Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (6 page)

Vinnie knew he couldn’t let Hogan take the belt directly from Backlund. Wrestling convention holds that babyfaces rarely battle one another. He needed a heel to stick in the middle of the transition—someone Backlund could lose to and Hogan could beat. Scanning his roster, he found his answer in an aging novelty act with curly toed genie sneakers: the Iron Sheik.

Wrestling has always fed off simple prejudices, and the papers were full of news about Iran sponsoring secret terrorist cells in the United States. It didn’t matter that the Sheik, known to his friends as Khosrow Vasiri, helped coach the American wrestling team in the 1972 Summer Olympics or that he now lived in Atlanta. With anti-Iranian fervor at its height, he was the perfect choice to take the heavyweight belt off Backlund.

But when Backlund arrived at Madison Square Garden on December 24, 1983, he refused to lose to Vasiri. He’d held the company’s heavyweight belt for six years; he had his pride. So a long backstage negotiation ensued. Finally, Vinnie agreed to let Backlund exit with an old boxing gimmick. He could pretend to wrestle hurt until his manager threw a white hand towel into the ring, signaling surrender.

The beauty of Backlund’s surrender to the Iranian was that it required a swift corrective justice, something to reorder the moral universe that it had skewed. On January 23, 1984, Hulk Hogan was unveiled before a sellout crowd at the Garden to do just that. While the yellow taxis stacked up three thick outside Seventh Avenue as they always did on a big night, Hogan and Vasiri worked out their spots backstage, agreeing that the babyface would start the match by landing a double-fisted blow to Vasiri’s head and follow it with an open-palm slap. Vasiri knew what was expected of him, and at showtime he paraded around the ring waving the Iranian flag and playing the foreign fool. Hogan’s entry was simpler. He stalked up the runway in tight yellow trunks and a too small T-shirt that read “American Made.”

Tradition holds that the heel calls the wrestling match, much like a lead dancer, in order to keep it in rhythm, and once Hogan locked Vasiri’s head in the crack of his sweaty elbow the more experienced heel whispered their next move—a clothesline. Despite his improvements as a showman, Hogan was still stiff as a wrestler and the clothesline was one of the few moves he could pull off, or sell to the crowd. So as he threw Vasiri into the ropes and watched the heel sink into them, Hogan stuck out his left arm, knowing Vasiri would run into it when he bounced back. On cue, Vasiri did just that, falling hard to the mat.

Though exceptional workers could wrestle for as long as an hour, shifting momentum a dozen times, Vinnie didn’t want to keep Hulk onstage anywhere near that long, in part because he didn’t have the arsenal of moves to keep it interesting, in part because he wanted his new star to look dominating. All he wanted was a good five-minute match with just one twist at the end.

It began with Vasiri rolling himself along the ropes to avoid Hogan’s lunge and Hogan falling woozily to the mat, as if blinded by cartoon stars. Next, Vasiri rolled him on his stomach and bent him into a Boston crab. Then, as he sat on Hogan’s back, Vasiri slipped into a gimmick he’d performed for the better part of two decades, the
camel clutch
. Threading his hands under Hogan’s armpits, he locked them around his chin, and, with his knee buried in Hogan’s back, yanked up hard. Hogan strained, his face contorting as the Sheik sold a broad dinner-theater snarl. Then Hogan stirred … slowly … lifting himself to one knee … until he finally lurched up, sending Vasiri staggering back. Now for the big finish. Hogan flung himself off the ropes, catching Vasiri’s neck with the point of his elbow. When Vasiri crumpled, Hogan fell on top of him, dropping his right leg over Vasiri’s midsection. All that remained was for the referee to count to three as Vasiri lay pinned and declare Hogan the new heavyweight champion of the World Wrestling Federation.

Vasiri went to his Ramada hotel room on Forty-eighth Street and Ninth Avenue after the match, ate a quiet meal, and watched television alone. It was just another night for him.

But not for Hogan, or for thirty-eight-year-old Vinnie McMahon. This was their night, the night they moved the center of the wrestling world to Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.

THREE

IN 1984, THE YEAR
in which Ronald Reagan was elected to his second term as president and Apple introduced its first Macintosh personal computer, 41 percent of America was wired for cable television—a huge jump from just a few years earlier. For the price of a basic subscription, a family could get ESPN, Lifetime, CNN, the Family Channel, and A&E. If they wanted to pay more, there was HBO. Still, most of what aired was bottom-rung network repeats or fringe sports.
TV Guide
didn’t carry cable listings, and Nielsen was only starting to monitor the phenomenon.

One of the few cable stations with enough of an audience to command a Nielsen rating was the USA Network, a joint venture between Paramount, Universal, and Time-Life. USA was originally designed as a sports network and collected rights to major tennis tournaments, the NBA, the NHL, and the Masters. But when ESPN became a major player in televised sports, USA’s penny-pinching backers changed gears and turned it into a dumping ground for cheap programming like
Robert Klein Time
, a game show with Don Adams, and
Southwest Championship Wrestling
from San Antonio, Texas.

The president of USA was Kay Koplovitz, a smart and savvy businesswoman whose tastes were grounded in her Kansas upbringing. Koplovitz understood wrestling had a niche; still, the only female studio head in either New York or Hollywood preferred to keep a discreet distance from it. But when two
Southwest
wrestlers hurled pig shit at each other on an episode that aired in October 1983, distance became a luxury she could no longer afford.

It was a public relations disaster and McMahon turned it to his immediate advantage. While USA’s switchboard was still lighting up, he instructed his aide, Jim Troy, to call USA and offer an alternative. By the end of that week, a deal was struck in which the WWF became USA’s new supplier.

In 1984, the opportunity to reach 24 million homes with a single broadcast every week was extraordinary. (At the time, USA was available in 29 percent of the 83.8 million homes that were wired for cable.) The McMahons were powers on the East Coast, but there were NWA wrestling czars just as powerful operating in cities like Memphis, San Francisco, Tulsa, St. Louis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Houston, and Dallas. And the men who ran them were just as creative and strong-willed. Vincent James McMahon had warm relations with most of the NWA’s members because they respected his gentility and dignity, not to mention the way he loaned out the acts that he had under contract at fair prices.

His son was the opposite. Having had to wait half his life for the chance to break into his father’s company, he was desperate and hungry and disgusted at the fat old territory czars who’d grown lazy in the absence of competition. As Vinnie saw it, the beauty of cable was that it could take the McMahons into every market where the NWA operated, bypassing the czars’ control. The cable airwaves could be used like a fighter squadron, providing air support for the live arena wars he was prepared to wage on the ground.

In fact, Vinnie was so convinced the extinction of the NWA lay in cable that shortly after he inked his deal with Koplovitz in the fall of 1983, he booked an appointment with her biggest cable rival, Ted Turner, to ask him if the WWF could simultaneously take over the production chores on the top-rated TBS program,
Georgia Championship Wrestling
. Turner wasn’t crazy about the idea, but he was always on the lookout for talent and agreed to hear the young McMahon’s pitch. Vinnie and Linda spent fifteen minutes in Turner’s Manhattan sales office boasting about their stars, their youthful demographics, and the family name. When they were done, Turner was polite but noncommittal. Linda thought they’d made headway. Vinnie was skeptical.

WHEN TED
Turner walked into WJRJ in Atlanta for the first time in 1971, he wasn’t sure what to make of it. The rickety station, which broadcast on a low-powered frequency known as UHF, was the kind of place where employees would hang out smoking dope, playing banjos, and forgetting to replace the film reels when they ran out. Turner wasn’t thirty yet, but with his days as a hell-raising redneck at Brown University behind him (not to mention a first marriage), he was rich and prominent and culturally worlds away from the hippies who now found themselves on his payroll.

Ted wasn’t interested in the station at first. He was interested in the shell that owned it. WJRJ was the only asset in a corporation that was traded on the New York Stock Exchange. At the time, Turner was president of the company he’d inherited from his father, Ed, a blunt, cantankerous man who’d gotten into billboards at a time when new highway construction made it a booming business. Ed may or may not have been a visionary, but he was strong-willed and sure of himself—at least until his crowning achievement, his acquisition of a Cincinnati billboard supplier many times his size. It was a classic leveraged buyout, but instead of gloating Ed became oddly depressed about the debt he’d amassed, perhaps remembering how his father, a dirt farmer, had lost all his land in the Great Depression. Ed and his son started having shouting matches over Ed’s decision to sell off what he’d just acquired. On March 6, 1963, Ed killed himself with a shotgun blast to the head in the bathroom of the family’s plantation home in Savannah.

Ted had never shown a hint of his father’s ambition, and Ed had whipped him for it before he finally put his son in military school. Oddly, Ted came to like the routine of the military, if only because it gave him a refuge from his volatile life back home. He also learned that he was good at arguing, which won him a medal for oratory. At Brown, he continued to refine himself, becoming gifted in the collegiate arts of reading the classics, bedding women, and drinking hard. After his father’s death, most of Ed’s friends assumed that Ted would want to sell off large chunks of the company so he could take a sizable cash payout and spend his years indulging his passion for sailing.

Ted surprised everyone, first by wanting to run the whole show and then by doing it well. He turned Turner Advertising into a tightly run and profitable ship, aggressively buying new plants while adopting his father’s strategy of never using his own dime. He routinely shocked advisers who worried about him overextending himself by saying that if it all fell apart, he’d just take his daddy’s way out. It was as if debt was a demon he felt compelled to stare down. As Judy Nye, his first wife, told Robert and Gerald J. Goldberg in their book
Citizen Turner
, “The dream was just to build on the dream until you can’t go any further.”

That’s why, after he’d reached the limits of what he could borrow and was hard up for cash to finance his expansion dreams, the acquisition of WJRJ seemed attractive. If Turner Advertising could list on the New York Stock Exchange, then Ted could raise as much capital as Wall Street was willing to gamble on him.

“I never watched any television in those days,” he told the Goldbergs. “I had no idea what UHF stood for. I had never even watched the station because I couldn’t get it on my set.” WJRJ had lost nearly a million dollars the year before, but Turner ignored the pleas of his closest aides and leaped at the chance to take it over. As soon as the deal closed, he changed the call letters to WTCG, for Turner Communications Group.

The potential for growth was certainly there. In 1971, UHF increased its reach over the bustling Atlanta market by so much that it covered the entire inner city and was starting to make inroads on the south-side suburbs. Initially, Turner was too highly leveraged to afford much except cheap reruns of such black-and-white sitcoms as
Leave It to Beaver, Gomer Pyle, Petticoat Junction, The Beverly Hillbillies
, and
The Andy Griffith Show
. His only means of improving the mix was to wait for another station in town to cancel a show. Then he’d swoop in to cherry-pick the discards. His best source was the limping ABC affiliate, WQXI, which had just been bought by a New York outfit that was intent on improving the quality of what Atlanta watched. When WQXI was ordered to run news instead of
Star Trek
at dinner hour, Turner immediately grabbed the reruns—and their decent ratings—for himself. But the big score was Ray Gunkel’s wrestling show,
Georgia Championship Wrestling
.

Gunkel was a six-foot-four, movie-star handsome wrestler with a flair for scripting fast-paced matches that showed off stars like Mr. Wrestling II, a masked babyface who dressed from head to toe in white, except for black trim on his tights and mask to differentiate him from the original Mr. Wrestling. (Mr. Wrestling II gained a measure of political infamy when he posed for a photo with then-presidential candidate Jimmy Carter holding him in a headlock. The photo delighted Carter’s mother, Miss Lillian, a devoted wrestling buff who regularly attended matches in Columbus, Georgia, and believed every toss was real.) Under Gunkel,
Georgia Championship Wrestling
became the highest-rated locally produced program in Atlanta. But in 1971, new owners took over the station and seemed not to care about wrestling. They moved the show from one time slot to another until loyal viewers had trouble finding it and fell out of the habit of watching. Gunkel’s live shows at the Atlanta City Auditorium suffered, too.

Turner heard about Gunkel’s troubles through the wrestler’s wife, Ann. Ann was fair-skinned, with could-be-model good looks, and most of her friends assumed her closeness with Turner implied an ongoing affair. Whether that was the case or not, he made it clear that he’d be more than happy to help the couple by offering Gunkel a time slot at six o’clock on Saturday nights—the same slot the show had to be moved from at WQXI. A grateful Gunkel quickly agreed.

Soon after that, Gunkel booked himself to meet a 310-pound wrestler with a Fu Manchu mustache and curly eyebrows named Ox Baker at the Sports Arena in Savannah, Georgia. Baker was dangerous—he’d been involved in a tag-team match in Nebraska in which one of the opponents died from a ruptured pancreas—but Ray didn’t seem overly concerned. In fact, he went for a hearty lunch that afternoon at Mama’s, a restaurant that sat its patrons family style and kept filling the table with heaping portions of fried chicken, pot roast, and potatoes. Ray had more than his share of Mama’s cooking floating around his stomach when he took to the mat with Ox.