Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (35 page)

Brenner was the only one in the USA negotiating group who had been at the network under its old president, Kay Koplovitz. And to some extent, he shared her disdain for wrestling. Certainly, he’d been through enough talks with the McMahons to feel no particular pressure to jump through hoops for them. His first volley had been a two-page offer sheet that significantly increased the fees they got for their shows—
Raw
, for instance, would see its $12,000-a-week fee doubled in the third year of the deal—but didn’t mention much else. The McMahons reacted angrily when they got the initial offer. The accumulated slights of seventeen years came spilling out all at once. They wanted to be wooed. Instead, they felt as though they were getting worked. And they let Diller know it when they convened in his West Fifty-seventh Street office two days before Christmas. The network’s owner was just as surprised as Chao at how little progress had been made. Scolding his lieutenants, he told them to get together a better deal. And to get it done fast.

By then, though, McCluggage’s woo-at-all-costs strategy was starting to pay off. Two days into the new year, he traveled to Stamford to continue fleshing out what the McMahons wanted, including a prime-time series for Steve Austin and a stake in what they were now calling
Raw Football
. Things were starting to happen fast and furiously. They agreed to meet again at the national cable convention, which was being held in New Orleans during the week of January 24, 2000.

At the Paramount booth there, McCluggage was pleased to see Linda, but he was also taken aback when, for the first time, she mentioned that USA had a matching rights clause. McCluggage had repeatedly asked their agents whether such a clause existed and was assured that it didn’t. It wasn’t the first time an agent had played fast and loose with the truth. But as he scanned it, McCluggage realized that this added a whole new dimension to what he’d hoped would be clean negotiations. Suddenly he had a deadline: the March 31, 2000, date that USA’s Baker had set for Linda to return with a rival offer. More than likely, there was also the possibility of litigation.

As McCluggage was scanning the document, Steve Chao was walking the convention floor nervously. He’d picked up signals that Viacom was becoming a serious rival in the talks, perhaps even starting to pull ahead of USA. Writing an urgent e-mail to Diller from New Orleans, Chao said he was “at Def-Con 3” and urged that

we should go halfsies on football (50% up to $50 million). We should commit to a man-cable channel using our respective libraries as payment into this USA-WWFE [World Wrestling Federation Entertainment] partnership. And we should renew WWFE for USA on same terms as before (since we will plow investment into cable channel and football). Our clumsy USA process is getting in the way of a speedy conclusion to this. Because Vince is Vince and we do not want to lose this, you should call Vince with as much detail as possible and shake hands.

But Chao’s influence on the negotiations was limited. His higher-ups at USA continued to believe that they were safe because their contract gave them the right to match rival offers. Their first real sense that they were in trouble came on February 2, when
Variety’s
website reported that Viacom “was convinced it had locked up a deal with the WWF.” That might have been a bit premature, but Baker didn’t help himself much when he trucked up to Stamford on February 17 to deliver the presentation that Diller had promised would be better. Vince and Linda watched the slide show that had been prepared for them, straining to figure out what was new in it. There was a mention of a prime-time show, a WWF version of
Baywatch
. And there were a few words about cross-promotion on the Home Shopping Network and Ticketmaster, which USA also owned. But there was none of the sweep or the dollars of the Viacom blueprint.

Vince was grossly disappointed. He’d hoped that he’d proven his seriousness about wanting to launch his new league when he’d held a press conference at a theme restaurant he’d recently opened in Times Square. One reporter had asked if this thing he was now calling the XFL was his chance to go legit. “Oh, I love that question,” he sneered. “May I never be thought of as fuckin’ legit.” Had he learned anything from his failed World Bodybuilding Federation? “Yeah,” he replied curtly, “don’t make mistakes.” But what about the fact that his stock price lost 20 percent of its value on the news that he wanted to take the WWF into football? “Wall Street can kiss my ass,” he said.

It was a vintage performance. Afterward, when he’d climbed into his limousine for the ride back to Stamford, he got a surprising cell phone call from his friend Dick Ebersol. The president of NBC Sports had tried and failed to get his own idea for a spring football league off the ground some years earlier, but the notion of placing one in the lead-in spot before
Saturday Night Live
still had enormous appeal to him. “Don’t do anything until you’ve spoken to me,” he’d told Vince.

Now, as McMahon finished listening to the presentation being given by Baker, he found himself becoming incensed. There was nothing even remotely resembling what Chao had suggested in his e-mail to Diller about the XFL, just vague allusions to future talks. It was meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Nothing had changed. USA was still taking him lightly.

But not McCluggage. In fact, while Diller’s aides were dithering, McCluggage was having his own lawyers look at the contract that gave USA the right to match rival offers. If he was going to make a play for the WWF, he wanted to make this a clean sweep and not leave USA any room to counteroffer.

So on February 24—five days after Baker’s visit—the studio chief led his own contingent to Stamford. He’d gotten together an all-star cast from the various divisions of Viacom. It included John Dolgen, McCluggage’s boss as the head of Viacom entertainment; Tom Freston, head of MTV, who controlled the music channel’s offerings as well as the Nickelodeon family of kids’ stations; and David Hall, the head of TNN. Vince and Linda were impressed. These were busy people.

McCluggage started by saying the package he was about to unveil had been approved at his company’s highest level—by Viacom’s president, Mel Karmazin, and its CEO, Sumner Redstone. It started with their desire to move all four of the WWF’s shows currently on USA to TNN. In addition, he was prepared to link that with a thirteen-week pilot for a Steve Austin drama, a book deal with Simon & Schuster, five annual events at their theme parks, seven specials a year, and a boatload of cross-promotion on radio stations and billboards. UPN was also serious about wanting a piece of the XFL.

With slightly more than a month to go before the McMahons had to give USA their final answer, they were on the verge of getting everything they had ever wanted, including respect from some very heavy hitters.

SATURDAY, APRIL 1
, was cool in Anaheim, the perfect kind of day to prepare for the biggest show of the year and bank $60 million at the same time. Ebersol had been right. NBC had been willing to go along with McMahon’s idea for a new football league. In fact, it was in the midst of acquiring $30 million in stock in the recently renamed World Wrestling Federation Entertainment—which equalled 3 percent of its outstanding shares—in order to become a part owner in the XFL. “In Vince McMahon, we’re getting the best marketer in America,” Ebersol enthused.

Now, as Vince was going over the final preparations for the next day’s
Wrestlemania 2000
, McCluggage thought he’d put the finishing touches on his own wet kiss. The evening before, he’d broken open a bottle of Kettle One vodka and toasted the lawyers arrayed around his conference room table for sealing the deal that he hoped would trump USA and bring the WWF to Viacom. All that remained was for the McMahons to sign the short-form agreement he’d faxed over that morning to the Arrowhead Pond auditorium. McCluggage assumed this was a formality. But he learned otherwise when his office phone rang shortly after noon.

“Kerry, “Vince said. “We have a problem.”

McCluggage winced, then sank into his seat, preparing himself for what would come next. “It’s this exclusivity thing. I can’t do it.” The studio chief told himself to be patient. He had a deal worth more than $100 million on the table. Surely he had the right to demand that the WWF produce its programming exclusively for Viacom. But McMahon, the Hollywood outsider, didn’t see it that way. No matter how much he was getting, he still bristled at the idea of being tied down. McCluggage tried to read into what was happening. Had he misjudged Vince’s willingness to follow these talks all the way through? No, he couldn’t have. They’d be fools to walk away from this; it was what their whole lives had been building toward. Surely all Vince needed was a little hand-holding before. So that’s what he did. He told Vince that this was going to be the best thing he’d ever done, but he had to trust his new partners. And as far as they were concerned, exclusivity was a deal breaker. After a flurry of phone calls, Vince finally agreed. The McMahons of Havelock, North Carolina, would be Hollywood outsiders no longer.

The pay-per-view that Vince aired the next day was a perfect example of the kind of product that they’d sold to one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. Because this was pay-per-view, Vince could be unfiltered, not having to worry about talk show moralists like Bozell. So right from the opening, the Godfather and his ho train were led out by Ice T, dressed in a feathery red pimp coat and hat, rapping the lyrics, “Pimpin’ ain’t easy, pimp or die. Yeah bitches, God-fatha’s in the house.” Not long after that, the newest staple of Vince’s harem, a curvy blonde named Trish Stratus, sauntered to the ring in skintight hot pants as the manager of a tag team called T&A. This gave one pimply boy a chance to unfold a sign that read, “Trish, show us your T&A.”

Backstage, the even more uninhibited Stacy Carter filmed a segment where the grandmotherly Mae Young helped her get dressed. At one point, Young spied a shirt with a furry cat face on it and held it up. “Oh, I love that one,” Carter said, moving her nude body into the camera frame in such a way that the only thing covering her thatch was the furry cat face on the shirt being held by Young. Carter would come out a short time later to wrestle Terri Runnels in a match where they pummeled one another until Carter used her long nails to tear the spandex covering off Runnels’s rear end. If one squinted, it became clear that Runnels was wearing a flesh-colored thong. If one didn’t, it looked convincingly like she was wrestling bare-assed.

The main event was a four-way elimination match, with each member of the McMahon family standing in the corner of a different contender. Paul “Big Show” Wight was thrown first from the ring, followed by Mick Foley, who endured a last crowd-pleasing torture before his retirement—a leap off the top rope onto the announcer’s table where Hunter Hearst Helmsley lay. Because he’d hurt his shoulder when the 450-pound Wight fell on him earlier, he landed short—caroming off the table and onto the floor. With a rib possibly broken, he dragged himself into the ring one final time, waving a two-by-four wrapped in barbed wire before he let himself get pinned. The Rock and Helmsley brawled after that, though not to the match’s conclusion. This, after all, was a night for the family McMahon.

Shane had already proven to be a provocative, risk-taking amateur. The more pleasant surprise was Stephanie. The twenty-three-year-old product of Greenwich private schools was a firebrand. She’d been introduced to her father’s viewers as an ingenue but now, in a turnaround only he could engineer, she’d traded sweater sets for leather miniskirts and an on-camera marriage to Helmsley. (In real life, Helmsley would leave his live-in lover, Chyna, to begin an affair with Stephanie.)

If hearing his daughter called a slut every time she entered the ring mattered to Vince at all, it was only because it proved she could carry herself before a frothing arena. Now, fulfilling the promise of ads that boasted “the most dysfunctional family in America,” he had his son run in to ambush him at ringside as his daughter looked on in apparent delight.

As Vince staggered to his feet from a vicious head shot with a television monitor, he kicked his son in the groin with his Italian leather shoes, then turned his back, giving the thirty-year-old heir a moment to heave a folding chair over his old man’s head. It connected so loudly that even Shane seemed surprised. To make it look worse, Vince took a razor from his pocket to cut his forehead; he cursed when it didn’t bleed very much. The denouement of the match required him to influence the outcome by turning against one of the two survivors. Helmsley was the heel husband of his estranged daughter. The Rock was his million-dollar champion. The fans would expect him to turn on his heel. Instead, he climbed into the ring and brought a chair down over his babyface. As Helmsley rolled over on his side to pin the surprised-looking Rock, Stephanie joined her father in the ring, signaling a new father-daughter alliance and a new booking year of twists and turns.

The next day, Linda would call USA and say they were accepting Viacom’s offer, ending a relationship that started when Kay Koplovitz allowed Vince to replace a wrestling show in which two Texans jousted in pig shit. That was seventeen years before. Now, as Vince scanned the fresh faces of the sold-out Arrowhead Pond auditorium, he had to wonder what his father would think. He’d gotten America’s mall majority to scream at him, to hurl cups on his thousand-dollar suit. He’d twisted their well-scrubbed young faces into a rage. He’d gotten them to believe in what he was selling.

Most of the kids in that crowd in Anaheim weren’t even alive when Vinnie walked into the Warwick Hotel with two bags full of contracts and the smoke-and-mirror financing to take over the World Wide Wrestling Federation. That was two wrestling lifetimes and a bloody war with Ted Turner ago. That was before the feds tried to convict him as a drug pusher, before he’d watched Brian Pillman and others die. Now anyone who attacked him—a conservative activist, a publicityseeking U.S. attorney, even a billionaire—could expect to be met with the full force of his rebuilt machine. Wrestling wasn’t nearly as innocent, funny, or well mannered as it once was.