Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (30 page)

Finally, at 9:50
P.M.,
the fifty-two-year-old McMahon strutted into the ring, demanding that Austin make good on his boast to beat him with one hand tied behind his back. “Come on, hotshot,” he said. “You got any guts?”

In fact, with just a few minutes left, he had no intention of wasting a valuable match on free television. That was the difference between the WWF and WCW. An increasingly desperate Bischoff was giving away pay-per-view quality matches in a bid to boost his ratings. But that was what you did when you dealt from weakness. Dealing from strength meant having a star like Foley emerge from the wings to suddenly drag Austin out of the ring as the show was going to black.

If anyone had the slightest doubt about McMahon’s drawing power, it was shattered the next afternoon.
Raw
had achieved a 6.0 rating in that quarter-hour—an all-time high in their head-to-head competition. When all eight quarter-hours were added together and
Raw
averaged a 4.6 rating,
Nitro’s
streak of eighty-three straight Monday night wins had come to an end.

1
This wasn’t purely a request. Hart had a clause written into his contract that gave him creative control over his character for thirty days before his departure from the company.

2
This quote, along with many of the details of the incident, was included in a chronicle of the events in the November 17, 1997, issue of Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer.

3
A year later, a documentary about Bret Hart, Wrestling with Shadows, would rekindle the controversy surrounding the Montreal double cross, featuring tapes of conversations between Vince and Bret, some of which McMahon did not know were being recorded. It shows Pat Patterson going over details of the finish of the match, which he obviously knew wasn’t going to happen. It also shows Bret talking to his wife and telling her Vince had agreed to the disqualification finish, to which she responded, “I don’t believe it.” In a conversation before the match, Bret was filmed saying, “I’d just like to get through today. Then tomorrow I should just forfeit my title. It allows me a chance to leave with my head up, leave in a nice way. I don’t have to beat Shawn. We can have a schmooze or whatever you want.” To that Vince replied, “I’m open to anything. As I said before, I’m determined for this to wind up the right way.”

4
Claiming long-term emotional and physical damage, Kulas pressed criminal assault charges against Young, but the wrestler was cleared in 1999 when his six-person jury viewed a tape of Kulas pressing together his lips and puffing out his cheeks—an action to make the blood flow more freely—and decided that Kulas was a willing participant.

5
Maivia, who was known as Dwayne Johnson when he played linebacker for the national champion Miami Hurricanes, assumed the stage name the Rock as a tribute to the two generations of wrestlers in his family. His father, Rocky Johnson, worked in the WWF under the name Soul Man. His maternal grandfather, High Chief Peter Maivia, was a top Samoan wrestler during the sixties and seventies. With genes like that, no one at the WWF was surprised when he progressed so fast that the Rock became a breakout star by the age of twenty-seven.

FIFTEEN

THE WAR BETWEEN THE
WWF and WCW was entering a new phase now, one in which both companies were abandoning any reservations about explicitly attacking one another. On April 27, 1998, in Virginia—where the rivals had scheduled shows within thirty miles of each other—Vince rented an army jeep with a mounted bayonet and sent Hunter Hearst Helmsley and the rest of his Degeneration X crew to the Scope Arena in Norfolk with it. At the gate, Helmsley aimed the gun barrel at the marquee and fired a blank shot, proclaiming it the maiden shot in the Monday night wars. Because
Nitro
aired in an hour version that started at eight o’clock (so the NBA playoffs could begin at nine),
Raw
ran unopposed in its nine o’clock slot. That meant the stunt was seen in 4.1 million homes—helping the show to post a 5.7 rating over the full two hours that broke its former record, set two weeks earlier, by a full point. Emboldened, Vince sent Helmsley back on the road to Atlanta a couple of weeks later with Sean “X-Pac” Waltman, a wrestler whom Eric Bischoff had hired away from the WWF and then subsequently fired. As they arrived at WCW’s corporate offices in suburban Atlanta, Helmsley lingered out front while a cameraman trailed Waltman into the lobby, where he told a security guard that he wanted an explanation for his firing. Not surprisingly, Waltman was turned away. With nothing else to do, they took their jeep to the CNN Center in downtown Atlanta and pretended to fire another shot. When editors at
Raw
spliced in footage of a building collapse, unamused Turner lawyers had a cease and desist order on McMahon’s desk within days.

Bischoff, however, loved the warfare. On television the next week from Kansas City, he hyped a forthcoming pay-per-view by suggesting that if Vince really wanted to find him that badly they should simply meet in the ring. The prospect of more stunts drove ticket buyers to the box office of the Georgia Dome for a show whose lineup wasn’t even announced yet. More than fourteen thousand tickets were sold in just less than five hours, a company record for first-day sales.

The heat was so intense that Bischoff was able to sign Karl Malone to wrestle Dennis Rodman as part of a tag-team match after the Chicago Bulls met the Utah Jazz in the NBA finals. David Stern, the league’s commissioner, wasn’t happy when he got wind of the stunt. Rodman didn’t help matters by skipping a Bulls practice between games two and three so he could show up, cigar in mouth, at a
Nitro
taping in Detroit. When the Bulls forward scrambled for a ball with Malone in the sixth and deciding game of the finals, a disgusted Bob Costas suggested that they save the theatrics for their “bogus match.” But Malone, like so many in sports, was tired of being told how to act to keep corporate money (read: white money) pouring into luxury boxes and season ticket plans. A reporter came up to him before his bout with Rodman and mentioned Costas’s remark, causing him to snap, “Fuck Bob Costas. For a long time I’ve lived my life for the media. Now let me live it for me.”

In other words, wrestling was the distraction du jour for the sports world’s elite, all the more desirable because the sanctimonious press hated it so much.

But within the WCW offices, there was growing concern that the expensive stunt looked too derivative and wasn’t going to have the same ripple effect as Tyson’s ratings revelation at
Wrestlemania
. On June 1, 1998, the day Michael Jordan propelled the Bulls into the finals and the buildup to the pay-per-view started, the episode of
Nitro
that aired was the lowest-rated one of the year. By June 30, when the finals were over and anticipation for the show should have been red hot,
Nitro
had fallen a ratings point and a half behind
Raw
—the biggest disparity since the wars began.

If Bischoff was worried, he didn’t let his staff see it. One day Nick Lambross, a smart young lawyer who’d been installed as a kind of second in command to oversee the business side, sat listening to the producer talk about the flying lessons that he was taking so he could shuttle between both coasts and the home he was building in Cody, Wyoming. “I’m going to be just like Ted,” Bischoff crowed.

“The difference between you and Ted,” Lambross replied dryly, “is that Ted sits in the
back
of the plane.”

IF THERE
was one match the producer knew he could still bank on, it was Bill Goldberg versus Hulk Hogan. The two biggest names in his company had yet to meet. When they did, many thought it should be at a pay-per-view, where the anticipation would have been enough to produce a multimillion-dollar payday. But a week before the next
Nitro
, Bischoff was driving through Marina del Rey, California, when Hogan reached him on his cell phone. “What do you think about letting me work with Goldberg and having him win the strap?” he asked. Bischoff pulled off the highway to think about it. The Georgia Dome show was a sellout and would be held in the backyard of CNN Center in downtown Atlanta. He knew that Hogan, who’d been running on fumes lately, wanted the station’s brass to see that he could still put on a big-time show. But as self-serving as Bischoff knew the idea was, Hogan had a point: It was the one match of the year that everyone would talk about, the one that would take Goldberg over the top. He’d lose a small fortune putting it on basic cable, sure, but with
Raw
routinely beating
Nitro
in the ratings now, Bischoff decided it was a gamble worth taking. After he told Hogan that he’d do it on Thursday, July 2, he called one of his road agents, J. J. Dillon, and told him to go on television that night—on a new show they’d started called
Thunder—
to announce that Goldberg would be squaring off against Hogan for the title four days hence.

Bill Goldberg was watching that show in his living room in Atlanta. No one had breathed a word about it to him. Somehow, it wasn’t the way he thought he’d hear about his first meeting with the biggest money earner of all time.

On July 6, Goldberg arrived at the Georgia Dome to find the whole cast of WCW being pressed into service to make him a star. Even Karl Malone was on hand to hype the following weekend’s pay-per-view match with Rodman (who no-showed because he’d spent the previous night crashing the stage of a Pearl Jam concert in Dallas, shoeless, shirtless, and chugging wine from a bottle). The buildup unnerved Goldberg, and the hours to the main event seemed to drag on forever. When it finally arrived, he found it hard not to be unsettled by the full-throated crowd’s chanting of his name or the fear that somehow he might hurt Hogan.

A year on the road had helped Goldberg perfect his entrance; he walked out with his head bowed as if in prayer, looking almost peaceful as fireworks and fog sprayed over him. Though the sparks burned his skin, he never let on that it hurt because he knew it seemed more authentic when he finally uncoiled and began his full-throated scream. Hogan had seen the move before, but with forty thousand fans roaring “Goldberg” in unison, even he allowed himself to be a little impressed.

Just as the match had been laid out, Goldberg dominated early, overpowering Hogan in a battle of strength. Hogan, dressed in his nWo black, acted the part of the heel, poking Goldberg’s eyes, raking his back, and whipping him with a weight-lifting belt. The key spot of the first series was when Goldberg grabbed the belt away. Feigning surprise, the older wrestler shook his jowls like a dog shaking off water, then played to the crowd with a wide-eyed “Oh-oh”. He tried falling on Goldberg with a series of painful-looking elbow drops, but each time Goldberg rolled over, leaving Hogan to rub his right elbow in apparent pain. The match had a bare, stripped-down feel, and it continued when Hogan launched into his own offense, grabbing Goldberg, lofting him upside down, and dropping him headfirst onto the mat. As the ex-tackle lay there, his chest rising, Hogan sprung into two leg drops, seemingly gathering strength.

It was at this point that a prearranged distraction turned the tide of the action. Curt Hennig, a second-generation grappler once known as Mr. Perfect, appeared from the wings, ready to help when he was suddenly intercepted and dropped by Malone at ringside. With Hogan watching Malone, his back to center ring, Goldberg assumed a combat crouch. Every soul in the Georgia Dome knew what was coming next. Just as Hogan turned around, Goldberg speared the golden champion with his head, then launched into the most ferocious-looking jackhammer he could summon. At that moment, as all of Atlanta seemed to be rocking, reporter Dave Meltzer looked in his notebook and wrote:

Make no mistake about this … WCW is now Goldberg’s company. Not Hogan’s or anyone else’s …. When the story is written years from now, people will be shocked that Goldberg’s first world title win wasn’t something planned in advance, and came simply because a company was desperate.

In WCW’s offices on Tuesday morning, no one was thinking about the long run. The overnight ratings showed that
Nitro
just scored its first victory in fourteen weeks—a 6.9 rating that continued the upward rating arc for wrestling. If they had been thinking longer term, they might have paused before their next move.

GARY CONSIDINE
, the executive producer for NBC Studios, had helped book Hogan and Diamond Dallas Page on
The Tonight Show
in advance of one of their pay-per-views and was impressed at the way they’d helped NBC get an edge over CBS’s
David Letterman Show
. So in mid-July, Considine invited Bischoff to his office in Burbank to ask whether WCW might want to expand the relationship, perhaps even get Jay Leno involved in some kind of angle. Bischoff replied that he had the perfect vehicle—the
Road Wild
pay-per-view in August. Leno loved bikes. It was a natural fit, even more so because he had the perfect way to cast it: He and Hogan would wrestle on one team, Leno and Dallas Page on another.

Leno threw himself into the role. A regulation-sized ring was moved into an empty union hall on the NBC lot, and Leno and his musical director, Kevin Eubanks, went there to practice after every show. Chris Kanyon, a native New Yorker who learned the business in a basement gym in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was given the assignment of training the comic. Kanyon thought Leno was taking his training seriously, maybe too seriously. As they went through their steps, Leno was so businesslike he was almost boring; he refused to crack a smile or show much personality. It wasn’t until Kanyon went to a
Tonight Show
taping that he understood Leno became a different man when the camera’s light blinked red.