Controversy Creates Cash (30 page)

I wasn’t in a position where I could say that I could live without Hogan, even though Scott and Kevin were strong. But at the same time, even something as catastrophic as losing Hogan wouldn’t have been so catastrophic that we couldn’t have recovered from it. And I wasn’t concerned about Hogan jumping over to WWE and maintaining that kind of persona—it wouldn’t have worked without Scott and Kevin. There was no one for him to feed off, and as a stand-alone heel, he wouldn’t have had the same impact. I didn’t think WWE could use him effectively.

Hogan and Vince did talk, but I don’t think their conversation could be considered a negotiation. And in the end it really wasn’t hard for us to come to terms with Hogan on a new deal. If anything, it was much easier than the initial negotiations. The money was about the same, and the concerns and insecurities that Hogan had when he came over originally were gone.

Hogan tried to pretend that he was being a hard negotiator, but I knew deep down inside that he really didn’t have many options. He was either going to stay with us or go someplace that he really didn’t want to go. He’d told me multiple times how much he didn’t trust Vince McMahon.

A lot of guys try to prop themselves up with accounts of how hard they are to come to terms with. But Hogan knew he had a good thing. He wasn’t going to risk it for the unknown. That just wasn’t his personality.

And we did have a good thing. As the Hulkster himself once put it, “Everything we touched turned to gold, brother.” Hall & Nash, a Creative Dynamo

I can tell you without bragging that no one else had anything to do with the nWo idea initially. That was out of necessity—not ego, not THE REVOLUTION TAKES HOLD

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confidence. I couldn’t trust any of the people at WCW. Word would have leaked out, and the surprise would have been ruined.

But after the nWo was born, Scott and Kevin really contributed the key elements of nWo’s feel and attitude. I’d like to take most of the credit, but that would be a lie. Scott Hall and Kevin Nash had more to do with the attitude and tone of what the nWo represented than anybody.

Scott Hall was one of the most talented, creative people I’ve ever known in the wrestling business. When his head was on straight, he was an extremely creative guy. The problem, as we all know, was that Scott had demons that he couldn’t overcome. But for a year, year and a half after the launch of nWo, Scott came up with a lot of great ideas. And Kevin fed off his energy.

Kevin and I both grew up in Detroit, at about the same time, and in neighborhoods that were close to each other. We had the same Detroit street mentality And a lot of what nWo did was consistent with the way we grew up. So when Kevin would bring something up, I related to it right away.

Spray-painting—tagging—opponents, for example; the attraction of being an outlaw, that sort of thing.

Beyond Scott, Kevin, and myself, there were a lot of people behind the scenes who made contributions. For example, we created the nWo graphic in 1996 by working with some graphics people down in Disney. They asked what I wanted the logo to represent. I talked through the general concept: they’re rebels, counterculture, street thugs—everything the wrestling culture represents.

They came back to me with a couple of concepts. The one that jumped out was the now familiar black-and-white graffiti nWo logo.

It went right along with the nWo attitude. It encapsulated everything we were trying to do.

The black-and-white video promos and vignettes that we began doing toward the end of 1996 were born out of necessity, not any lightning-strikes-in-the-middle-of-the-night inspiration. The first one we ever did came about because we needed to put Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, and Hulk Hogan together in a promo.

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Hulk Hogan can be really, really good in a certain kind of interview. Kevin Nash can be good. Scott Hall is capable of being great.

The problem is putting all three of those guys together, because their styles are very different. I knew it would be next to impossible to pull off a traditional wrestling promo.

So I sat back with Craig Leathers, one of my directors at the time, and said, ”Let’s do it differently than anything we’ve ever done before. Because we’re not capable of doing a promo with these three guys together. It will turn into a twenty-minute clusterfuck.” We decided to do it in black and white instead of color, which was consistent with the message and attitude. We also wanted a piece that was more thematic than informational. We gave each guy their own sound bites, editing the promo together along the lines of a music video or underground documentary rather in the style of a traditional wrestling promo.

It was so damn good, and so damn different, that we knew it was going to work.

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Finding My Inner Heel

A Gradual Thing

Often in life, there aren’t really clear, defining moments or transi-tions. A lot of times, concepts are the amalgamation of days or weeks or months of conversation and collaboration.

It’s always difficult for me to look back and pinpoint exactly where or how a certain storyline or angle was born. They evolve over time. You’ll be at a meeting, and someone will throw out the kernel of an idea. Then someone else throws out something that changes the idea.

Which is how I, or rather my on-screen character, joined the New World Order.

I can be dishonest about it and blow smoke up my ass like so many other people do and make up a story, but the truth is, I don’t remember where the decision was made or how it came about. We were looking for a plot twist, something that would shock the audience a little bit. Up until that point on camera, my character represented the traditional pro-WCW faction. I was aghast at the nWo invasion and everything the Outsiders did and represented. I was trying to fight them off.

When I revealed myself to be a part of the nWo in November 1996, the thinking was that this nWo cancer had gotten so deep inside the executive structure that they’d finally gotten to me. As the head of WCW, I was the ultimate turncoat, the boss who turned out to be part of the evil invasion.

In some ways, though, it was a very natural move for the character.

The audience didn’t like me that much anyway. I
was
the outsider, the guy who hadn’t paid his dues. The decisions I made in power were counterintuitive and against conventional wisdom, so the fans who claimed to be insiders or purists despised me. I embraced that, turned up the volume on it, and made it work for us. I found my inner heel.

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I knew people would say things like, “Oh, Bischoff just wants to be in the limelight and part of something successful.” I knew there’d be personal attacks and barbs from the dirtsheet writers and some of the people in the locker room, who were quite frankly jealous.

But I didn’t care, because to me it just made sense. My career wasn’t going to be defined by my character, but by how the company did.

So I had nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

You can’t have babyfaces without people the fans really hate.

And they hated me.

Blurring the Line

I was in a fairly unique position for a character in pro wrestling, or any entertainment medium, frankly. I was Eric Bischoff, the president of a high-profile division of Turner Broadcasting and the executive producer of one of the most successful shows on cable television, playing Eric Bischoff the evil, self-serving bastard. I was running the real company and the fictional one.

It was confusing for people. It was certainly confusing for the limited intellectual bandwidth of the dirtsheet community, but it was equally confusing for people who thought they knew what was going on in wrestling but weren’t quite sure.

That included a lot of executives at Time Warner. There were definitely people walking around who thought an absolute lunatic was running the company. They couldn’t distinguish between reality and the fiction we had created.

It can still be a problem these days when I deal with entertainment executives on nonwrestling projects. But I’ve learned to accept it, and sometimes use it to my advantage, even in business.

When I sense that I may be in the room with someone who may be confusing the character Eric Bischoff with the person Eric Bischoff, I point out in a fun way that there’s a big difference between the guy on television and the guy in the room.

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Hate Mail

With my on-air profile so high, I often got hate mail. Eighty percent was what you expected it to be—from people who were so out of touch that they were obsessive-compulsive about the wrestling business. There were also a number from fans espousing what they read online. You characterized that for what it was pretty easily.

But as the nWo angle continued, I started getting mail from people who were intelligent. They’d lost sight of what was real and what was not. That was exciting—it meant we’d really succeeded. I liked it, even though they were letters from people who wanted to kill me, castrate me, and burn me at the stake. If I could get people to that point, where they weren’t differentiating between fact and fiction, they would tune in every week. And that happened more and more and more.

We had a referee named Randy Anderson. Randy got involved in a storyline. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I “fired” him one week as part of the story.

He came on the next week with his tail between his legs, dragging his kids along to confront me so I would feel sorry for him, and apologized. Randy was kind of a pathetic character. Let me rephrase that—Randy was a
sympathetic
character, with a beat-up, basset-hound look to him. You took one look at him, and your heart ached.

I let him tell his story and beg for his job back. I feigned that I was touched. I leaned down and said to one of his kids, “Tell your daddy—he’s
still
fired!”

And he kind of moped away.

It did a lot for me as a heel, and it did a lot for the story. But a couple of days later, I came into the office, and Harvey Schiller had gotten a letter from a church group in Georgia in the community where Randy lived. They had seen what had happened, and taken up a donation for him.

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the Japanese product. I didn’t convince anyone that everything they saw on our show was real. But more and more, people believed that my character and many of the others on the show were real.

Darker Side

There were some darker incidents, but nothing that hasn’t happened to other performers, and nothing really very serious.

I don’t want to come off like some streetwise tough guy, because that’s really not the case. But having grown up in Detroit, I’ve always been able to tell when people were serious about fighting. I know when anger is serious enough that it becomes dangerous. I can tell when it is real, and when it’s show. There is a big difference.

A very big difference. And I can read it a hundred miles away There were plenty of times when I’d be with Hogan and Nash in the ring, and I’d scan the immediate area around us, looking to see if anyone was going to jump in. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the audience’s responses were fairly benign, jeering or booing or whatever. But every so often, I’d catch someone and look them in the eye and I’d know, if that guy had an ice pick and could get to me, I was in big trouble.

There was one time in Georgia, when I was doing my thing outside the ring, letting the crowd tell me what they thought of me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw this guy coming from about thirty-five yards away. How he got that clear a shot at me, I don’t know; clearly there was a security lapse somewhere.

I just stood there doing my promo, pretending I didn’t see him as he came at me. Finally, he took a leap at me to tackle me. He had some steam on him. But while he was in midair, I bent my knees and ducked.

He went sliding across the arena floor, where the cops were waiting for him.

There were a few other close calls. We were in Newark, New Jersey. Hogan was playing his air guitar. I was in front of him, bowing THE REVOLUTION TAKES HOLD

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down. As we were walking in, I saw a beer bottle arcing out of the cheap seats right at us.

I put my hand out and stopped Hogan. A full bottle of beer passed maybe six inches from my face and exploded on the cement nearby.

Had that hit me in the head, I wouldn’t be writing this right now.

Wild Blue Yonder

Sometime during 1996, I decided I needed to do something to take my mind off my work. I’m the type of the person who, when I get really passionate about something, will dream solutions to problems in my sleep. My subconscious never turns off.

While that’s always worked well, by this time it had begun to take its toll. I was working seven days a week, ten, twelve hours a day—often more. I couldn’t turn the WCW switch off. I knew I had to do something that would just allow me to stop thinking about my business, even if it was just for a couple of hours.