Controversy Creates Cash (6 page)

That was my first job. I took some two-by-fours and Sheetrock, and built a little freestanding cubicle not too far from the front door.

A few days after I was finished, all the wrestlers came to the studio to shoot promos. There were twenty, thirty guys in the studio, making a bunch of noise, cutting up, acting like wrestlers, all that happy horseshit. I was in my office, staying out of everybody’s way.

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All of a sudden I heard Sheik Adan El Kaissey and Kevin “Nails” Wacholtz yelling and swearing at each other.

Kevin, by the way, was the first guy to ever beat up Vince McMahon over a payday dispute. He was jacked up at the time and not the sharpest knife in the drawer to begin with. He didn’t just play a hothead on TV; he was one in real life.

The wrestlers began shouting, “Whoaaaaa! Whoaaaa!” I looked up just as Sheik’s head crashed through the Sheetrock beneath one of the photos on my wall.

I said to myself, Wow. This is pretty impressive.

And then:
What have I gotten myself into?

2

Ken Doll

Smartening People Up

Lies and Bullshit

I’d like to take a minute to address some of the more blatant lies, inconsistencies, and bullshit that have been spread about me and my time at the AWA.

For example, if you look at a lot of the Web site information about me, my background—none of which was ever supplied by me—you’ll read that I took a job mowing Verne Gagne’s lawn.

That, I assure you, never happened.

More seriously, people have said that I was the architect behind the Team Challenge Series, which was a cute little idea that was horribly executed and was a dismal failure. I had nothing to do with that. It was not my idea, and I was not involved in executing it, but for whatever reason, that disaster has been attributed to me. People have called me AWA’s booker, claimed I clashed with Verne over wrestling styles, even suggested I was the general manager.

None of it is true.

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CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

Behind the Curtain

During the time I was working with Verne, I had zero input—and I cannot emphasize
zero
enough—on anything that anyone had to do with anything on the screen.

I had
no
creative input. I was not asked for any creative input, and it didn’t even occur to me to offer any, because my role was primarily that of a sales and marketing guy. The only time I even saw most of the wrestlers was when they came into town maybe once or twice a month to shoot promos. And then I kept my distance.

Quite honestly, Verne was one of those old-school promoters who didn’t want to “smarten” anybody up, or explain the inner workings of the wrestling business to outsiders. He very much believed that the only people who needed to see what went on behind the curtain were the people who were behind the curtain. If you weren’t a wrestler or a referee or one of the bookers, you had no business knowing what was going on inside the ring. You couldn’t ask questions like, “Hey who’s going to beat the Crusher?” You ask that, you’d be shown the door.

Verne was very strict about kayfabe, or the secrets of the business, as the term is used today. If I happened to walk out of my office near the studio, and Verne was talking to a wrestler, he’d whisper in their ear so I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

I didn’t try to ease my way in behind the curtain. I knew my role and knew what I could do and should do.

For a year and a half, all I did was syndication and sales—and I was
ecstatic
to do that. It was probably the first time in my life that I was doing something that I wanted to do for an indefinite period of time.

The pay was about thirty thousand a year, less than I’d been making at Blue Ribbon, but it was regular. And it was doing something I loved, as opposed to something I was good at.

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How the Business Side Worked

Verne’s operation at AWA had two main components—the live events or promotions in different locations, and television shows.

Primarily, Verne’s live event business was driven by local television markets. The more television stations or local markets that carried his show, the better the live event side of his business did. The TV shows gave you an opportunity to promote the events. That was the best way of advertising the shows. Posters and radio time, the other options, were pretty ineffective for wrestling. Fans have to know your characters and storylines. That’s the difference between wrestling and other live event businesses like the circus or music.

That happens on the air.

When I came to AWA, Verne distributed a program on ESPN, Monday through Friday, and had a syndicated show that would play on various stations around the United States. My job was to increase the number of stations syndicating the show. I’d solicit interest in different markets over the phone, then go and visit them, hoping to convince them to air Verne’s program. That in turn gave Verne a chance to expand his live event territory.

It also helped us increase advertising revenue. Advertisers like M&M Mars paid us based on our penetration into the marketplace.

If we had 60 percent national penetration, say, we would get X; if we had 70, we would get X plus Y.

Within six months or so, I took us from thirty-two stations to sixty-five or seventy. That remained my primary focus for the first year and a half.

Pitching

I remember a lot of those pitches. This was a time when television was still very traditional, and the program directors tended to be older, in their fifties for the most part. They’d been around when 40

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

wrestling was in its heyday in the 1960s. I liked talking to them, because they’d tell me great wrestling stories.

When I was a kid, I remember when this guy wrestled that guy, and
my grandma took me to the wrestling matches and she got so upset she
reached into her bag and pulled out a hairpin and tried to stab this guy.

That kind of stuff.

You’d hear all of those stories, because everybody has one, especially in the Midwest. Out there, you didn’t get a lot of rock ‘n’ roll; you didn’t get the circus coming to town on a regular basis. Cedar Rapids and Fort Dodge, places in Nebraska that outsiders have never heard of and I’ve forgotten—out there people didn’t have a lot of entertainment coming to town. So when wrestling came to town, it was a big damn deal, especially back in the 1960s.

When I went to markets like Milwaukee or Chicago or some of the other big cities, I’d run into younger programming people at certain stations who were trying to be hip and cool. But invariably they’d reveal, yes indeed, they were wrestling fans. It was always fun getting that out of them.

Behind the Curtain

The Cockpit of a 727

About a year after I started, Mike Shields came to me and said,

“Why don’t you come to Las Vegas and sit in on one of the shows and
watch what we do?”

Besides everything else Mike did, he directed the ESPN show that Verne shot in Vegas at a small off-strip casino called the Show-boat once or twice a month. Mike made me technical director on the show. It was a pretty low-level job, but it was the first time I stepped foot inside the television production universe.

It was like walking into the cockpit of a 727. It was amazing.

I’m a product of the 1950s and ’60s. Television was still rela-KEN DOLL

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tively new to our culture when I grew up. We didn’t even have a color TV when I was a kid. Very few people had more than one set in the house. But the television they did have was the center of every family’s life. Everyone knew what television was—they just didn’t know how it worked. I was fascinated to find out.

Mike gave me an opportunity to step inside a television truck and see how it all came together. It absolutely intoxicated me.

Equipment crammed the production truck. Eight or ten people worked elbow to elbow. You saw lights and buttons and levers and screens. Mike watched eight screens on the wall, all at the same time, each feeding a different shot. It was controlled, high-energy chaos. I was fascinated that he could pick the shot he wanted to take at any given moment. It’s like watching someone juggle hand grenades.

“Ready, Camera Two, take two. Camera Four—take four. Camera
one—graphics up—hit the music!”

By today’s standards, it was pretty fundamental and basic, and, dare I say, crude, without any disrespect to Mike. But to someone who’d never seen it before, it was an amazing thing.

I think Mike invited me out to Vegas as a “It’s time you learned another phase of the business” thing. He was a mentor that way.

Whether he saw my enthusiasm for it, or because I asked so many questions, he invited me to learn more.

I was an eager learner, and he was a great teacher.

One More Step

At some point around late 1988 or early 1989—I wish I could recall when, but I can’t—I went from being the sales and marketing guy to being an on-camera talent.

Which I had
no
intention of doing.

My goal, my aspiration, was
never
to be in front of the camera. I was thrilled to be in sales and marketing. I never assumed I could be a “talent,” never hoped to be asked. But it just fell in my lap.

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Edit Market Promos

The way Verne set up his business, the wrestlers came in every two weeks and cut edit market promos. Edit market promos would be edited into the syndicated show to advertise upcoming events. They were made in such a way to make it seem as if the syndicated show was actually a local production. That was the “magic” of the old territory system.

Here’s how it all worked:

Verne used to shoot his syndicated show inside the soundstage at the local television station in Minneapolis. It was a small soundstage; probably seventy-five to a hundred people would come in and watch the show. A number of matches would be filmed at one time, then prepared for the syndicated TV shows.

At a later date, the wrestlers would cut the interviews, which were generally a minute and thirty seconds long. These would be edited and inserted into the show for each market.

Let’s say I’m Greg Gagne, and Mean Gene is interviewing me. I have a match coming up in Milwaukee. Gene would say something like, “Okay, great. You’re coming to Milwaukee and you’re going to be wrestling at the Mecca Center on Saturday, January 19, at 8 P.M.

tickets are available at all Joe Blow ticket outlets right here in Milwaukee. And who are you going to take on?” And Gagne would say, “Well, right here in Milwaukee I’m going to be wrestling the Crusher and I’m going to show these people here in Milwaukee . . .”

The interview would make the viewer feel like the show was being produced specifically for Milwaukee. The wrestler and interviewer referred specifically to things in the Milwaukee area. They might mention the Green Bay Packers, or people that everybody in Milwaukee knew.

They would do that for every single market the show was in.

The same basic show would air in Milwaukee and Green Bay and Minneapolis and Fargo and Mason City and Lacrosse and Cedar KEN DOLL

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Rapids, with dozens and dozens of these interviews edited into the proper segments.

If you were a wrestler, you would stand there for an hour and do the same promo, the same interview about the same guy you’re going to wrestle, maybe fifty or a hundred times. Each time you’d change just enough to refer to the local market. The announcer would do the interview over and over with different wrestlers, feeding them their lines all day without, hopefully, getting hoarse or mind-numb.

The Worst Announcer Ever

By this point, Verne’s longtime announcer “Mean” Gene Okerlund had left AWA and gone over to work for Vince. Verne hired a guy by the name of Larry Nelson, who had a deep, burly voice that Verne liked. He was an old-school radio guy, and he was also a pretty heavy drinker. In fact, I think the Scotch had a lot to do with his radio voice.

One day all of the wrestlers had arrived in the building. It was about ten o’clock in the morning, and they were getting ready to shoot. But Larry wasn’t there. An hour went by and, no Larry Nelson. An hour and a half went by—they couldn’t find Larry. No one could find Larry.

That’s because Larry was in jail. Larry had gotten pulled over by the police and, for whatever reason, he never showed up to work.

There were a lot of wrestlers, and a lot of work to be done, but there was no announcer.

I was sitting in my office, minding my own business, working the phone. I had a sales call that I had to make later that day, so I’d worn a shirt and a tie and a sport coat to work, which turned out to be my undoing.

At some point—I’m not sure who it was, it may have been Greg Gagne, it may have been Verne, it may have been Mike Shields—

someone said, “Hey, why don’t we get Eric to do it? He wore a tie today, let him do it.”

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“Do what?”

They brought me in, put a microphone in my hand, and told me what to say

I tried. But I sucked really bad.

Really
bad.

I might add that even today, the announcing job is one of the toughest jobs there is on camera. You can’t really compare it to being a wrestler, because there’s no physicality involved, but getting the information out and getting it out in an entertaining way, without a teleprompter—the AWA didn’t have one—is tough. You have to remember where the event is, what time it is, where you can get tickets. You have to introduce the wrestler, feed him a line so he can feed the camera his line: “When I’m in Rochester this Saturday night, I’m going to kick Baron Von Raschke’s ass because of what he did to me last week. . . .” Then take it back and button it up, reminding people where and when to buy, and get it all done in exactly one minute, thirty seconds. All the while there’s a guy behind the camera going, “Ten, nine, eight . . . ,” counting the spot down because if it’s a minute and thirty-five, you had to do it over again.