Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (23 page)

But before she could reach Vince, Eric Bischoff at WCW had gotten word to Scott that he stood to make three times his salary if he crossed over to TBS. Hall didn’t breathe a word about the overture to anyone in the WWF until the day before he decided to leave. After a television taping in West Virginia on February 20, 1996, he leaned over to his best friend, Kevin Nash, in the showers and said, “I’m gone when my contract is up in two months, brutha. I’m breaking up the Clique.” Nash was stunned, but no more so than Hall’s wife. After emerging from his private study in his home, where he’d dictated his termination notice and sent it to Vince, he told her that he was heading to WCW.

When Vince arrived at his office and read the telegram with Hall’s termination notice, his blood pressure started to rise. Hall had been two inches from his face the night before in Huntington, West Virginia, and hadn’t said a word about it.

McMahon sat down to dictate his own missive. Effective immediately, it read, Hall was suspended for failing a drug test for marijuana several weeks earlier. He’d be out of work for six weeks. When his contract expired after that, he could do whatever he wanted, so long as he left the name Razor Ramon—and all the character’s gimmicks—with its rightful owner.

LIKE HALL
, Kevin Nash had spent his share of journeyman years in woeful costumes. The worst was when he worked under Jim Herd at WCW and had to wear a hideous rubber mask with a cone on his head, wrestling as the caped Oz. His entry into the WWF in early 1992 transformed him into “Big Daddy Cool” Diesel, a
monster heel
whose entrance on stage was usually accompanied by a film clip of an 18-wheeler rumbling down the highway.

“When I started there, we were all young and hungry,” he’d say years later. “If Vince had told us women weaken the legs, we probably wouldn’t have gotten laid. We were trying to get the business back on its feet because it had been strip-mined by the old-timers for so long. And I’ll always love him for helping us.”

But in February 1996, even Nash was beginning to understand the ground was changing underfoot. Vince was relying on smaller and more agile wrestlers, which is why he’d asked Nash to
drop the strap
, or lose a title match, to Bret Hart. Before Hall had made his decision to break up the Clique, Nash was in Phoenix, driving to a restaurant to have a Valentine’s Day dinner with his wife, when he got a call on his car phone. It was from Bischoff’s next-door neighbor and emissary, a bar owner turned wrestler named Diamond Dallas Page.

Page pushed hard. Exciting things were happening at WCW, he insisted, and Nash should be a part of them. Then, in a moment of spontaneity, he gave the wrestler a private number for Bischoff and implored him, “Call Eric right now.”

Bischoff was surprised to hear from Nash and greeted him warily. Even though Page had set up the call, Bischoff still considered Nash a loyal Clique member. In fact, he’d boasted that he’d get a sex change before he returned to WCW. And from the long pauses in their conversation, Nash could tell that Bischoff was suspicious. When Bischoff threw out a figure that Nash considered too low, Nash joined the game of playing hard to get. Thanks for the interest, he said, but I’m not really job hunting.

The truth was, though, that both men wanted to do business. At thirty-seven, Nash had a new wife, a baby boy, and a questionable number of years left as a headliner. As for Bischoff, he was forming the outlines of a plan that the two WWF stars would come in handy in implementing.

IN JAPAN
, where professional wrestling is at least as big as baseball, the most respected and innovative company is called New Japan. Under the guidance of the senator and wrestling legend Antonio Inoki, New Japan was drawing NFL-size crowds. Bischoff flew to Tokyo as part of a regular exchange of talent. At the time, another Japanese wrestling company was struggling and needed help, so Inoki brokered a deal in which they would face one another in an interpromotional rivalry. Two companies going to war with one another, the equivalent of a wrestling World Series, had never been done before on such a grand scale, and the response was fantastic.

By the second New Japan/UWFI (Union of Wrestling Forces International) show in January 1996, Tokyo was abuzz with the rivalry, and Bischoff decided to adapt the gimmick for his American audience. The only question was how to do it when he didn’t have a rival like the UWFI willing to cooperate.

Recruiting Scott Hall was a first step. Convincing Nash to follow put the final piece in place. Nash was in a Florida motel room, on the road with the WWF, when he decided to accept the six-figure deal that Bischoff finally offered. “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done,” he’d say. “Though it was my sweat, it was Vince’s opportunity that made me. I’d slept on Vince’s couch and by his pool. I hung out with his son, Shane. I tried writing a letter to him in my motel room, but I started crying so much I had to get my wife to type it. Then I called Vince in the office because I didn’t want him to get the letter first. He didn’t sell anything. He was like,
Fine
.”

If McMahon knew the way Nash would be used with Hall, he wouldn’t have been so calm. Hall gave an early indication of the bumpy road that lay ahead when he worked his last WWF match on May 19, 1996, at Madison Square Garden. (Once Hall served out his suspension for marijuana use, McMahon decided to bring him back for the final weeks on his contract, hoping in vain that the wrestler might decide to stay.) The night had an edgy feel, and Hall heard it in the crowd’s chant of “You sold out, you sold out.” Yes, he did, and he was proud of it, and before he wrestled his old friend Helmsley he looked squarely in the fans’ faces and snapped, “So what?” (The power to his microphone was cut before he could say more.) Later in the evening, Hall decided to make his last act as a Clique member a memorable one. After Michaels won his cage match with Nash, Hall made an impromptu appearance in the ring and spontaneously wrapped his arms around Michaels in a good-bye hug. Helmsley was so moved that he ignored the fact that he was supposed to be feuding with Michaels and joined them. Next they approached Nash, who was still laid out unmoving, and got him to rise up with them. It was the rarest of moments: four wealthy men who’d sworn allegiance to a life of pretend were putting their friendship before the business.

McMahon was furious at the breach of kayfabe,
¹
but at least the hug was part of a dark match, not meant for television. The same couldn’t be said of Hall’s shocking appearance the next week on
Nitro
. At 8:34
P.M.
on May 27, the first night that
Nitro
was scheduled to expand to two hours, Hall swept through the Macon Civic Center in Georgia, interrupting a WCW match in progress by declaring, “You know who I am, but you don’t know why I’m here.” Bischoff pretended to be stunned, and the confusion on his face was the confusion he wanted the audience to feel. What was Hall doing there? Who was he working for?

In Internet chat rooms, tens of thousands of fans exchanged their thoughts, most divided into two camps,
smarts
and
marks
. Smarts were fans who thought they were so sophisticated they could never be fooled. Marks were the rubes. Those who weren’t smarts by definition were marks. But as soon as Hall made his debut, even the smarts got marked, or duped. Were they seeing a WWF-WCW war? Or, even more astoundingly, were they seeing the beginning of an era of cooperation?

It was a canny move. In effect, Bischoff was forcing McMahon to play an unwitting role in a WCW story line, a character employed against his will. And he succeeded in making the whole episode murkier by using a friendly Pittsburgh sportscaster named Mark Madden to float misleading information on a 900 phone recording that charged for “inside information.” Hall wasn’t working for WCW, “so what’s he doing here?” Madden wondered. (Merely referring to Hall by name was an innovation. Once, wrestlers hid behind the impenetrable walls of kayfabe. But since Bischoff couldn’t legally use the Razor Ramon name, he did away with their idea of stage names entirely. Scott Hall became Scott Hall. The more real things seemed, the better.)

McMahon was furious. It was one thing to steal Hogan, who hadn’t worked for the WWF for a year when he was hired at Turner, or snare past-their-prime acts like Randy Savage. It was another to take current performers and misrepresent them as still working for the WWF. He instructed aides to go undercover to WCW shows with cameras to film Hall and Nash performing, hoping to catch them using the trade-marked names Razor Ramon and Big Daddy Cool Diesel. (The performers didn’t have to; fans shouted the names for them.) When that didn’t work, he expanded the scope of his search, looking for evidence that Turner was forcing WCW’s shows down the throats of syndication affiliates by withholding his other program offerings until stations bought wrestling, an illegal practice known as
block booking
. When he couldn’t find any evidence of that either, he turned to his lawyers to find something he
could
sue for.

The result was a sweeping piece of litigation that alleged a kitchen sink of wrongs, from copyright infringement to tampering to defamation. Essentially, the WWF position was that any attack on it was illegal. It claimed that Turner interfered with its contracts by offering Hall and Nash a combined $4.5 million over three years. Acting as if there was something untoward instead of robustly competitive about airing
Nitro
on Monday nights, it accused WCW of trying to “dilute the viewership of the WWF.” It insisted that “TBS utilized
Nitro
as a vehicle to disparage, defame, and libel the WWF,” sidestepping the issue that the Billionaire Ted skits could be seen as doing much the same thing. It defended those skits as being part of the WWF’s “competitive strategy” to deal with “the unfair and anti-competitive tactics of WCW.” In other words, when McMahon skewered Turner it was David battling Goliath. When Turner used his checkbook to buy ratings, something that everyone in Hollywood tried to do, it was anticompetitive.

SHORTLY AFTER
Nash joined Hall on
Nitro
in early June, the WCW’s website and 900 lines began to plant the seed that a third ex-WWF wrestler would soon be joining the two-man invasion squad dubbed “the Outsiders.”

Hulk Hogan hadn’t been a heel since his first stint working for Vince’s father at the World Wrestling Federation that ended in 1981. The closest he came was a brief flirtation in the fall of 1995, when he donned black gloves and a black rag on his head during a
Nitro
show and declared, “I just might hang on to the black gloves, brother, because everyone knows what a man with a pair of black gloves and a black rag on his head is capable of doing, dude.” (When the tactless allusion to O. J. Simpson bombed, he shed the dark image and asked the fans for their support back.)

But as the summer of 1996 dawned, Hogan wasn’t as quick as he might once have been to reject the idea of stepping into the role of the third man. For one thing, his movie career was on the skids. The new vehicle he was filming,
Santa with Muscles
, would get such bad reviews (“Call it the movie equivalent of coal in a Christmas stocking and you won’t be far off the mark,” huffed
Variety)
that it would only be the thirty-sixth-highest grossing film on its opening weekend. For another, he was below his natural weight of 240 pounds and showing every bit of his forty-two years. Even towns that were reliably supportive of him were starting to yield such loud boos that his closest friends had begun to suggest that he turn heel.

With his contract running out, Hogan saw that Hall and Nash were becoming the company’s new creative force. With each passing week that
Nitro
beat
Raw
, Bischoff became more respectful of their judgment. Hogan could see the expediency of attaching himself to them. He’d look younger and hipper trading his yellow shirt and trunks for biker black. And once he got a toehold, he’d be in a better position to muscle them aside.

On July 7, 1996, the plan was for Hogan to come to the Ocean Center in Daytona, Florida. He flew into town that morning on his Lear jet and remained in seclusion most of the day, shunning the local hotel where the rest of the Boys stayed. Neither Hall nor Nash knew for sure who their new partner was going to be, although they suspected. Everyone suspected.

Bischoff was giddy about this element of surprise, but he was also nervous. What if Hogan was setting him up? In this business, you could never tell. So in the event that Hogan pulled a double cross and backed out at the last minute, he had Sting standing in the wings, ready to take his place.

It wasn’t necessary. Fifteen minutes before show time, a stretch limousine pulled into the back of the Ocean Center and idled with its tinted windows up. Once Hogan was assured no one was looking, he was hustled out of the car with a towel covering his head and ushered into a private dressing room. There he stayed over the next two hours, until the show was nearly over. The last match of the night featured Sting, Randy Savage, and Lex Luger against Hall and Nash and the unadvertised partner making his debut as the Third Man. Hogan watched on a backstage monitor as Luger got knocked out and the tide turned twice, first to the advantage of the babyfaces, then the Outsiders. It was at that point that a backstage aide knocked on his dressing room door.

Hogan walked out, strode to the side exit, and stopped at a curtain that opened onto the walkway. There he knelt down and dropped his head, as if in prayer. A moment later, he lifted his head, made a fist, pounded the table twice, and walked through the curtain to do what he’d avoided doing for fifteen years.

With the audience expecting him to rescue Sting, he walked between the ropes. Then he looked around and laid a prompt legdrop on his old friend Savage. For a moment, there was silence. Then Hogan let his face turn a couple of shades of mean.

In creating the Outsiders, Bischoff had created a new kind of genre: reality-based wrestling, in which threads of reality were woven into the world of pretend that promoters once took pains to paint as real. And the act of turning heel and telling the truth seemed to inspire Hogan, who was at the crux of it.