Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (36 page)

But neither was Vince McMahon.

OUR STORY SINCE THEN …

LINDA MCMAHON WAS ON
the French Riviera, in Nice, for an international television convention when she received a fax copy of USA’s response to Viacom’s offer.

Had she known what kinds of discussions had been going on at USA, all the red lines through the paragraphs would have made more sense. Over the prior week, the company’s executives and lawyers huddled, trying to figure out what to do with the mess they’d made. If the network matched the deal, USA stood to lose $6.79 million the first year, $6.60 million the second year, and $4.96 million during the third year of the contract.

Viacom’s lawyers had played dirty, they decided, by dissecting USA’s matching agreement word for word and then creating a deal designed to thwart it. Why else would a studio chief like McCluggage throw theme park events into the mix? In the end, they concluded that they were only obliged to match the part of the offer that dealt with the WWF’s five programs. Everything else was irrelevant. That was why Barry Baker faxed a copy of the Viacom offer sheet with cross-out markings everywhere.

Irritated, Linda called her office in New York, where it was morning, and had her assistant get Baker on the line. Baker tried to sound cheerful, saying he hoped that there might still be fruitful negotiations ahead. But then he added, “We also believe that this is ultimately going to be an issue for the courts to decide, so we’ve asked their opinion.”

“How have you done that?” Linda asked warily.

“Well, we’ve sued you.”

At a four-day trial in June 2000, USA’s lawyers offered their narrow interpretation of what their matching rights required. To the McMahons, it was nothing more than the last desperate gasps of a network trying to keep them on the cheap. “There was very little dialogue on the part of USA,” Vince testified. It came “only from the standpoint of Stephen Brenner, who I consider to be intellectually challenged. He presented a proposal to us in its initial state which was, I think, embarrassing.”

In ruling on the case, a Delaware judge agreed that Viacom indeed had put together a package that it knew USA didn’t have the assets to match. But that didn’t mean USA was out of the woods, the judge said. Even if USA’s strict interpretation of the contract was used, Viacom still presented the better offer. For instance, while USA belatedly agreed to pony up $500,000 per week for its WWF shows, it continued to balk at giving the McMahons a guarantee that they wouldn’t be preempted for special events like the U.S. Open or the Westminster dog show.

When the ruling was made public, Steven Chao tried to put the best face on things for USA. Since the WWF kept most of Raw’s advertising inventory, he said the network would actually do
better
because it would have more ad time to sell. “It will have a negligible effect on our ratings and a positive effect on our cash flow,” he insisted.

Brenner was the first to be called to account; he was summoned to Baker’s office and told he was being reorganized out of a job. Shortly thereafter Baker also resigned. Ultimately, Chao would be fired, too, as USA’s ratings nose-dived by 15 percent and the loss of the WWF caused it to lose its claim to being the highest-rated network in cable.

As for Linda McMahon, she went on CNBC the day after the Delaware ruling to boast that the WWF was expecting to post a 15 percent increase in revenues in fiscal 2001, helped by the $85 million that the WWF expected to earn in the first season of the XFL.

VINCE’S AIDES
had begged him to wait a year before launching the new football league. The coaches needed the extra time. The production staff needed the extra time. But most of all, the people positioning the upstart league needed more time.

The early strategy was to sell more flesh than football. “We want our viewers to be on a first name basis with the cheerleaders,” Vince told
ESPN The Magazine
. “That way, when the quarterback fumbles or the receiver drops the ball, we’ll know who he’s dating and our reporters will be right in her face on the sidelines demanding to know whether the two of them did the wild thing last night.” When told about the remark, an XFL general manager by the name of J. K. McKay bristled. “Yes, we have cheerleaders,” he snapped. “But so do the Raiders. What are people expecting? That our cheerleaders are going to take their clothes off on the sideline?”
Uh, yeah
. And who could blame them, considering that the first ad that NBC aired featured an army of next-to-naked women in a steamy locker room?

At points, it seemed that the only thing that kept the mainstream sports press from completely pillorying the raunch launch was the supreme confidence of Dick Ebersol, who kept insisting that he’d heard similar doubts when he helped start
Saturday Night Live
. After the XFL’s first Saturday game on February 3, 2001, his calm seemed well-placed. Ten million households tuned in to see the maiden game between the New Jersey Hitmen and the Las Vegas Outlaws, outrating everything else on television.

But the excitement was short-lived. When eight o’clock arrived the next Saturday night, viewers didn’t see a moonlighting Governor Jesse Ventura sitting beside Jim Ross in the NBC announcer’s booth. Instead, they saw dead air; a power failure stalled the start by ninety seconds. It’s hard to know how many fans tuned out because of that, but only half as many viewers as the week before soldiered on to watch a doubleovertime game between Los Angeles and Memphis.

One of them was Lorne Michaels. When NBC committed $100 million to starting up the new league, the producer of
Saturday Night Live
had been promised that his 11:30
P.M.
starting time would be protected. But there he was, with Jennifer Lopez—a star with the number one movie
and
number one album in the nation—ready to go on for what was expected to be his biggest show of the year … and the XFL game was still lumbering on. Michaels was mad enough that he considered canceling the show and having NBC run a repeat. Instead, he sent his cast onstage, most not knowing that they weren’t airing live. The next day, when the overnights showed that his delayed broadcast didn’t even reach the 7.4 rating he’d done the week before, Michaels made sure that his old partner heard about it. “It was one of the most bizarre nights I’ve ever been a part of,” Ebersol told the
New York Times
.

If Ebersol was having doubts, he kept them to himself, as did everyone else at NBC. After the XFL’s fourth game drew four million viewers—ten million fewer than three weeks earlier—network president Bob Wright insisted that they were all in it for the long haul. “This season’s start-up costs represent less money than we would have lost airing three NFL games under the current contract,” he said, trying to sound casual. But while that was true, only the opening week’s rating was saving NBC from taking a bath. The average four-week rating of 5.1 was just a hair above the 4.5 level that NBC guaranteed advertisers who paid an average of $130,000 for thirty-second spots.

By the fifth week, when the NBC game drew only a 2.4 rating, advertisers weren’t the only one complaining. The network’s West Coast stations begged to be allowed to broadcast the games on tape-delay because the live East Coast feeds were leaving them nothing to show in West Coast prime time. By the seventh week, when NBC’s broadcast drew the lowest recorded rating since Nielsen began tracking them, the deathwatch was on. No one was surprised, then, when Ebersol confirmed that his network wouldn’t be sticking around to make the second year work.

For NBC, it was a bigger public relations disaster than a financial one. But the same wasn’t true of the UPN affiliates that had broadcast XFL games on Sunday night. “Their sales forces were trying to build up the XFL and get people excited about it, “says Adam Ware, UPN’s chief financial officer. “But they got undercut by the NBC sales guys who were used to selling the Olympics. When our affiliates went into the local Cadillac dealership, the owner had just finished getting an earful from the local NBC guy, who was selling his ads at a 20 percent discount because they were so embarrassed by the whole thing. When our guys came in trying to sell ads at full price, his reaction was,’ One of you is lying.’ ”

Despite this, McMahon remained hopeful that UPN would stay in for the long haul. In fact, he’d gathered the league’s general managers around him at Titan Tower on May 7 to tell them that they should all get ready for play the next spring. But his optimism belied the warnings that Adam Ware and Dean Valentine were giving him. For weeks, they’d been saying that UPN would need a concession before it invested in a second XFL season. The central one they now wanted was a reduction of the length of
SmackDown!
by a half hour so they could tack a new show at the end of it.

McMahon stalled. He’d already allowed the ratings for
SmackDown!
to decline while he focused on the XFL. The last thing his listing company needed was to lose thirty minutes of network advertising revenue. But the morning after he’d promised his GMs that they’d have another season, Ware told him that UPN couldn’t wait any longer. It needed an answer. Would he go along with shortening
SmackDown!
or not?

And it was then, after all the bravado and public posturing, that Vince was finally forced to acknowledge that his beloved XFL had done enough damage. “All the stars had to line up for us to go forward and the broadcast component was the most important one,” he sullenly told reporters a few hours after telling Ware that he’d fold his league before shortening
SmackDown!
“It just didn’t happen.”

WWF stock briefly shot up on the news that the country’s most famous wrestling promoter was returning his attention to where it belonged.

AS LONG
as Ted Turner was in control of the network that bore his name, wrestling served as a kind of Rosebud, a reminder of what had been set in motion on the day that Ray Gunkel agreed to move
Georgia Championship Wrestling
to Channel 17. Turner’s paternalism spanned the next thirty years, surviving even his merger with Time Warner.

But in January 2000, Turner made a rare miscalculation, or at least a misjudgment about the reverence with which a new generation of Internet moguls regarded him. As the largest single stockholder in Time Warner, he gave his approval to a merger with AOL, only to find out in April that the new owners wanted him gone. Gerald Levin, the chairman of Time Warner, told Turner that the networks that bore his name would now be reporting to the chief operating officer of AOL.

The news sent appropriate tremors through WCW, which was on pace to lose $80 million that year. After Eric Bischoff’s firing, the company hired Vince Russo away from the WWF, hoping the chief writer could lend
Nitro
some sizzle. His first show as booker featured a stripper match and the debut of a group called the Filthy Animals. But after four months, all he managed to accomplish was to elevate the show’s mean-spirited violence while keeping its ratings flat. By March, there was such desperation in CNN Center that Bischoff was brought back from his six-month exile by the president of both TNT and TBS, Brad Siegel. (Mindful of Bischoff’s spendthrift habits, the accountant who’d Siegel hired to run things, Bill Busch, promptly resigned.)

Even before he agreed to come back, Bischoff knew the odds were good that WCW would be put up for sale. America Online was a bottom-line company, and with Turner’s influence diminished, WCW no longer had a high-profile defender within it. At first, Siegel denied an interest in selling. Then, in June 2000, he called Bischoff to ask if he thought he could put together a buyout. Bischoff said he did, and over the next six months lined up a package of financing that was worth $50 million. Three days before the Federal Trade Commission gave its final regulatory approval for the AOL merger in January 2001, the
New York Post
reported his group’s purchase as a certainty.

But the report was premature. In March 2001, AOL named Jamie Kellner, the fifty-three-year-old programming whiz who helped start the WB Television Network, to be the new head of Turner Networks. In his first move, Kellner concluded that wrestling didn’t fit the upscale image he wanted for the vestigially named company. Bischoff was on a beach in Hawaii with his wife and two teenage kids when he got word of the decision. The final WCW show would be March 26; Bischoff’s last-ditch effort to keep the Monday night wars alive was dead.

Without a television outlet, who would want the motley collection of assets that was left of WCW? The 3 million viewers who tuned in to see the final episode of
Nitro
got the answer when the nine o’clock hour began. What they saw was the same thing that viewers of
Raw
were seeing, which was Vince sauntering into the Gund Arena in Cleveland with a wicked smile. “People ask me, how did you do it, Vince?” he began, speaking by simulcast to audiences of both shows. “You were up against this conglomerate, this millionaire. How did you do this?” He walked around the ring, giving the question time to settle. “Some would say I had help along the way with some WWF superstars, but the truth is I did it all on my own. It was my effort, my money. Okay, Vince, how can you possibly beat a billionaire? There’s only one way—become one yourself.”

Of course, he hadn’t beaten Turner so much as outlasted him. But the plan that he put in motion on the day that he told Verne Gagne, “I don’t negotiate” had finally been realized, and without much negotiation. He paid $4.3 million in cash for little more than the WCW name and a tape library. When Extreme Championship Wrestling filed for bankruptcy the next week, McMahon hired its founder, Paul Heyman, and started using the ECW name, too. The consolidation allowed him to create a three-way war for his cameras, a perfectly designed faux rendition of the real Monday night war he’d just won.

BARELY A
year into his new relationship with Viacom, Vince was already demonstrating that he was ill-suited for corporate monogamy. When MTV programming executives presented him with an idea for a reality-based show, he went behind their backs and offered it to his friends at NBC, infuriating Tom Freston, the head of MTV networks. He also irked Kerry McCluggage when, during the course of his negotiations to purchase WCW, he argued that he should be allowed to produce a version of
Nitro
for TBS. McCluggage scratched his head in disbelief, wondering what Vince thought he’d signed when he agreed to the exclusivity clause with Viacom. Ultimately, McMahon gave up on the effort, contenting himself with buying the WCW name and using it to further his storylines on
Raw
and
SmackDown!