitting hundreds of parkgoers in Hulkamania memorabilia so they’d form a backdrop for his motorcade. To make sure that no questions about steroids intruded on the choreographed ceremony, phony reporters were planted at the postparade press conference to ask benign questions. Hogan was genuinely moved by the attention being lavished on him. At the end of the evening, he turned to his old friend and sometime manager, Jimmy Hart, and said, “Jimmy, this is our chance. We’re starting completely over.”

But ten years had passed since Hogan was fresh or flashy. For one thing, his last run in the WWF had been considered a flop within the industry. For another, the arena business was still mired in the recession that hit it in the early nineties—when the boom cycle of the eighties had finally played itself out. The McMahon trial was the curtain closer of that era, exposing all of its secrets and excesses.

In Philadelphia, an underground troupe called Extreme Championship Wrestling was making waves with wrestlers who put their bodies through punishment that bordered on self-mutilation. ECW was the brainchild of Paul Heyman—who’d been chased out of WCW during the Bill Watts regime when he’d worked as the manager named Paul E. Dangerously—and it owed more to gangsta rap and white hard-core music than anything that Hogan had ever done. Men with names like Axl Rotten and Balls Mahoney were fighting matches with flaming two-by-fours, or giving themselves contusions with tire irons. One of ECW’s biggest stars, Mick Foley, was already a legend in Japan, where audiences expected their wrestlers to fight on top of thumbtacks and power bomb themselves into unconsciousness.

And that was still on the fringes of respectability. Away from those fringes, wrestling was often more disturbing. One reader of Dave Meltzer’s
Wrestling Observer
wrote about channel surfing in Chicago, and stumbling on an episode of something called
Windy City Wrestling
in which a severely handicapped fan was put into the ring to give a plaque to one of the show’s wrestlers. Apparently the fan had some form of autism, and he stuttered terribly as he read the plaque’s message, much to the delight of those in the studio audience. Finally, the wrestler grabbed the plaque and ambushed the handicapped fan with it. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, “wrote the
Observer
subscriber. “The victim was obviously a wrestling fan. He agreed to it. And being part of a wrestling angle may have been one of the most exciting things to happen to him. But [the promoter] took someone who looked to be one step away from lifetime confinement in a wheelchair and used him to get a wrestler over as a bad guy. What’s next?”

Hulk Hogan didn’t have the answer to that question when he signed the deal that brought him to WCW. And judging from the reaction he received during a walk-on cameo at the
Clash of the Champions
show in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 1994, fans were going to make him pay for it. Monitors set up in the arena chronicled his limousine pulling up with a police escort, and as soon as the arenagoers saw him they began to boo wildly. The drumbeat grew louder as Hogan made his way inside for a few prepared remarks. The catcalls seemed to genuinely surprise him, throwing him off his usual cadence. His remarks were rushed and unclear, his manner unusually nervous.

Seeing that Hogan was embarrassed—and knowing that he would be embarrassed again when he would take the stand in Vince’s drug trial in a few more days—Bischoff set out to drape him in even more celebrity scaffolding. Turner Home Entertainment spent $75,000 on a half-page ad in
USA Today
to hawk his debut match. There was a guest spot with Regis Philbin and countless print interviews. As for his WCW wrestling debut, it was to be held in Orlando, the heart of Hulk Hogan country. Bischoff designed the pay-per-view undercard so that heels would be put over in each of the other five matches on the card, leaving room for only one babyface to reign.

By the time the opening refrain of
2001: A Space Odyssey
was piped through the Orlando Arena on July 17, 1994, Ric Flair had made his peace with the fact that his job tonight was going to be making Hogan look his best. Once he’d worked a show in Texas with a wrestler who’d passed out drunk in the dressing room right before they went on, and the sold-out crowd never suspected a thing. This would be easy by comparison. For one thing, Flair knew that the WWF emphasized gimmicks rather than hard-hitting wrestling and that meant Hogan liked
working light
, or avoiding stiff contact. So, at the bell, he began by dancing and then circling inside to land a series of open-hand blows to Hogan’s chest, each of which he held up just before they connected. Over the next ten minutes, Hogan thwarted everything Flair threw at him: his swirling chops, his suplexes, his trademark figure-four leglock. When Hogan began tiring, Flair locked his elbow around Hogan’s chin, letting him take a break to get ready for the next flurry of offense. Hogan gasped for a minute, then powered out of the hold, hitting Flair with a pair of shoulder blocks and flinging him into the turnbuckle. It was one of Flair’s favorite spots, and the two had worked out the details in their clench. Flair went upside down in the corner, falling back on his feet. Then he gathered himself and took off toward Hogan, leading with his neck so Hogan had a wide target for the clothesline. Just then, a new character intruded as a kind of bridge between two stanzas. She was one of Hogan’s old sidekicks, a former women’s champion named Sherri Martel who’d been cast as Flair’s valet. An attractive woman in her mid-thirties, she started out in the business as Sensational Sherri, then morphed to Scary Sherri and finally to Sensuous Sherri—though with her garish
Road Warrior
makeup, the second appellation was more applicable. When she and Hogan started working together in the early nineties, Sherri would use her loaded pocketbook on Hogan, who’d hoist her into the air to give the fans a peek at her black lingerie before bringing her bottom-side down across his knee in a maneuver known as the
atomic drop
. This time, though, a new twist had been written into the end, one that was supposed to help Flair build to a big finish. As Sherri lay on her back from the drop, she threw Flair a pair of brass knuckles. Flair tried to use them to beat Hogan, but, to his enormous irritation, Hogan refused to sell the beating. After all these years, he silently observed, the guy still wouldn’t give up his ego for the act.