Controversy Creates Cash (46 page)

My wife and I even planned to renew our wedding vows there, and invited some friends from Japan to meet us. I took everybody out there, and we had a great, great time. Life was really, really good.

I was excited again. I believed our strategy would work. WCW was going to be a successful franchise once more. I had the support of the important wrestlers. Brian Bedol and his partner had the horsepower and business acumen to help us achieve great things. Everybody was locking arms and stepping up to the plate to go forward.

It’s Over

Three or four days after we got to Hawaii, I went down to the beach with my wife. While I was there, I got a phone call from Brian Bedol.

“Eric, it’s over.”

“Great, deal’s closed. Finally.”

“No, you don’t understand. The deal’s not going to happen. It’s off the table. Over.”

Shock
doesn’t begin to cover what I felt.

Kellner Kills It

Jamie Kellner killed the deal.

Kellner, who had formerly run the WB Network, had just taken over TBS and TNT. I assume—I’ve never spoken to Kellner about THE ART OF THE NON- DEAL

357

it—that when he got there he said, “Show me all the deals that are pending.” Our deal would have been at the top of the list.

The deal called for us to acquire copyrights, trademarks, assets, all the things that would normally go along with an acquisition. But the most important part of the deal was a ten-year broadcast window at TBS. The window gave us four hours a week, for both
Thunder
and
Nitro.
We controlled the inventory—meaning that we got the revenues from the commercials during that time.

Kellner said he didn’t mind selling WCW, but he didn’t want wrestling on his networks. He took the distribution element out of the agreement, eliminating the broadcast window.

That took the deal from something worth roughly $67 million to something worth $67.

Maybe.

It made absolutely no sense for us to do the deal under those circumstances.

WWE Swoops In

I had been talking to Peter Ligouri at Fox during the months leading up to the closing of the acquisition about airing one of our shows on FX. They wanted
Nitro;
I wanted to give them
Thunder.
In any event, we intended on flipping one of them over. Even though
Nitro
and
Thunder
had fallen from the ratings heights they’d been at a few years before, their numbers were still pretty good for cable shows. But Fox wasn’t interested in giving us the kind of commitment we would have needed to resuscitate the deal. Our deal was dead.

That left Vince McMahon and WWE. Now that there was no broadcasting involved, Viacom no longer had any objections. So Vince bought what was left—basically, the copyrights and video library. I’m sure whatever he paid, it was worth it in the end.

For me, it was a long flight home from Hawaii.

12

Meet the Devil

Getting On with Life

Out of Wrestling

When the deal fell apart, and because of the way it fell apart, I was disheartened and disappointed. My life in pro wrestling was over, not with a sparkle but a splat.

There was no way in the world I was ever going to work for Vince McMahon. Joining WWE was out of the question—I didn’t see that happening in my lifetime. So I geared my mind toward developing other projects.

Out of sheer boredom, I took a couple of consulting jobs. A group out of Canada wanted to develop an MTV-like wrestling format called
Mat Rats.
They were relatively well funded. I worked with them for a short time, trying to help them develop the concept. Ultimately, their project didn’t get off the ground.

I was also approached by a group out of Los Angeles called Battle Management. They represented probably a dozen or so mixed martial arts fighters who were fighting in Kl, UFC, and Pride. They 360

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

wanted to develop a business plan similar to a wrestling model. I worked with them for a little while, though their project was too advanced for its time. The television networks were a little too leery of the whole mixed martial arts genre, and it was still pretty raw.

They’ve gotten more used to it now, but back then it would have taken way too much money to fund a wrestling-like business structure.

Most of what I did was develop projects on my own. Among other things, I worked with Mark Burnett, best known as the cre-ator of
Survivor
and
The Apprentice.
With Battle Management, we created a show that was loosely a martial arts version of
Survivor.

A Call from WWE

In my family, the Fourth of July is the biggest holiday of the year.

For one thing, it’s my wife’s birthday. For another, July 4 in Cody, Wyoming, is very special, unlike any other Fourth of July celebration I’ve ever been to. I don’t want to say that the people of Cody are more patriotic than the rest of America, but they have a real sense of small-town patriotism that you don’t get in a lot of places.

Celebrating the Fourth of July in Wyoming has been a tradition for my family for probably fifteen years, even before I owned a home there. But in 2001, it was a little more special and a little different, because it was the first Fourth of July after my dad passed away.

We’d been there for a week or so. On a Thursday night, I got home, and my answering machine was blinking. John Taylor had left a message.

John was an attorney in Atlanta who represented WWE. He wanted me to give him a call. So I did.

He told me WWE wanted to talk to me. Would that be okay?

“Sure. Have them give me a call.”

Jim Ross called back a short time later. Jim and I have since MEET THE DEVIL

361

mended our fences. I won’t say that we’re great friends, but I think we’ve dealt with our issues. But up to that point, Ross hated my guts. He blamed me for every bad thing that had ever happened to him. He’d told people I fired him, when that wasn’t true. In fact, he’d made such a public enemy of me—I think to endear himself to the crowd and get himself over—that in real life it carried over.

I could tell he wasn’t excited about talking to me. Vince or someone must have put him up to it. WWE had decided that it would be a good idea to shoot an angle with Vince McMahon and me the following Monday.

I asked what they were thinking. Ross was pretty vague.

“We don’t really know if it’ll work,” said Jim. “It’s a short-term deal. Come in, we’ll try it. If it works, great. If not, hey, part friends.” A couple of things occurred to me. One was, if they were calling me on a Thursday night for an angle they wanted to do on Monday, they probably hadn’t given it a lot of thought. It seemed like an idea that came up at the last minute. If that was the case, it probably hadn’t been planned to go very long or very far—it would be a hot-shot moment, as we say in the business.

The other thing was that I wasn’t in any kind of shape. I’d been eating and drinking for a week straight.

I was also stuck in Wyoming. There are only two or three planes that go into Cody on any given day, and over the July 4 holiday you have to make your reservation months in advance or you won’t be able to get a flight out. I honestly didn’t think I’d be able to get out of there.

On top of everything else, I didn’t feel like leaving my entire family, which had just flown and driven in from different parts of the country.
Hi everybody! Thanks for showing up! I’m gone!

I called Ross back and thanked him. “Maybe we can do something down the road. The timing just isn’t right.” When I hung up the phone, I said to myself,
That’s it.
Not too many people tell Vince McMahon no and hear from him again.

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A Year Goes By . . .

I continued working on different projects. I had pretty much made up my mind that I didn’t really want to work for anyone else again.

After everything that I had been through with Turner and AOL

Time Warner, I didn’t see myself working for another big company again. I had enough money in the bank and wasn’t under any financial pressure. I’ve never really been the type of person who over-spends. The only money that I’d ever really spent foolishly was on my airplane. Aside from that, I’ve lived under my means.

A year went by. I started developing a lot of relationships in Hollywood. I pitched various ideas for shows. We had some false starts and near misses, but didn’t really develop anything substantial.

I was in Los Angeles in May 2002 when I got a phone call from Kevin Nash. He was working for WWE—it was right around this time that World Wrestling Entertainment changed its name from World Wrestling Federation. Kevin and I were still pretty good friends, though we hadn’t talked in a while.

“Hey, Eric. There’s a rumor going around that you’re going to be getting a call from Vince. Would you be interested if he calls you?” I told him I didn’t believe that would happen. But I said I’d be interested. By this time, I’d put all of my bitterness and ill feeling behind me. I’d moved on, emotionally and psychologically.

“Sure, if Vince calls, it’d be great. But if it doesn’t happen, let’s go catch a beer next time you’re in L.A.” A day later, I got a call from Vince.

A Fellow Warrior

Whatever anxiety or doubt I had, Vince eliminated immediately by saying something to the effect of: “I would like to think that if the shoe was on the other foot, and you had acquired WWE, we would have been able to work together.”

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It was odd. I was on the phone with him for, maybe, two minutes, and I felt like I’d known Vince for my whole life. It was as if I was talking to an old friend.

Vince was very gracious. The feeling I got was that he understood what I had gone through. While he came out on top, he understood what the Monday Night Wars and everything else had meant and had some empathy for me. He didn’t say it, but I felt it.

I hung up the phone and I said to my wife, “I can work for this guy. If the offer’s right, I’d like to go back.” I wanted to go back because my career in the wrestling industry had ended in a bitter and ugly way. I had spent nearly twenty years of my professional career in the wrestling business. To have achieved everything I achieved and have it end on such a down note bothered me. I didn’t want to be remembered like that.

If nothing else, I thought, WWE would be an opportunity for me to go out and have some fun. It would give me a chance to end my career on a high note.

And in the meantime, make people realize that much of what they’d heard or read about me wasn’t true.

Or, if it
was
true, give me a chance to learn something about myself.

Tell Me What to Do

Vince and I talked two or three more times. It was a very easy negotiation. We’re all motivated by money to various degrees, but the money wasn’t really that important to me. After some back-and-forth between our attorneys, we did the deal.

Vince told me what he had in mind for me in a very general sense, but we didn’t talk about storylines in a detailed way. I guess that had to do with the way I was brought up in the industry. I didn’t get hung up on how they were going to use me and didn’t worry about it. The agreement didn’t have any language that said

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they owed me any explanation creatively. I pretty much signed over my character when I went to work for them. They were going to tell me what I was supposed to do, and I would do it to the best of my ability. That’s how I work.

There were a lot of people in the WWE who claimed to have insight into what kind of person I was and what made me tick. All that kind of crap. Somehow, I believe Vince was under the impression that I would be difficult to work with, and that I might not be willing to do certain things creatively. But nothing’s further from the truth. If you look at what’s happened since I got there, there’s nothing they’ve asked me to do that I haven’t done. I’ve enjoyed almost

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all of it. I don’t get hung up on the difference between my character and the person I really am. The two are not really connected.

Vince did ask me early on if there was anything I wouldn’t be willing to do.

“Yeah. I wouldn’t be willing to move to Connecticut. But other than that, I’m wide open.”

Just Acting, Thanks

I was never interested in being a real general manager or taking
any
management role at WWE. And no one ever offered it.

Running WWE is Vince McMahon’s job, and I don’t think he’d ever offer it to anyone. He’s got a wife that is very competent. He’s got a daughter who is quite competent, a son who is very competent, a son-in-law who is very competent—I don’t think he’s looking for anyone, especially me, to come in and run things.

In fact, that was one of the things that made the WWE offer attractive to me. My schedule would be limited, allowing me to do all the things I wanted to do to build my business outside of wrestling.