Controversy Creates Cash (44 page)

Bischoff vs. Russo

I looked around at my first WCW meeting and said to myself,
Wow.

We don’t have a lot to work with.

We still had some of the bigger names, guys like Sting, Diamond Dallas Page, Hogan, Goldberg. But I think a lot of the talent had become so disillusioned and tired that they were simply worn out.

The whole Vince Russo disaster—or “experiment,” as I like to refer to it—had a pretty negative impact on all of their characters. They were shells of their former selves.

Man, this place is miserable. It’s not fun. There’s just not a lot of
light at the end of the tunnel.

But we tried.

I laid out an angle that would have Russo and I feuding, with two camps of wrestlers opposing each other. I think one of the things that helped convince Vince to come back was the fact that the storyline called for him to be on television.

I didn’t know how badly Russo wanted to be on TV. He was already a monster in many respects, but the newfound “celebrity” really got to him. He went off the deep end.

Soon, the storyline was reality.

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Crash TV

The more I worked with Russo, the less I liked him, and the less I trusted him.

As I’ve said, it’s not important for me that I like someone. It’s nice when it happens, but it’s not a requisite. But when I start looking at people and start realizing that I can’t trust them, it has a serious impact on how I move forward.

When you sit across from someone and you’re talking to them, whether about the weather or politics or business, you get a sense of whether they’re honest people with integrity or not. At first, I couldn’t pinpoint it. It was just a feeling creeping in.

I wanted to make the situation work. One of the things I decided to do early on was give Russo a lot of room. That may have been a mistake. Many of the things that he came up with didn’t fit my SARSA formula. There was action because they involved wrestling, but they didn’t have story, anticipation, reality, surprise.

They were shock for the sake of shock. There’s no structure to that.

Okay, Vince, I get it—but where’s that going to go?

It was crash TV for the sake of crash TV.

I didn’t like it, but I didn’t want to stifle him to the point where he just threw up his hands and said it wouldn’t work. I gave him a lot of room.

Room, not rope—I didn’t want him to hang himself. I wanted him to prove himself right. I was hoping he’d show me something that would make me go, You know what? This guy does have a point of view that makes sense.

So I sat back a lot. By May or June, I decided it wasn’t working.

The stories remained dark, weren’t going anywhere, and weren’t connecting with the audience. Siegel told me to put a bridle on Russo and his dark tones. So I began exerting more control.

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Fiasco at the Beach

Nothing for Hogan

It seemed to me when there was pressure on him, Russo would tend to go home for any number of reasons. Maybe it was a coincidence, but I think he’d get so frustrated with things that he couldn’t function. Then he’d throw up his hands and go home for a week or two at a time. At least it seemed that way to me. He had the emotional constitution of an eggshell in my opinion. Brad, not knowing what else to do, was okay with this.

I didn’t really care. It was easier to not have him around.

Russo was on one of his emotional sabbaticals while we were laying things out for the July
Bash at the Beach
Pay-Per-View. Hogan and I bounced some ideas around generally. We didn’t have a real good handle on anything that felt great. He was going to be in the main event, but we couldn’t come up with a finish.

The Pay-Per-View was July 9. I flew out to Wyoming to be with my family, as I did every Fourth of July, continuing to talk to everyone by phone. When I left, Russo decided he would return and plug himself back in. It was a bit of a nuisance, but okay with me.

We talked through the majority of the matches. I don’t recall the details, because they all flow together, but we were pretty much okay with everything except for the Hogan match.

I asked Russo what he saw for the Hogan match, and he said he really didn’t know what to do with him.

Not the right answer. Russo didn’t like the character or believe in it. That was fine, but we had a responsibility—and a long-term contract with Hogan. We couldn’t just bury the guy because Russo didn’t like him. Whatever our personal tastes were, he was still one of the biggest draws in the history of the business. It was up to us to figure out the best way to take advantage of him.

I called Hogan and told him I had two or three options.

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“If either one of us comes up with anything that we feel really strong about over the next two or three days, you call me or I’ll call you. Otherwise we’ll flesh this out at the event.” I planned on getting there the night before the show, which would give us enough time to plan the finish.

Father’s Death

I got up on the Fourth of July and went to the parade, partied on the steps of the hotel that Buffalo Bill Cody built, and cooked for my family and friends the way we do every year. Later that evening I got the news that my father had passed away. That turned things upside down.

I put the Pay-Per-View off to the side. With the exception of the Hogan finish, everything was under control anyway. I went to Minneapolis for the funeral, which I believe would have been on Friday.

I remember being in the parking lot of the funeral home before the service and being on the phone with Russo. And I could tell by the tone in his voice that he had a shitty attitude. He just didn’t want Hogan on the roster.

As it turned out, I had to spend a little more time in Minneapolis than I had planned, and didn’t leave until early Sunday morning. That put me into Daytona around noon or so. I called Russo when I landed and told him that I was on my way and to hold on until I was there.

“Yeah, yeah, no problem.”

I got into the building, and the production meeting was almost over. Russo had started the meeting without me, trying to get it done before I arrived.

It was a very bizarre situation. It was clear to me that Russo thought my preoccupation with my father’s death had given him the chance to slip in and take over everything that was going on.

Rather than making a big scene and disrupting the meeting, I sat back and let it go on. When it was done, I cornered Russo and asked, “What was that about?”

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He made some piss-ant excuse about wanting to get ahead of schedule. It was just Vice Russo bullshit. I would deal with Russo later.

I let that go and went to find Hogan. I found him and headed with him to a motor home I used as an office. I laid out an idea I had been thinking of for the past few days.

The Title

Because of the way we had used the WCW Championship belt over the past few years, it had ceased to have any real meaning. I had been working on an angle involving Hogan that would fix that.

“What if we create a situation where you win by disqualification,
but you’re so disgusted with everything that happened until that moment that you grab the microphone and basically say, ‘Screw you. I’m
done. I’ve achieved everything I want to achieve. This belt is my belt.

Kiss my ass, I’m out of here!’?”

I would feign confusion and try to calm Hulk down. There’d be plenty of people and press around. We’d work everyone there, trying to make it look as if Hogan was quitting with the title. He was quitting and taking the title with him.

That would force WCW to have a tournament to decide the new champion. The anticipation would build over the months, cul-minating with a title match at
Halloween Havoc.
The storylines with everyone striving for the title would give it back its credibility and meaning. As I laid it out, the idea was for WCW to acknowledge that Hogan had retired with the title. We’d create a new one.

Hogan liked it. It made sense. There was an arc and a reason for what happened.

“So what happens next, brother?”

“We’ll end up having two heels in the finals at
Halloween
Havoc,
” I told him. “As these two show up to wrestle, you come out of nowhere and say, ‘Uh-uh—this is the championship belt. This is the WCW title. It has a history and tradition. You want it, you have to go through me.’ ”

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Bam, we have an impromptu match. We surprise everyone.

We’ve added credibility to the World Heavyweight title. We have Hogan in the ring with a heel. It all made sense.

Hogan agreed. I told him that for it to work, he had to go away for three months. That was no big deal, though. It worked into the framework of his contract anyway, and he was okay with it.

I got on the phone and ran it by Brad. I didn’t want him to panic if he heard the news that I’d chased Hogan out of the building. Brad liked it, and he, I, and Hogan decided that was what we were going to do.

I didn’t want to tell Russo. By that time, I knew I couldn’t trust him. I knew he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut. A leak to the dirtsheets, even by accident, would kill the plan. But Brad said, “No, you can’t do that; you can’t keep the secret from him.” Brad was still trying to make it work.

So I pulled Russo in and told him what the deal was in front of Hogan. Russo went, “Okay, great. That’s what you want to do? Great.” The plan was set. He fully understood everything we were going to do.

I thought.

Hogan compromised a little with Jeff Jarrett on how the match ended, but to me it was irrelevant. As long as it ended with him saying, “Screw you, WCW,” and me running out the door after him like I was trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, it didn’t matter to me.

We went out and did what we were supposed to do. Jeff Jarrett lay down. Hogan, disgusted, denounced us all. He told me to take the company and stick it, then jumped in his limo. I ran after him, yelling, “No, no, wait.” I jumped in the car, and it took off.

In Business for Himself

We were laughing our asses off. We high-fived each other and congratulated each other. We thought we had a really good plan.

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The Pay-Per-View was over with, so there was no reason for us to go back to the building. Hogan and I drove to the airport and hopped on his plane to fly back to Tampa.

When the plane landed maybe twenty or thirty minutes later, both of our phones were lit up with calls.

We quickly learned that right after Hogan and I left, Russo got on the microphone and went into business for himself. He said, basically, Hulk Hogan is a piece of shit, he’s never going to work for this company again. He vented, burying Hogan in slanderous terms.

He then set up an
immediate
championship match, completely at odds with what we had worked out. Booker T pinned Jeff Jarrett in what Russo declared was the championship match. He’d rebooked the show and pulled the rug out from under the entire tournament plan.

It didn’t make any sense, but he did it.

We were stunned. We couldn’t believe that Russo would be so stupid and arrogant to take it on himself to change the finish.

Hogan was livid. The first thing he did was call his attorney.

I called Brad Siegel and said, “What the fuck? What was that about?”

Brad was in a total state of confusion.

That was it for me as far as Russo went. I told Brad I couldn’t work with him.

Showdown

Siegel, who was working in L.A. at the time, told me to meet him out in L.A. and talk about it. I thought, Fine; I was doing what he asked me to do and assumed he was going to explain that to Russo.

I was pretty sure where he was going to come down in the discussion. Brad had approved the plan, and the storyline I’d laid out for the company wasn’t exactly complicated. I thought he’d pull the trigger on Russo on the spot.

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or the other—preferably the side he’d laid out earlier—began to vacillate, trying to find a middle ground.

Middle ground?

I don’t think Brad understood the magnitude of the problem, or the fact that Hogan intended to sue. Russo was a great whiner—

he’d get these puppy-dog eyes and be very emotional. He was a good con artist.

I was shocked that Brad seemed to be trying to find a way to compromise. Maybe he was overwhelmed by Russo’s passion for his position. But looking back, I think Brad didn’t want to report to the people he reported to that he’d had to fire Russo. Even though he didn’t like the dark, no-star approach and the stunts Russo had pulled, he couldn’t bring himself to pull the plug.

So I made it easy on him:

“If you think Russo’s approach is going to be a great approach,” I told Brad, “I’ll just step aside. I have some things I have to work on.” I’d just sold a show to UPN. And besides, the fishing was just getting good in Wyoming.

Brad seems to have seen this as the path of least resistance, so he took it. Brad didn’t like confrontation or tough decisions.

I was happy. I was tired of working with Russo, knew I didn’t trust him, and knew that he had nothing under the hood creatively.

Now
I wanted to give Russo enough rope to hang himself with.

That way, he’d be out of my hair for good.

Hogan’s Lawsuit

Let me make this point very clear: I think that if Brad Siegel fully understood the magnitude of the legal problem he was about to have with Hulk Hogan because of what Vince Russo did, he would have fired Vince Russo on the spot, if for no other reason than to protect the company legally.

Hogan did go ahead and sue, alleging that he had been defamed by Russo and that WCW had broken its contract to him. The RETURN TO HELL

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defamation portion of his suit was later dismissed, but Hogan wound up with a significant amount of cash after a protracted legal battle.
Bash at the Beach
was probably the costliest Pay-Per-View ever for WCW, thanks to the self-serving bullshit Russo pulled.