Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (31 page)

To weave Leno into
Nitro
, Bischoff had written an angle that essentially staged a war of talk show hosts. He had Considine fax him Leno’s monologue from the Friday before and then unveiled a replica
Tonight Show
stage on the
Nitro
set from Salt Lake City, from which he repeated the monologue word for word. At first the crowd started to rustle, then jeer. Finally, it booed with outright hostility. But the producer was elated when he finished. As far as he was concerned, Leno was the best thing to happen to him in Hollywood, the apotheosis of what he’d been building toward. Unfortunately, the same reaction wasn’t shared inside TBS. As Bischoff drank coffee in his hotel room the next morning, working on the script for the Thursday taping of
Thunder
, he got a call telling him the Standards and Practices Board of TBS wanted to see him right away. He went through the past few months’ worth of shows in his mind, wondering what for, and was astounded when he was told the company’s lawyers were balking over the Leno monologue. Of all the things he could get called on, it would amaze him that it was a Monica Lewinsky blow-job joke, and a used one at that. But that was just the beginning. He was also told that he had a new guideline: He couldn’t present anything that wasn’t suitable for a first-grader. “I should have seen the writing on the wall and resigned then,” he’d say later.

Instead, he traveled on to Sturgis, South Dakota, for the annual Black Hills rally, a weekend that wound up lifting his spirits. It was beautiful on August 8, and a hundred thousand bikers gathered in the center of town to rev their engines around the makeshift set that the WCW crew had built. Bischoff had suggested that Page team up with Leno because he didn’t want to trust such a delicate assignment to a newcomer like Goldberg. And as the match began, he was glad he did. Page carried the load with Hogan like a pro, leaving Leno the light duty of delivering the few spots he was given with energy and humor. The
Tonight Show
host taunted the principals, struck a few muscle poses, and twisted a couple of arms. Then, ten minutes into the match, his band leader, Kevin Eubanks, made a cameo appearance designed to give Leno an efficient exit. He ran in, took down Bischoff with a maneuver he learned from Page called the
Diamond Cutter
, and left Leno the perfunctory work of rolling over and pinning Hogan to win the match. Afterward, waves of relief gave way to good feelings. The biker crowd partied well into the night at a country music concert that featured Travis Tritt, while the wrestlers retired to the parking lot of a Best Western that had been decorated to celebrate Hogan’s forty-fifth birthday. It was the kind of party that everyone attended—if only because it was good office politics to stay on Hogan’s good side.

Kevin Nash stayed in his room, however, brooding. He couldn’t get his mind off what the photo in the next day’s papers would look like: Leno wearing baggy sweats, pretending to strangle the bug-eyed and bald Hogan. It was a giant fuck you to the audience, he thought, a sign they were all just winking their way to the bank. Though they’d worked together closely, Nash couldn’t say he’d ever actually
talked
to Hogan. That was how distant he could be. But tonight, Nash was determined to have himself heard. So after showering he went down to the party and buttonholed the tanned star. They wound up talking for nearly an hour, sitting on the bumpers of parked cars. Nash told Hogan that the show they’d just done was a perfect example of what was wrong with WCW. He understood Hogan’s income was heavily influenced by the buy rates of the pay-per-views he worked. But no other wrestler could build a following, or add to the company’s depth, as long as Hogan kept using his power to assure that each of the monthly story cycles climaxed with him in the forefront of the action.

Hogan listened patiently, more patiently than Nash expected. But at the end of the hour he concluded, “Brother, what you want is gonna cost me money.” Nash looked at him. “What could I say?” he’d recall. Hulk, after all, was just reciting the code of the Boys. So Nash shook his hand and walked away saying, “Okay, dude.”

JESSE VENTURA
never had much use for Hogan, going back to the days when Hogan snitched him out to Vince McMahon for trying to unionize the WWF’s talent prior to the second
Wrestlemania
in 1986.
¹
He thought less of Bischoff, who fired him shortly after taking over WCW.

By the late fall of 1998, Ventura was putting them and the rest of the wrestling world behind him. Against all odds, his long-shot campaign for the governorship of Minnesota was actually gaining converts. A Minneapolis ad executive named Bill Hillsman, brought into Ventura’s campaign to help sharpen its message, had ignited it with one of the more unorthodox political commercials of the campaign season. He wanted an ad that could be produced cheaply and placed on the air fast, so he sent his creative team to a local Toys “R” Us to get an action figure that resembled the candidate. Studying the shelves, they selected a G.I. Joe doll for the stoic expression on its face. The only problem was its body was too small for it to resemble Ventura. They solved that by buying a muscular Batman and gluing G.I Joe’s head onto it. As a member of Hillsman’s team put it, “We wanted him to look like the governor and be taken seriously. But still, you didn’t want Ken’s wimpy body on him.” The commercial they ended up with featured one boy playing with Evil Special Interest Man while his friend played with a Ventura doll that groused, “I don’t want your stupid money.”

As the first statewide candidate of Ross Perot’s Reform Party, Ventura leavened his campaign with quotes from Jerry Garcia, conservative fiscal policy, and a pledge to keep government out of voters’ bedrooms. But the thing that helped him most was a Minnesota law that allows voters to register at the polls instead of months in advance. For wrestling fans, turning out to vote was the equivalent of rolling up to an arena to buy tickets to a show, albeit one that would last for four years and be filled with more surprises. So many new voters registered that Minnesota’s turnout rate was 61 percent, the highest in the nation. By evening, a majority of them had elected a wrestler as their governor.

Ventura was understandably proud of what he’d accomplished, so he was more than a little irritated when Bischoff and Hogan mocked him on the November 9 episode of
Nitro
. After the show opened with a band playing “Hail to the Chief” and shots of flags waving outside the White House, they emerged from behind the tinted glass of a limousine and, once in the ring, offered perfunctory congratulations to the governor-elect. But it was obvious they were setting him up. As hundreds of red, white, and blue balloons fell from the rafters, Hogan looked into the camera and crowed, “I’m going to rock the world, just like Jesse did.” He elaborated on what he meant during a Thanksgiving appearance on the
Tonight Show
. Dressed all in black, he told Leno that he was retiring from wrestling. (Leno had seen Hogan work a crowd before and put his spiel in perspective, asking the balding star, “You’re not going to come back in six weeks and say you’re back?”) “This helps me segue into being the next president of the United States,” he said. “In fact, I’d love to run against Jesse because that would be really easy pickings. Everything I’ve always done against Jesse I’ve always won. That would be fun to beat him one more time.”

Hogan and Bischoff were too arrogant for their own good, Ventura thought as he watched from his library at home. He was going to relish watching them get speared by their own egos.

IN EARLY
November, WCW was well on its way to having a record year. Ratings had doubled, and with twenty-three straight sellouts the company was on pace to post a $55 million profit on $200 million in revenues. There was even talk about a series of prime-time specials for NBC to fill in for the striking NBA. But Bischoff was starting to wear down; he even began to resent the Boys who he’d made rich. To be fair, they were
all
tired. To get through their days and stay bulked up for the cameras, many of them ordered steroids through the latest Dr. Feelgood to worm his way into the business, an Indianapolis physician named Joel Hackett.
²
A joke that made its way around the WCW locker room went, “I’ve got to get back to the hotel room and call my doctor. I just can’t
Hackett
anymore.”

Backstage, meanwhile, the Hogan and Nash factions continued to regard one another warily, if not with outright hostility. As for Ric Flair, he wouldn’t go away, even as the writing crew tried to literally bury him by having him suffer a heart attack on live TV. But what could Bischoff do? He’d put himself in a box. Thanks to the guaranteed contracts he’d negotiated, his talent could call in sick whenever they felt like it. Kevin Nash had already infuriated him by no-showing a pay-per-view at the last minute. Bischoff knew that Nash didn’t want to lose to the overweight and sluggish Paul “The Giant” Wight. But it was low to wait until the weekend of the show began and then leave a message saying that he thought he was having a heart attack. It was a not-so-subtle reminder about who really held the power.

Nash, however, was more than happy to show up for the December 27, 1998, version of Starrcade, booking himself to win the world title while unceremoniously ending Goldberg’s victory streak. The dethroning, the equivalent of demoting the lead actor of a hit show, was the worst birthday ever for Bill Goldberg, and a nasty turn of fortune for the company.

But what could Bischoff do? Despite appearances to the contrary, the Turner brass was keeping him on an ever tighter leash, increasingly suspicious of the direction things were taking. He pressed them to sign the deal he’d done with NBC, but they stalled. When David Stern and the head of the NBA Players Association locked themselves in the league office and came out twelve hours later with a deal to end the lockout that had delayed the 1998–1999 season, the hopes Bischoff had pinned to a high-profile berth on prime-time network television died. He was frustrated and running out of ideas. “The numbers were still holding up,” says a member of the company’s road crew. “But you could feel that things were changing. Vince was beating us with a lot less talent, and that wasn’t a good sign.”

Eager to start 1999 with a bang, Bischoff brought Hogan out of “retirement” for what looked to be another sensational gate at the Georgia Dome on January 4. The main event had been advertised as a title rematch between Nash and Goldberg, but the latter was surgically excised by a script that had Atlanta cops carting him to jail under the guise that Randy Savage’s ex-wife, Elizabeth, had accused him of stalking her. Goldberg wasn’t happy, but at least the original angle had been scrapped—the one in which he was accused of rape.

Not only were the forty thousand fans in the arena furious to find that Goldberg had been removed from the match, the substitute bout was an example of the paralytic state of affairs: In a bid to make peace among the warring Hogan and Nash camps, the two principals agreed to reform the nWo in a way that neither made Hogan look good nor Nash particularly bad. Hogan would lightly poke Nash in the chest, Nash would take a dive, and Hogan would walk off with the belt. The entire charade would last less than two minutes and keep the peace.

What was worse, advance word about the finish had leaked out and was posted on the Internet. Although the
Raw
match had been taped on December 29, 1998, in Worcester, Massachusetts, McMahon did his voice-overs live. Seeing a delicious chance to tweak Turner, he told Jim Ross to announce over the air that Nash was going to lay down and hand the belt to Hogan on TNT. Bischoff, who always monitored both shows from backstage, lost his composure when he heard that. Grabbing a headset, he screamed at his own play-by-play man, Tony Schiavone, to retaliate by telling their audience that Mick Foley was about to win the WWF’s title from The Rock.
³
Schiavone winced. This was Foley’s first world title win. He knew that viewers would probably turn the channel in droves to watch the belt change hands. And when he did as he was told, he was proven right. Thousands of viewers switched to see two of the hardest-working men in the business, instead of two of the laziest.

Over the next six months, Bischoff began to spend nearly all his time in Los Angeles, where friends introduced him as the “man who helped save wrestling” while he tried to fill the void left by the NBC fiasco. But it wasn’t until the end of May, when he was headed to LAX to pick up Bret Hart for an appearance on
The Tonight Show
, that the full weight of what he’d helped turn the business into finally settled on him. Owen Hart had fallen from the rafters in Kansas City that night, and Bischoff had raced to the airport to tell Bret. Hart would be getting some information in the air, but Bischoff worried that he’d think it was a prank. Some months before, a crude joke had been played on Bret by another wrestler, who called an arena where he was performing to say his father had died. When Bret stepped off the plane, Bischoff sadly assured him that it was no prank. The men talked awhile. Then, during a moment of reflection, the producer turned to the star. “Do you ever wonder if it’s worth it anymore?” he asked.

1
In his book,
I Ain’t Got No Time to Bleed
, Ventura wrote, “Hogan had been a friend of mine—or so I thought—for six or eight years at that point. He was the last person I would have suspected …. It turned out Vince was taking care of him very well, and I guess he didn’t want to share that with any of the other wrestlers.”

2
Hackett’s name was found on the bottles of drugs that lay at the bedside of a young WCW wrestler named Louis Spicolli when he overdosed in 1996. Scott Hall’s wife, Dana, also remembers routinely receiving “boxes of stuff” from him at their Florida home. “I asked him, ‘Do you realize my husband is an alcoholic, and he’s not supposed to be taking these things? Do you know that he’s washing these down with beer?’ ” she’d recall. “But he still gave Scott whatever he asked for.” Hackett had his license suspended by an Indiana medical board and was facing thirty-eight counts of writing bogus prescriptions in late 2001.