Death Of Wcw

10th Anniversary of the Bestselling Classic - Revised and Expanded

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• Publisher: Ecw Press Digital
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781770411753
• eBook ISBN: 9781770906426

In 1997, World Championship Wrestling was on top. It was the number-one pro wrestling company in the world and the highest-rated show on cable television. But by 2001, however, everything had bottomed out. The company - having lost a whopping 95% of its audience - was sold for next to nothing to Vince McMahon and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). What went wrong? This expanded and updated version of the bestselling The Death of WCW takes readers through a detailed dissection of WCW's downfall, including even more commentary from the men who were there.

ê ê ê ê ê PART I

THE BIRTH

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“Ted called me up and said ‘Hey Vince, guess what? I’m in the rasslin’ business now!’”

—Vince McMahon, Owner, World Wrestling Entertainment

CHAPTER

ê ê ê ONE ê ê ê

1988–1996:

Mr. Turner’s Baby Boy

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While many believed World Championship Wrestling could never die and were stunned in 2001 when it actually did, an even larger group believed the company probably should have died countless times before then, since it had consistently lost so much money. And perhaps it should have. But the misconception that WCW was a huge money-loser in its formative years should be dispelled right off the bat. In truth, WCW lost around $6 million per year in the first five years of its existence—not a horrible figure at all, considering what they were giving Turner: four hours of excellent ratings every single week of the year. Some within the Turner organization squawked at the losses, but Ted Turner himself didn’t. In fact, Turner was such a cheerleader for the company that when his board of directors suggested shutting WCW down in 1992 (their argument was that they’d save tons of money putting movies they already owned in the WCW time slots), he told them that wrestling built the Superstation, and as long as he was in charge it would always have a home there. He also told them never to bring the idea up again.

They didn’t.

Since Turner was so strongly behind WCW, it seemed that regardless of what happened or how much money the company lost, it would always be around. No matter what, no matter how bad things could get, many within the company were unafraid, and unfortunately this sense of security often led those in charge to make bad decisions. They could throw away money, alienate their employees and even their fans—none of it mattered, as Ted Turner would always be there to bail them out of a jam.

For all the reasons why the company could have and arguably should have died, it did have history on its side. After all, this was a company that had been around almost 100 years … or at least that’s one of the myths rabid WCW supporters would have you believe.

The truth is a bit different. When promoter “Big” Jim Crockett died in 1973, his assets—including Jim Crockett Promotions, which ran pro-wrestling shows—were eventually passed on to his son, Jim Jr. For decades, the Crocketts, like other National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) promoters nationwide, tried to bring prestige to their organization by claiming that their main title, the World Heavyweight championship, dated back to 1905. Their champ, they claimed, wore a belt with a lineage that could be traced to such turn-of-the-century legends as George Hackenschmidt and Frank A. Gotch.

Truth be told, the NWA that helped form WCW has roots in 1905 about as much as the rap group NWA does. The confusion stems from the fact that there were two different NWAs: the turn-of-the-century National Wrestling Association, and the modern-day National Wrestling Alliance. Today’s NWA was formed in 1948 by six promoters at a meeting in Waterloo, Iowa. They named Des Moines promoter Pinky George the first president and Kansas City promoter Orville Brown the first champion. Lou Thesz won the title in 1949, then won the National Wrestling Association title in 1950. Because the group controlled all the major titles, the NWA championship became the most prominent belt in the world for almost forty years. In April of 1984, it was one of three “big” titles in the U.S., along with the World titles of the AWA, promoted by Verne Gagne, and the WWF, promoted by another junior, Vincent Kennedy McMahon.

The original Vince McMahon—Vincent James McMahon, to be precise—was the son of boxing and wrestling promoter Jess McMahon. Vince Sr. had promoted the World Wide Wrestling Federation (they dropped a “W” in 1979) since 1963, running throughout the Northeast. The highly successful promotion, based in Madison Square Garden, was built around such legendary stars as Bruno Sammartino, Superstar Billy Graham, and Bob Backlund. But Vince Sr. was getting old, and his son—the handsome, fast-talking announcer on his wrestling shows—was eager to make a serious impact.

Vince Sr. wasn’t so sure about his son. He never wanted him to be a wrestler, and probably didn’t want him to be involved much with the business at all. Plus, the young McMahon seemed to have some pretty grandiose ideas. Wrestling had always been a territorial business, with different groups promoting cards exclusively in “their” areas of the country. There was Roy Welch in Alabama; Nick Gulas in Nashville; Leroy McGuirk in Oklahoma; and Sam Muchnick in St. Louis; among over two dozen others. While promoters would sometimes venture into opposing territories, no one had ever attempted to do what Vince Jr. was planning on such a massive scale. Vince Jr. wanted to promote wrestling wherever he pleased.

Amazingly, had Vince Sr.’s wish that his son never become a wrestler come to pass, the history of wrestling might forever be different. A key turning point in the war between WCW and the WWF was Steve Austin’s blood feud with his most famous in-ring rival: none other than Vince McMahon himself. Vince was a great heel; his chemistry with Austin was a large part of what turned the tide. While his early stint as a babyface cheerleading announcer was little to pay attention to, and his later stint as a song and dance man (really!) crooning a ditty called “Stand Back” was more something for folks to laugh at, the evil Mr. McMahon’s pumped-up faux-pro-wrestler persona was one to whom nearly every fan could relate; after all, who hasn’t had a boss they wanted to pummel? No doubt Austin would have been a huge star regardless, but no one can argue the impact that the vile Mr. McMahon foil had on Austin’s rise to fame. And that rise to fame was what gave wrestling fans options, options that led in part to WCW’s fall.

Contrary to what many believe, Vince Jr. wasn’t the first wrestling promoter to go national. His father’s Madison Square Garden cards aired regionally on the MSG Network and nationally on HBO in the early-to-mid-’70s. Other promotions had been syndicated nationally as early as the dawn of television in the late 1940s, while others, such as Jim Barnett, tried national expansion in the ’60s and ’70s. And when Ted Turner’s Atlanta WTCG UHF station went up on satellite as the Superstation in 1976, it took Jim Barnett’s Georgia-based promotion nation­wide, airing two shows on the weekends: Georgia Championship Wrestling on Saturday nights (6.4 average rating) and Best of Georgia Championship Wrestling (6.6 average rating) the following evening. The station quickly grew to serve 15 million people, and the wrestling show was the first program to draw over one million viewers on the station and the first TV show in history to ever reach one million homes on cable television.

The NWA promoters were leery of this newly configured nationwide coverage, but Vince Sr. argued that it would be ridiculous for him to stop promoting in the Garden (as long as he promoted there, MSG Network was going to broadcast the shows regionally and nationally through HBO), and Barnett simply said that no matter what, his show still featured mainly Georgia wrestlers. Several years later, however, Turner requested that the name be modified to something less regional in scope, and therefore the show was changed from Georgia Championship Wrestling to World Championship Wrestling, which just so happened to be the name of a promotion Barnett had successfully promoted in Australia a decade earlier.

Cable, Barnett would later say, could not be stopped. And he was right.

In 1982, Vince Sr. finally caved and sold the World Wrestling Federation to his son. The deal, though, was that if Vince Jr. missed even one of his quarterly payments he’d lose the promotion back to Vince Sr.’s three original partners: Bob “Gorilla Monsoon” Marella (who eventually got a lifetime announcing gig out of it), Phil Zacko, and Arnold Skaaland. While some believe that Vince Sr. was never aware of his son’s lofty plans, most with knowledge of the situation feel otherwise. The sense was that even if Vince Sr. did know, he didn’t believe that his son could pull it off. Shortly after selling the company, Vince Sr. was diagnosed with cancer, and he died a few months later.

Those who doubted Vince Jr. couldn’t have been more wrong. Not only did he take the WWF national, he created a near monopoly for himself within five years of doing so. One of his first major offensive moves was to offer lucrative contracts to stars (and sometimes guys nobody in their right mind would consider star material) from other territories, most notably from Verne Gagne’s AWA. Vince had already offered to buy Gagne’s promotion outright, but he’d been shot down. His next step, therefore, was to buy Gagne’s talent, including his hottest star of all: a young, bleached-blonde muscleman named Hulk Hogan. Hogan ended up being the chosen one, and McMahon quickly moved his WWF title from his father’s long-term champion Bob Backlund to the dastardly Iron Sheik. On January 23, 1984, just twenty-eight days later, Hogan beat Sheik in Madison Square Garden with his dreaded Legdrop of Doom, and Hulkamania took off.

Widespread TV was the next major step. In those days, many wrestling promoters got along swimmingly with their local TV affiliates. In many territories, the television people would air the programming for free and make money off the advertising. The wrestling people, meanwhile, would write shows to compel fans to go to the local arena and pay for tickets. In some territories—Jerry Jarrett’s Memphis is a good example—the TV stations would actually pay the promoters for the programming. Vince Jr. went from territory to territory and not only offered the station managers his slick TV tapes in place of their current, often poorly filmed local wrestling shows, but also offered to pay to get them on the air.

Further into his expansion, McMahon purchased Georgia Championship Wrestling for $750,000 in a deal actually made behind Ole Anderson’s back. The company had gone from a money-loser under former promoter Jim Barnett (a notoriously lavish spender who, during a money-losing period in 1982, was forced out by his own booker, Anderson, and other shareholders over allegations of embezzlement) to a moneymaker under Anderson. However, the shareholders were disgruntled that they weren’t making any money—all of the profits appeared to be going into the pockets of the highly paid Anderson. Two of the shareholders, former legendary grapplers Jack and Gerald Brisco, talked the other shareholders into banding together to sell a majority of the stock to McMahon.

The entire point of the purchase was for McMahon to gain control of the coveted Saturday and Sunday 6:05 p.m. time slots on TBS. Adding those time slots to his traditional Monday night time slot on USA Network (which eventually became the home of Monday Night Raw) gave Vince a virtual monopoly on the best television real estate for pro wrestling in the entire country. His plan, obviously, was to replace tapes of the Georgia wrestlers with tapes of his WWF superstars. The problem was that there was a vast in-ring difference between the two products: the Georgia show featured an emphasis on in-ring action with talented workers, and the WWF show featured a bunch of one-sided “squash” matches that had already aired on the USA Network.

Problem: viewers didn’t want WWF wrestling. When the switchover took place on “Black Saturday,” July 14, 1985, over 1,000 fans angrily complained to the Superstation. Many asked specifically for “Gordon Solie Wrestling” to return, a reference to the legendary GCW announcer. Turner’s response was to give Ole Anderson a Saturday 7:00 a.m. time slot so that he could start a new company, Championship Wrestling from Georgia, Inc. (which didn’t last long). Then, the following year, Turner gave Bill Watts’ Mid-South Wrestling a one-hour time slot on Sunday, and agreed to finance him so that he could compete nationally against McMahon. Vince, who thought his purchase of GCW would give him an exclusive on TBS, was outraged, particularly since he paid nearly $1 million for the time slots and Turner gave Watts the new time slot for free. Turner, of course, disagreed, feeling that Vince had reneged on a stipulation in the contract that required him to produce a separate weekly program from an Atlanta studio. If Vince wasn’t going to do it, well, someone else would. Thus began the two-decade war between McMahon and Turner.

What made things worse for Vince was that Mid-South, a tremendously well-booked and entertaining show, immediately started to destroy all of his programming in the ratings despite the weird time slot and having no promotion whatsoever. At its peak, the show was averaging a 5.2 rating, not only beating McMahon’s shows, but also becoming the highest-rated show on all of cable television. Turner, who had promised to bankroll Watts, wanted to kick Vince off the station, but couldn’t until the contract the two had signed expired. When that day drew near, who should return to the fold but former GCW promoter Jim Barnett, who had jumped to WWF after being ousted by Ole, and who just happened to be a clos...

Table of contents

• The Death of WCW
• FOREWORD
• 1st EDITION FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: THE BIRTH
• PART II: THE RISE
• PART III: THE FALL
• PART IV: THE DEATH
• PHOTO SECTION
• 1st EDITION EPILOGUE
• EPILOGUE 2014
• ENDNOTES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS
• Copyright