Death Of Wcw

Randy Baer

Description

In 1997, World Championship Wrestling was on top. It was the number-one pro wrestling company in the world and the highest-rated show on cable television. But by 2001, however, everything had bottomed out. The company - having lost a whopping 95% of its audience - was sold for next to nothing to Vince McMahon and World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). What went wrong? This expanded and updated version of the bestselling The Death of WCW takes readers through a detailed dissection of WCW's downfall, including even more commentary from the men who were there.

Sujets

• Lucha libre profesional
• Wrestling

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 20 novembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770906426
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

To Dixie and Bob


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Ten years ago, when the original edition of this book was released, World Championship Wrestling had just closed up its doors three years earlier. That company’s demise ended a legacy that stretched back to the days of territorial pro wrestling, with promoters like Paul Jones in Atlanta and Jim Crockett Sr. in Charlotte, dating back to the depression.
The pro-wrestling industry was territorial in nature prior to 1984, when things started to change with the advent of cable television. What’s notable is that many of the same opportunities arose in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when the birth of network television garnered the major promotions national prime time exposure. The mentality in that era was that the dozens of wrestling companies would work together; the promoters who had national television had a key to the gold mine and would utilize that exposure to broker their top stars to the local promoters for a nice booking fee, usually based on a cut of the gate. This led to thriving promotions all over North America and in many other parts of the world.
The National Wrestling Alliance is a name that dates to about 1940, originally used by a promotion based in Kansas City. But the famous NWA, the one that led to the creation of the titular WCW, was a conglomerate of regional promotions that dated back to meetings in 1948. By the ’50s, they had set up an arguably illegal monopoly of the business; one so overarching that it even led to a Justice Department investigation.
The various promoters would respect territorial boundaries. If an outside promoter came along, the alliance could help in many ways, such as send top talent to the promoter in a jam. They could also go with a more heavy-handed approach, such as threaten to blacklist talent that appeared for a non-NWA member. A key rule was that an NWA promoter could only recognize the NWA World champion, voted by the board of directors at the annual conventions.
For most of the 1950s, the NWA was the dominant force in pro wrestling. But there was always opposition, leading promoters who couldn’t get along or simply didn’t want to get along. In 1957, when the alliance champion, Lou Thesz, quit to wrestle overseas, he handpicked his replacement in Dick Hutton, one of the greatest U.S. amateur heavyweights in history. But while Hutton was top of the line as a real wrestler, he wasn’t particularly colorful and couldn’t draw like Thesz. A number of promoters decided he wasn’t worth the 13 percent of the gate-booking fee (10 percent to the champion and 3 percent to the alliance itself) charged. Over the next several years, the alliance nearly crumbled.
New major champions were created. The World Wrestling Alliance was based in Los Angeles and its champion was recognized in Japan, where wrestling was on highly rated prime time network television, although it rejoined the NWA in 1968. The American Wrestling Association was based in Minneapolis, as another former amateur star, Verne Gagne, who for political reasons never had a shot at the NWA title, bought controlling interest in the promotion and made himself AWA champion. But Gagne always worked harmoniously with the NWA, except for a brief period in the late ’60s when he arrived in Los Angeles.
But bigger problems were coming. In 1962, the NWA champion was “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers, who was being booked by Northeast promoter Vincent James McMahon, the father of today’s Vincent Kennedy McMahon. McMahon kept the champion working in the Northeast the majority of every month. While the NWA’s strongest cities, like St. Louis and Toronto, got steady championship matches, smaller territories weren’t getting dates on Rogers. This led to more promoters creating their own champion.
A showdown was about to take place.
In late 1962, Sam Muchnick, who headed the NWA, scheduled Thesz to beat Rogers for the title. Things got hairy, as strange things began to happen, such as convenient injuries by Rogers. This led to the match continually being delayed. D-Day came on January 24, 1963, in Toronto. In the ring, Thesz, one of the great legitimate submission wrestlers of the era, told Rogers, “We can do this the hard way or the easy way,” a line that had already become part of pro-wrestling’s lexicon from Thesz’s mentor, Ed “Strangler” Lewis. It remains used to this day in the business, kept alive in modern interviews by Stephanie McMahon.
The fallout was McMahon’s champion lost, but McMahon wanted no part of Thesz as champion. Thesz never drew well in his cities, and Rogers, in 1962, was the hottest thing going. Originally, McMahon tried to pretend the Thesz-Rogers match never happened, still billing Rogers as champion. When that became impossible, he announced that Rogers had won a tournament in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to become the World Wide Wrestling Federation champion. In 1979, the WWWF was shortened to WWF, as in World Wrestling Federation. Today, the promotion is known as World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE for short.
McMahon and Muchnick still worked together, and in 1965, decided to unify the titles. McMahon’s new champion, Bruno Sammartino, was to beat Thesz, and they’d work out the dates. But for a number of reasons, the deal the promoters worked out fell through, as Sammartino refused a schedule that would have him on the road every single day. Ironically, Thesz wasn’t happy with the arrangement either.
In 1971, McMahon rejoined the NWA, and the WWWF World Heavyweight title, as it was called during the first Sammartino reign that lasted from 1963 to 1971, was simply called the WWWF title. It was never really known to fans that the WWWF had rejoined the NWA, nor that McMahon had influence on picking the NWA champion.
By the late 1970s, cable television emerged and would change the game.
Jim Barnett, who ran the Georgia office, was the first beneficiary. It was almost a fluke. The local Channel 17 in Atlanta broadcasted highly rated Georgia Championship Wrestling every Saturday and Sunday. As cable companies around the country started picking up the station, first called WTBS and then just TBS, wrestling was its most popular program. The stars on the station started to develop a national following.
Barnett had been around pro wrestling since the 1950s, and even though for years he was not allowed to be an NWA member because he was gay, he was eventually brought into the fold. He refused to expand against his fellow promoters, even though he had the capability due to the exposure.
In 1982, Vincent James McMahon sold his Northeastern promotion to his 36-year-old son in a complicated deal, where Vincent Kennedy McMahon used the old company’s money to make his payments to the old owner.
By this point, the territorial foundation began a full collapse. Gagne had expanded the AWA into San Francisco, causing promoter Roy Shire to retire rather than fight. Barnett was forced out of Georgia, accused of embezzlement, where longtime booker and star heel Ole Anderson (Alan Rogowski) took charge and started moving into new regions. But the most ambitious of all was McMahon, who started running first in Los Angeles.
Wrestling changed in 1984, when McMahon signed Gagne’s biggest star, Hulk Hogan, and started buying television time all over North America. He bought some companies and took the biggest names away from the other territories. He also hired Barnett as his director of operations.
The whirlwind really began to spin during this period. In a secret meeting, unbeknownst to Anderson, McMahon was able to purchase more than 50 percent of the stock of Georgia Championship Wrestling. This gave him the television contract on TBS and the traditional time slots of the most widely viewed pro-wrestling shows in the country. While the relationship only lasted one year, it was key to what happened next.
TBS was owned by Ted Turner. When Turner put Channel 17 on satellite, he was a laughing stock in television; seriously, who could possibly want to see an Atlanta UHF station in Los Angeles or Dallas or New York? But he had three very unique ingredients that made it a success, the first being Atlanta Braves baseball and the second being The Andy Griffith Show , a television staple a generation earlier. But the third was the most popular of all: pro wrestling every Saturday and Sunday. In 1981, his two-hour Saturday at 6:05 p.m. wrestling show did a 6.4 average rating for the year. His Sunday show, starting at the same time, did a 6.6. Nothing else in cable came close. Wrestling was the first star of cable television, not unlike it was during the early days of television itself.
In 1984, when McMahon purchased the company that had the TBS contract, he first came across Turner. It wasn’t pleasant. McMahon had spent $750,000 to get the time slot, which at the time was significant money to him. But Turner got so many complaints from wrestling fans about not getting their Georgia wrestling with popular announcer Gordon Solie, that he gave Anderson an earlier hour on his station. Later, he gave Mid South Wrestling an hour and wanted to get into the wrestling business with Bill Watts. In an embarrassment to McMahon, the small group that taped TV at a Boy’s Club in Shreveport, Louisiana, drew more than a full point higher in the ratings in a non-traditional time slot.
Turner attempted to kick McMahon off, noting that ratings were falling and McMahon wasn’t producing a show at his studio. In 1985, McMahon sold the rights to the station to Jim Crockett Jr., whose Charlotte-based promotion had become the second strongest in the country, behind stars like Dusty Rhodes, Ric Flair, The Road Warriors, Wahoo McDaniel, and others.
Eventually, Crockett, whose father became wealthy promoting wrestling and everything else imaginable in the Carolinas, became McMahon’s key opposition. He took over in Georgia, Florida, and th