Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (33 page)

A New York-based watchdog group called Morality in Media didn’t get it. The group called the sixty-second spot “one of the most vile commercials ever aired on network TV” and begged the FCC to investigate whether it violated decency laws. (No action was ever taken.) Writing in the
New York Post
, Phil Mushnick asked:

If McMahon is so proud of what the WWF presents, why hint at it in a commercial? Why not show today’s Super Bowl audience exactly what the WWF now regularly presents to kids? Why not show clips from recent shows, perhaps the crucifixion angle, or the castration angle, or the transsexual oral sex angle? Perhaps some of the negative stereotype ethnic angles, or racial gang angles, or the weekly sexual degradation of women, women now known to young WWF audiences as
hoes
.

Ironically, neither Mushnick nor the self-styled cultural cops from Morality in Media caused as much trouble for McMahon as Sable. Bell used his friendship with
Playboy
publisher Christie Heffner to land Sable a deal to pose in the April 1999 issue. The success of the issue, which sold a million copies (only Cindy Crawford, Katarina Witt, and Farrah Fawcett sold more copies of a magazine in the nineties), brought with it a slew of new demands. One was that she no longer wanted to work house shows. Another was that she didn’t want to wrestle on Raw. The only times she’d get down and dirty, she said, was on a pay-per-view where she stood to get a cut of the gross.

Her diva act began causing backstage problems with the other girls, and Russo complained that it was irritating for him to submit her lines to her husband for approval. Finally, McMahon had enough. He decided to bump her down in the pecking order by taking the women’s title away. But everything about the match gave him headaches. The Meros insisted the rules had to be written out in advance and that they include a promise that the Sable character “not be degraded.” Vince agreed, only to set his announcers loose on her when her match with Debra Marshall aired live on May 10, 1999, from Orlando. As the women clawed at one another, Lawler asked Shawn Michaels, who was making a cameo appearance at the announcer’s desk, “Do you think she is horizontally accessible?”

“She’s accessible every which way from what I hear,” Michaels replied.

Mero would quit shortly after that appearance—the third of four episodes that helped
Raw
account for the four highest-rated shows on cable during the May sweeps period.

The fourth one was the memorial episode for Owen, whose death on May 23 prompted Martha Hart’s promise that there would be “a day of reckoning.”

Between the two eventful episodes, Vince and Linda found themselves signing a deal that would bring them to broadcast television for the first time since the days of NBC’s
Main Event
.

IN THE
spring of 1999, Dean Valentine, the president of UPN, was struggling with his future. After five years of dismal ratings his network was on track to lose $180 million, and Valentine’s bosses at Paramount were breathing down his neck. What was most embarrassing was that Warner Brothers, with its WB Network, UPN’s archrival, was scorching him with teen hits such as
Dawson’s Creek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Felicity
, and
Charmed
. As the forty-four-year-old Valentine looked at his forthcoming fall schedule, about all he saw was a
Moesha
spin-off called
MoNique
and a sitcom with a grown-up Jaleel White (better known as Urkel of
Family Matters)
.

Then the network CEO had a brainstorm, or at least the kind of clearheaded thought that precedes most near-death experiences. Instead of attacking the fem-friendly WB directly, why not go the opposite route and target the corresponding male audience that the WB was writing off?

The idea reflected the fundamental shift in the way television was being programmed. As a network vice president told
Entertainment Weekly
, “Demographics are the currency of the business now. Household ratings are a holdover from an era when demos were not available on a daily basis.” In other words, it didn’t matter how many people were watching, but what kind. NBC may have won the November 1998 sweeps, but Fox could argue that it was the real winner because its audience was more heavily weighted toward the young males that advertisers coveted (since they were the ones most likely to be willing to experiment with new brands and products).

There was a second issue for Valentine as well. Unlike Fox or NBC, his network was relegated to the high country of the cable dial; its average channel position was 29. Viewers had to really want to see something if they were going to surf that high. But he couldn’t invest a whole season, or even half a season, in building a hit that would lure them that high up the dial. He didn’t have the time. He needed to land something that had a built-in audience.

Over dinner at the Hollywood restaurant Patina, Valentine was explaining his dilemma to a friend who mentioned that his teen sons were addicted to wrestling. In his day, Valentine had also been a huge wrestling fan. Growing up in New York, he’d worked as a bellhop at the Hotel Holland on Forty-second Street, which lay across from the Port Authority bus terminal and was where the wrestlers stayed when they played the Garden. Valentine not only remembered helping Andre the Giant and Bruno Sammartino with their bags; those memories were some of his fondest from childhood.

Yes, he agreed, wrestling was a perfect fit. Moreover, if he acted fast, he could get something on the air that would announce his repositioning intentions before the annual “up-front” meetings in May, when all the networks debuted their fall lineups to advertisers. Valentine had met Vince McMahon briefly a year earlier, when Vince was afraid Barry Diller might cancel
Raw
and he’d need a new home. At the time, Valentine listened politely but said they didn’t have an opening. Now he couldn’t get the WWF on the air fast enough.

The two-hour WWF special that aired at the end of April was a smashing example of narrowcasting, luring more young male viewers than
Monday Night Football
. And so it was that when Valentine faced fifty of his advertisers at the Manhattan Center Theater on a bright mid-May day in New York, it was to announce a new Thursday night show called
WWF Smack Down!

“It’s hard for a lot of people to get the idea that most guys would rather put a bullet in their brain than watch
The Practice,”
Valentine crowed with The Rock and several of the WWF’s other most recognizable faces surrounding him. “Vince gets it. His genius is that he’s an out-and-out populist.”

Thanks to its futuristic new sets and a hard-core soundtrack,
Smack-Down!
turned into the fourth youngest-skewing show on television. And with an average viewer who was thirteen years younger than the ones who watched
Friends
, it continued Vince’s improbable comeback as the Pied Piper of teenage America.

BY JUNE
1999, Eric Bischoff was disappearing further and further into the Los Angeles music industry. Midway through the month, the rap impresario Percy “Master P” Miller convinced him that they could marry wrestling to an urban dance crowd. It was a dubious premise considering that both WCW and WWF had spent decades feeding their audiences a steady diet of antiblack stereotypes. Nonetheless, Bischoff struck a million-dollar deal to make Miller’s posse, the No Limit Soldiers, a hip-hop version of the nWo. Inevitably, the whole thing turned into a disaster when they were thrown into a rap-country angle with a heel group called the West Texas Rednecks. The black rappers wound up getting jeered so heavily by WCW’s young country-loving audiences that they were gone from the program within a month.

Was it wrestling? Did Bischoff even know what that meant anymore? His job had become an endless series of arguments with his new masters at Time Warner, with the irreconcilable factions in his locker room, even with himself. He should quit; he shouldn’t quit; he should let the Boys he’d made rich go ahead and screw themselves right into the ground. Let Hogan and Nash finally have it out—for real, on pay-per-view. Wouldn’t that be something? Then again, maybe not. Maybe all they’d do was threaten one another with lawyers. After all, they’d all gone soft, the whole lot of them. Dennis Rodman, brought out for another five-week stint that July, showed the cynicism permeating everything when he told
TV Guide:
“It’s money. That’s all I’ll say. I just don’t know why I have to do that damn wrestling shit. I just want to show up.” Even Bischoff would admit that he was going soft. He could feel his middle, see the results of too many lunches like the one at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, when Gene Simmons, the brains behind Kiss, convinced him to support the band’s upcoming tour by using wrestlers on
Nitro
who wore the band’s makeup. The idea excited Bischoff. It was a perfect launching pad for the music label he envisioned building. He was just as excited by the news that David Arquette, the
Scream
movie actor, had signed on to star in a wrestling movie that he was executive producing at Warner Brothers.

Unfortunately, while he was spending Time Warner’s money to play West Coast mogul, he’d lost sight of how to fight the war they’d hired him to win in the first place. For one thing, he hadn’t created a successful new act since Bill Goldberg. It wasn’t that he hadn’t had opportunities. He had a great talent in Chris Jericho, but the charismatic youngster left after being held back by the Hogan and Nash factions and was now blossoming into a star in the WWF. What was worse, the aging stars who held Jericho back were themselves out of control. When Randy Savage decided that Hogan was trying to sabotage his career, Savage boycotted high-profile shows in San Francisco, Reno, and Los Angeles, where his role in a tag-team match had been heavily hyped. The crisis forced Bischoff to throw Bret Hart into the breach, ruining a long-term plan to have Hart and Hogan—who’d never met in the ring—do so for the first time in the company’s upcoming
Fall Brawl
.

It was this kind of last-minute madness that caused the white-haired producer to explode in the locker room before a
Nitro
taping in Las Vegas, where they’d flown after the Los Angeles show. The previous week had been an embarrassment, he hollered. Scott “Raven” Levy, a midcard wrestler who’d publicly complained about Hogan on a Chicago radio show, could get the hell out if he didn’t like it. (Levy calmly did and quit.) Bischoff wasn’t any happier with Charles “Konnan” Ashenoff, who went overboard in Reno by grabbing a microphone and bellowing: “You guys look like you haven’t had any pussy since pussy had you.” They were supposed to be the family values alternative to the WWF, for
chrissakes
. What was Rey Misterio Jr. thinking when he asked an effeminate opponent if he was “going down the Hershey Highway” on national TV? It had to stop.
It all had to stop
.

About the same time those words were leaving his lips, an accountant on his staff back in Atlanta was shaking his head, sure he’d made a mistake. He was closing out the books on August, expecting to see a $1 million profit. Instead, he discovered a $5 million loss. “We went through it four or five times,” says Greg Prince, WCW’s controller. “I remember thinking that we must have missed some revenue somewhere. But we didn’t. I sent the file down to Harvey Schiller’s right-hand man and labeled it the ‘Holy Shit!’ file.”

As the higher-ups at Time Warner were warned that the chances of breaking even in 1999 were bleak, and that 2000 was going to be worse, some very serious people began asking some very serious questions. Why had Bischoff gone ahead with his
Road Wild
pay-per-view, which was a party but never made a dime, if he knew he was in so much trouble? Why had he spent $600,000 to launch a Kiss character called the Demon, and another million to bring the band to Las Vegas for a one-shot appearance on
Nitro
, where they lip-synched a single song after 11
P.M.—
well past a time they could have done the show any good? And what about his idea of trying to imitate
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
by giving away another $1 million on
Nitro?
Thank God they scrapped that one before it was too late. The man was spending millions like there was no end to his bankroll. No wonder they called him ATM Eric. And it was getting worse: He’d just booked the seventy-thousand-seat home of the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals for a millennial Kiss concert and wrestling show on New Year’s Eve. Not only was it wildly expensive, it had come close to causing a revolt. The wrestlers’ wives were petrified to have their husbands flying while the nation’s air traffic control system grappled with the prospect of a Y2K glitch.

Reporters who covered the industry were starting to publicly urge Bischoff to step aside before the damage got worse. In late August, Mike Mooneyham used his long-running column in the
Charleston Post and Courier
newspaper to ask whether anyone was noticing “the growing similarities between Eric Bischoff and the Roman Emperor Nero” who famously fiddled while his empire burned? Accountants for WCW surely did. When they looked at the revenue side, they were aghast to see its arena business in a state of total collapse. Only thirty-eight hundred paying customers came to the sixteen-thousand-seat Miami Arena for a show to celebrate the fourth anniversary of
Nitro
on September 6; another five thousand tickets were given away just so they wouldn’t have to be embarrassed about holding their anniversary in an empty building. Bischoff had lost $8 million in two months. As one Turner executive put it, “We’ve got a bleeder on our hands.”

When Nick Lambross, who worked as Bischoff’s business manager before leaving the company late in 1998, learned that his ex-boss had been fired four days after the Miami Arena embarrassment, he thought about the opening scene of the movie
Casino
. The camera pans a gaming room in Las Vegas while actor Joe Pesci laments: “It should have been perfect. But in the end we fucked it up. It should have been so sweet. But it turned out to be the last time that street guys like us were ever given anything that fuckin’ valuable again.” Lambross thought it was a perfect epitaph.