Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (29 page)

Left to his own devices, Tyson would have probably considered doing it for free. As a boy in Brownsville, Brooklyn, he studied the image of Bruno Sammartino at eleven o’clock on Tuesday nights on Channel 47 (WJNU), the Spanish-language station. As he told the writer Mark Kriegel, he made championship belts out of discarded canisters of Pillsbury dough, turning the flashy foil sides out and stringing them together around his waist. Now there was just one problem. He was due to appear before the Nevada State Athletic Commission in June 1998. Fortunately, the commission’s director, Marc Ratner, was a huge wrestling fan, in no small part because his commission regulated wrestling events and got a 4 percent tax on the gates. McMahon and Ratner knew each other well enough for McMahon to call and say that that he was thinking of using Tyson in a parody of the infamous “bite fight” with Evander Holyfield. “No, no,” Ratner said quickly. The commission would go crazy if Tyson ridiculed something they were still pissed off about. The idea of him wrestling was off limits, too; Tyson had to show he was willing to behave for a while. Finally, McMahon asked whether he could referee a match between Austin and Shawn Michaels. “That’s probably okay,” Ratner said. “I just hope it will be in good taste.”

Tyson started paying for himself right away when his appearance at
Rumble
in early January helped spike the buy rate to the tune of an extra $750,000. When he was introduced the next night in Fresno and got into a mock scuffle with Austin, the combined audience watching
Nitro
and
Raw
was 8 million homes, a record for wrestling and for cable television. “His journey is endlessly entertaining because it is half-tragedy, half-cartoon,” wrote
Chicago Sun-Times
columnist Rick Telander, echoing sports pages across the country. But wasn’t the reverse equally true, that Austin and Michaels had become real enough to meet the champ halfway in the public’s mind? Wrestling gave Tyson a structure and context that he couldn’t find in the real world, and McMahon was pushing hard to exploit it.

McMahon tried to convince the ex-champ that he should make the relationship more permanent by using the WWF as his sports management agency. In a nifty bit of gamesmanship, McMahon even helped edge King out of the picture by sending a copy of the WWF licensing deal that King had negotiated on Tyson’s behalf to the champ’s home in Las Vegas. Tyson’s wife, Monica, was furious when she saw that her husband had signed away the rights to his own likeness and that the cash registers k-chunged for King every time the WWF sold a Tyson T-shirt. In early February, Tyson got into a furious fight with King over the arrangement at a Bel Air hotel, slapping his longtime promoter before firing him. As it happened, the incident caused a media frenzy at roughly the same time that the WWF was holding a press conference to announce Tyson’s role as a referee at
Wrestlemania XIV
. Twenty-seven cameras and dozens of out-of-town reporters overran the All-Star Café in Manhattan to find out what was going on. Tyson didn’t address it. To Vince’s delight, all he did was turn to Steve Austin and deliver the line, “You do anything to Shawn Michaels and I’ll knock your teeth out. And by the look of things, you can’t afford it.”

Tyson was worth twice what Vince paid him that day. By agreeing to join Degeneration X and become a thousand-watt shill for Suck It T-shirts and Mr. Ass dolls, the biggest draw in the pay-per-view universe singlehandedly brought the mainstream press back to wrestling. Many at the All-Star Café that day would insist they were shocked at what wrestling had become since they last looked. But the fact was that for all its R-rated flirtations, the WWF wasn’t pushing the envelope alone. In fact, it was getting pushed.

PUDGY AND
balding, thirty-something Paul Heyman had been around the business for years, first as a manager of a group called the Dangerous Alliance and later as an announcer at WCW. After a run-in with Cowboy Bill Watts led to his firing, the native of an affluent suburb in New York’s Westchester County took control of a Philadelphia-based wrestling company, Eastern Championship Wrestling, and renamed it Extreme Championship Wrestling. Because he had enough friends at every level of the industry, he was able to hire a solid though unorthodox group of performers and build a small but loyal following throughout the Northeast. ECW played at bingo halls and bowling alleys and mixed the atmosphere of a cockfight with the violence of a Mexican snuff film. And at no time was that feeling more pervasive than the night that ECW came to a dog track in Revere, Massachusetts.

Jerome “New Jack” Young, a former bounty hunter who once shot and killed a man during a bust, was supposed to wrestle an ECW regular named Axl Rotten, but the latter was a no-show. When his absence was announced, a seventeen-year-old novice named Erich Kulas approached Heyman. Kulas had been using a Ralph Kramden-bus driver act with a pair of midgets at small-town shows and had come to Revere looking to step up. After he convinced Heyman that he was nineteen and had been trained by Walter “Killer” Kowalski, the owner let him stand in for Rotten.

Young—known for hauling shopping carts to the ring loaded with foreign objects and routinely stapling opponents’ heads with a staple gun—was under instructions to draw blood that night. But Kulas wasn’t a veteran and didn’t have the soft and porous skin that bled easily when nicked. His was virgin skin, hard and thick. So after Young hit him with a chair, a guitar, a toaster, and crutches, and then sank an X-Acto knife into his scalp, the teen screamed and started gushing an alarming amount of blood. Though his father stood up and yelled, “Lay off, he’s only seventeen,” the four-hundred-pound volunteer stayed in the ring, accepting more punishment until he finally collapsed in a thick puddle. As paramedics rushed in, soaking up the gore with towels and shirts, a drunken fan shouted, “You fat fuck!” Kulas gave him the finger, prompting the audience to roar “E-C-W! E-C-W!” and Young to declare:”I don’t care if that motherfucker dies.”
⁴

Heyman’s rogues’ gallery also included the twenty-six-year-old drug addict and former WWF pinup Tammy Lynn Sytch. It didn’t matter that her face was drawn, or that her stage name, Sunny, had become a cruel joke after her life unraveled and she became so desperate for cash that she auctioned her breast implants off on eBay. Heyman put her back on television, letting her bare all her secrets about her battle with alcohol and painkillers and depression. To be fair, he also demanded that she enroll in college and go through counseling as a condition of her employment. But within a month, she’d passed out on a chair in the ECW locker room, claiming that she accidentally sipped someone else’s drink that was laced with the designer drug GHB. She was fired after that, though not before Heyman let her embarrass herself one last time by getting her bare ass spanked by an equally buxom wrestler, as fans yelled, “Show your tits!”

Most old-timers would rather have read
Ulysses
than get stuck in a room with Heyman, but he had an influential admirer in Vince Russo, the head writer for the WWF. In late 1997, Russo began pressing McMahon to adapt some of ECW’s hard-core stylings and hire the wrestlers who could pull them off, in particular Mick Foley. Though his body looked like it trained at Taco Bell, Foley’s gift for absorbing pain was so remarkable that he reinvented the standard by which high-risk wrestling was judged shortly after arriving at the WWF under the ring name Mankind. Meeting the Undertaker at the King of the Ring pay-per-view in a match dubbed
Hell in a Cell
, Foley did a suicidal sixteen-foot pratfall off the top of a steel cage suspended above the arena’s floor, timing it so exquisitely that he narrowly avoided hitting the cold concrete and crashed backfirst through his target, a wooden announcer’s table. After being attended to by medical personnel for ten minutes, he rolled off the gurney and once again scaled the cage. This time, however, the plan went awry: After he got choke-slammed onto the roof of the cage, a weak spot in the mesh snapped under his three-hundred-pound girth, sending him hurtling backfirst to the canvas below. “Good God almighty,” Jim Ross intoned. “With God as my witness, he’s been broken in half.” Amazingly, the first two bumps hadn’t been enough to write Foley into history: He rose from the ground a third time, dumped thousands of thumbtacks onto the mat, and let himself get slammed into them. The bruised kidney that he ended up with was the least of his worries. He also left that night with a dislocated jaw, his tongue sticking through a hole under his lip, and a tooth sticking out of his nose.

With the promise of mayhem like that, five thousand fans—many of them high school kids skipping classes—descended on a plaza by the Boston Holocaust Memorial to see a public photo-op with Tyson, Austin, and Michaels four days before
Wrestlemania XIV
on March 29, 1998.
Raw
was still behind
Nitro
in the ratings, but anyone who scanned the crowd could see the tide had turned. These were new converts coming to see an arena show that was only partly about wrestling. One New Hampshire man who bought tickets for his kids told a
Boston Globe
reporter, “My wife says I’m stupid for coming to this, but I look at it just as a performance. If you want to watch
Fiddler on the Roof
, go watch it. I’m not a
Fiddler on the Roof
kind of guy.”

From the opening of the show, McMahon was determined to give the
anti-Fiddler
man, and those who thought like him, something gaudy and glittery. The opening battle royal had so many costumed bodies in the ring it looked like a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame jam session. Hunter Hearst Helmsley came out for his “European title” fight costumed like Cher. Sable and Luna were dressed like sex club swingers. And the penultimate match between the Undertaker and Kane was taken right out of
Phantom of the Opera
, wrestling wrought on a Broadway-style scale.

In addition to all its other uses,
Wrestlemania
ends one booking year and sets up a new one. The job of this particular show was to employ Tyson to help close the book on the Shawn Michaels era and hand the belt to Steve Austin. With all that was riding on the evening, the two main eventers could hardly be expected to back out, though Austin had suffered so much neck pain that doctors were warning him against wrestling again—ever—and Michaels was popping pills to numb the pain of the disks he’d herniated getting pushed into a casket during a match months earlier.

During the weeks before the show, Tyson had been aligned with Michaels and his group, Degeneration X (DX). Now the champ was used to warm up the crowd, introducing a montage of Michaels’s career that showed him at his arrogant best. As Michaels watched it backstage, he knew he’d never look like that again. Still, the night’s match was booked to go twenty minutes, and he was determined to throw himself into every minute of it. When Austin tossed him through the ropes and caused him to crash on the concrete, Michaels could barely feel his feet but got up anyway, holding his back as he grasped the ropes for leverage. Each move caused pain to rip up his spine and explode in his brain. By the last series, he was nearly immobile. He shoved Austin into the ropes and extended his legs, preparing to kick the Texan. Instead, Austin blocked the kick so he could go into his finisher. It was a simple move: Austin grabbed Michaels by the neck and fell with him hard to the mat. But Michaels nearly blacked out from the impact and was grateful to see Tyson jump into the ring, hit the mat three times, and hoist Austin’s arm in the air. All that was left was for Tyson to set up the surprise ending by taking off his DX shirt to reveal one that read “3:16”. Under the guise of being furious that Tyson would switch allegiances so fast, Michaels poked Tyson in the chest weakly and took a swing. When Tyson connected in return, Michaels had never been happier to get hit in his life. As he lay on his back staring up at the lights of the Fleet Center, Tyson gave him a wrestler’s good-bye: He took his T-shirt with the new champion’s slogan on it and laid it across the old champion’s face.

THE NIGHT
after
Wrestlemania
traditionally garnered strong numbers for
Raw
, but not many expected those numbers to hold up during the following weeks. However, the WWF did what most analysts would have considered impossible just a few months earlier. The March 30 episode of
Raw
from Albany, New York, beat
Nitro
in five of the eight quarter-hour rating periods where they faced one another. Overall, it lost the nightly competition by just two-tenths of a ratings point. (Had it not been for the fact that WCW, sensing that
Raw
was closing in, scheduled a pair of pay-per-view-caliber matches during
Nitro
’s final two quarters, the night surely would have gone to
Raw.)
The April 6 episode proved it was no fluke. It cut the previous week’s gap in half, and it did it with a show that had been taped a week earlier.

Vince’s writers came up with a clever skit to nudge him further into the center of things during that show. Austin appeared on camera in a suit and tie, suggesting that in the weeks since his reign as champion started, he’d been transformed into a blithe corporate mouthpiece. But then he ripped the outfit off and kicked the perfectly pressed promoter in his stomach, dropping him to his knees. The expression on McMahon’s face was an exquisite blend of confusion, powerlessness, and rage.

The final stage of Vince’s transformation into the star of his own show came complete with a new look for its opening on April 13. Banks of TV screens flashed images of Steve Austin marching to a pulsing score through streets that had been set ablaze, followed by fiery rockets screaming in the air and an explosion. Before viewers could even think about changing channels, Jim Ross announced that Austin would be settling his differences with McMahon at some point in the show.

The next 120 minutes was another textbook example of how to produce wrestling. Interspersed between vignettes showing Vince in a warm-up suit, training for the big showdown, he delivered up his new soft-core cast. There was a sweaty Val Venis on the giant TitanTron, wearing only a towel and telling the audience, “I’ve got a rocket in my pocket that will take each and every one of you women on the face of this planet to new and exciting heights.” There was a Degeneration X match between Owen Hart and “Bad Ass” Billy Gunn in which Hart yanked down Gunn’s tights, exposing his buttocks. (In the wings, DX cohort Hunter Hearst Helmsley asked, “Doesn’t he know crack isn’t good for you?”) There was Rocky Maivia, who was still part of the Nation of Domination, but would soon approach Vince with the idea of becoming a new millennium version of Ric Flair—complete with $500 shirts and shoes—and morph into The Rock.
⁵
And there was the requisite appearance by Goldust, dressed in a leather bra and panties set.