TLF Tackles Who Killed WCW Episode 1

Who killed WCW. That's the question posed by the new four part Vice TV series that is just premiered, and here in the Lapsed Fan, we're going to make it our mission for the next little while to not only attempt to answer that question, but tackle it to the ground into submission from a fans perspective. Dare I say a lapsed fans perspective? And it's called for because just when you point the finger for the downfall of WCW, you realize there's

someone right behind you pointing at you. Welcome in Jack and Carnacio, a JP sorrow from that cast, and boy are we excited to partner up with a longtime friend of the show and a man who has meticulously researched the fall

of World Championship Wrestling, perhaps more than anyone. He, of course, is the author of Nitro, The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW, as well as former WCW hanto Eric Bischoff's second book, Grateful, and the recently released Sitting Ringside by former law time WCW ring announcer Dave Penzer, and for years he's collaborated with former WSW producer Neil Pruitt to on Earth and bring forth such great detail about the comings, the goings, the ups,

the downs, the maneuverings, the machinations of a once great wrestling company. Guy Evans, thanks so much for being here and in fact suggesting we even do this in the first place. Oh, it's a pleasure just listening to that intro. I just thought, Man, no one does this podcast thing like you, guys, So congratulations on ten years. It's not a surprise that it's gone so well for you, and I'm very happy to be speaking with you about this series today. Excellent. Well thanks guy, and

you're off on the right foot. You've paid the appropriate premute, which is always important, right boss, that's right. I know that's mandatory. Right from the stove. Kiss the ring. Kiss the ring, and we can move on quickly. The squared circle. Call it what you will. It's right, I mean, kiss the square circle. It's good. Just wipe being around the bush. I mean, guy, you have thought of the question from as many ankles as anybody. You're featured in the Vice series.

The TLF played a little bit of role on the front end, consulting with the writer of the show and Evan Husny about how to perhaps structure a four act look at the collapse of WCW. And I'm just interested in starting with you. I mean, if you have to assign I don't know, fifty one percent blame for the collapse of WCW, of course there's a million culprits. Where does your head go, knowing all you know about the subject.

My head goes to the fantastic final episode of this series where that question is going to be posed to all of the interviewees, including myself. And if I was to give you a direct answer now, there would be I would be, you know, preempting that magnificent final episode. So I suggest we revisit that after episode four. How does that sound? It sounds good. Now, did you approach the book with that sort of framing? Did you approach the book as you know, let's let's build not a case against an

individual. Of course you wouldn't seek to do that, but let's seek to understand why, you know, this gallery of characters are blamed. And did you tilt towards one side of the house, the Turner side of the house,

the wrestling operation side of the house. In the final analysis, can you give us at least that well, I think you know what I will say is, in doing the book, one of the things that became abundantly clear quite early on was the fact that this dysfunctional relationship between Turner Broadcasting and WCW that was really going to be sort of the overarching theme throughout the book,

that was going to tie all of the contents together. And I think I underestimated that going in to kind of answer your question, I had an appreciation for it. I understood generally that the corporate people, shall we say, we're not fans of having wrestling on the air, especially in the high

profile time slots that it was. But once I actually got to meet with these people in many cases and speak to them on the phone in other cases, I really sort of saw that that vitriol in some particular examples, you know, up close and personal, and you know, almost with that exception, and I think in the series you're going to see one or two of those exceptions, but almost with that exception, there was a mix of you know, embarrassment and you know, disbelief at times that we're making this such

a big part of the programming schedule. So I think that's a very important part, you know, possibly the most important aspect of the WCW story to understand, and I think prior to the book coming out that hadn't been investigated

really in any appreciable detail. Of course, that doesn't discount the fact that you know, WCW clearly did themselves no favors if you look at a lot of the nature of the programming prior to the Nitro era, you look at what happened once things really started to unravel, which I'm sure we're going to go into when Raw of course made it come back in the ratings, and need we even touch on the sheer insanity of the last eighteen months or so.

Let's not sit here and pretend that you know we were putting on just this this, these amazing cards and amazing shows. It was stellar programming from top to bottom. And if it wasn't for the suits, you know, we would still be around today. Clearly that wasn't the case. But clearly or equally, you have to take a well rounded, sort of holistic view at all of those factors to accurately determine why what happened to WCW actually did

happen. In the end, Amen and that embarrassment to have that under the turner. You know, corporate agus is is so on thesis for us at TLF as we are constantly you know, seeking out proof points, right Boston, I mean this is this is not something to be proud of your chest. Just the the you know, the interviews in the episode alone, and just how disgusted they were, just how like, just how appalled they were

that Brad Brad Siegel in particular, that bad ah. I was like, Brad Siegel is a is a heaven sent individual just for his disdain, his absolute distain. And I love that, and I love that it's that it's really really real that they fucking hate it. Oh, it absolutely is. And I think it's interesting you mentioned Dick Cheatham and if ever there was a just a perfect name for a series on a wrestling company, that would be a yeah, he's the only one not cheating anybody. Yeah, right,

you're going to see as time goes on and these four episodes progress. He was one of those exceptions that I was just alluding to. There, someone who was a genuine fan of the programming and actually loves professional wrestling to this day. I maintain frequent contact with him actually, and he still goes to shows to this very day and supports it the way he has, you know,

pretty much his whole adult life. But you know that that obviously wasn't the case for the large majority of the people who mattered within Turner Broadcasting. And again, I think most people have some kind of an awareness for that, but it's a different cattle of fish when you actually hear it from these

people personally. And I can think of even some high profile executives that I spoke to who weren't willing to be quoted in the book, but were willing to talk to me on a sort of off the record basis, and you know, some of the things that they had to say really kind of took me aback. I kind of had the same impression that I think you guys did in watching this first episode, which was like, Man, these guys

really did hate this shit. This is not an act. They were really embarrassed to have to go to these functions or to go to a work conference or what have you. And when someone asked them what's the highest rated programming on their networks, they would have to turn around and say, wrestling, that's what's so satisfying about it. Yes, yes, it's not just that

they have to acknowledge it's somewhere in the thicket of programming. It's the reason that their ratings look so good when it comes to the weekly top ten. And what's great about it too, What I think the most fascinating thing about it is that there they would rather not have the ratings. They would rather what they're saying, at least to me in my opinion, what they're saying is they would rather cut the whole fucking thing out of the programming and be

like third or fourth best rather than be number one. Well, you know, it's funny because Brad Siegel really only takes power in late nineteen ninety nine, and he's the one, as we've seen in episode one and probably we'll see in future episodes, and had a sense of already that's willing to give voice to that negative animus. You know, a lot of folks say people had that disdain for wrestling and do a great job in the book Died cracking

down people who were aware of ww's reputation on the ad sales side. These aren't people who look down at WCW, but these are people who had to deal with the fact that everyone they had to sell commercial time during Nitro two look down on it right, and I think one of the most insightful comments

in the book. It's somewhat towards the back of the book, there's a TNT executive who comments on this notion that you often hear people go into, especially on the wrestling side, where they'll say, we were still drawing millions of viewers at the end. We were still Yes, we weren't where we were at our peak, but man, you know, the Turner Networks would

take those numbers today. And essentially he makes the point that, yes, drawing viewership is one thing, but if you can't actually get anyone to advertise against that viewership, then it's not necessarily all for nought. But obviously you're not maximizing those eyeballs on your channel. So I think that was always the age old problem with WCW and with wrestling at that time, and to a large extent still today as well, although perhaps it's not as big of an

issue as it was back in the nineties. But being able to guaranteed money, but being able to being able to sell to advertise as the idea that they should be associated with that product was always a problem for WCW, and there's a specific chapter in the book where we go into that, and I think again, as the series progresses, you're going to hear more to that

end as well. Well, then you mentioned guaranteed money. The thing about this time period of WCW's boom was that the cable networks weren't necessarily feeling as desperate as they would a decade or a decade two decades later to get audience, you know, as as people cut the cord, and as the cable universe in the United States shrinks and shrinks and shrinks as the years progress and a streaming takes off, all of a sudden, it's like, well,

shit, I don't care how hard it is to sell ads against raw this is our only hope to stay relevant and linear. So you know, let's stop being so personnicity about you know, the attitude. Plus, there's a generational changeover in these ad departments where you know, new bosses take the helm who don't have the negative sort of viewpoint of wrestling. But back then, I think, you know, we'll probably hear from Brad Siegel and others. There was sort of a swagger of like we're TNT, like it's not a

problem. These are great numbers, but if we can't make money off the ads, you know, we're not thinking there's no other way under God's blue sky to get those kind of numbers. And in fact, the guy we know that, Brad was pretty confident that movies should be the thing. And you know TNT was a network largely defined by you know, movies, and that the original Nitro was like a movie thing. It was a Saturday Night Nitro special Movie Night with action movies and things like that, and Brad's movie

Hollywood movies for guys who like movies. Yeah, that was that was TBS. It the I don't remember. I could be wrong. I can picture the graphic though, Yes, CBS, which tells you everything you need to know. Same thing, really, same principle, especially when Thunder goes to to TBS in January of nineteen ninety eight. But guy, that was the thing, right, I mean these guys they were, yeah, they were disdainful of wrestling. But but what JP's talking about that the willingness to just

not even have those ratings. They were sort of, I don't know, cocky enough, delusional, enough, some may say to think that they could just as easily replace that audience with an audience they could actually monetize from an ad sales perspective before guaranteed money. That's right, And I would also add to some of the points that you raise there. I think one of the main differences when we think about the environment today as compared to back then,

is just how fragmented the landscape has become with respect to media consumption. So it was really imperative at that particular time for something like WCW to really go after the mass audience, whereas today, I think because we're all sort of in our own silos now where we digest content whenever we want to, and obviously on demand has been a thing for quite some time, and there's a million different ways to tune into something. You know, it's a completely different

set of circumstances to compare the two. And you know, there's all kinds of interesting, you know, subcultures and phenomena going on today that probably none of us have any idea about. Sometimes I'll go on social media and see that there's, you know, a band playing in Times Square and there's tens of thousands of people there and they think to them and I'm sure it is on an objective level, this is a really big deal and it's a man

that you've never heard of before. That wasn't the case back in the nineties, right, So I think that's also something else to keep in mind when you think about just how important it was for WCW to monetize those four or five million people that they had at their peak watching their shows. And I think a key insight from episode one and during the course of TLF tackles who

killed WCW. We're gonna let the episode sort of be our guide. You know, We're going to aim to put more meat on the bone in the skeleton that they present in the forty five minutes or whatever it is that they have, and try to be additive as much as you know, sit back and critique the episodes that that's not our highest and best use, especially considering the intellectual capital of one guy Evans and how much he knows about the ins

and outs. So we're gonna consider this more of a companion guide to the series and sort of, like you know, asides footnotes, things that wouldn't necessarily make a cohesive make it fit nicely into a cohesive video narrative in the traditional para, you know, restrictions of television, but like we always do here, we don't give a fuck about that. We used to go and go and go and go until the corpse is exhausted, and and to that

and to that extent. You know, one of the key insights I think we hear in episode one from Brad Siegel and it never clicked in with me until he said it this way. We were TNT. We were incredibly competitive with the USA Network to be the number one network on cable. And if the reason JP the USA network is number one and Cable is Monday Night Raw, then all of a sudden, Monday Nitro isn't such a bad thing, no matter how personal distaste. How else were they going to compete with the

audience that USA was able to draw. That's extremely true. I mean, you know, if if if that's your if if if Raw and WW or you're number one program, you know your your main opponent in terms of viewership and ratings and success and whatever, then yeah, you got to kind of fight fire with fire, fire with fire, And you know, in our Black Saturday series, we talked about the beginning of the tensions between Ten Turner

and Vince McMahon. It's so long seated, this competition of Turner probably having a bee in his bonnet. Guy, I mean, what we're gonna hear from Ted Turner's son, which was a great get by the Vice Cup throughout the course of the series, Ted of course suffering from dementia and isn't necessarily someone that can that can hold court on on what the Grand Scheme was kind of like a smaller part of his operation, but one that was near and

dear to his heart. I mean that everyone seems to confirm that, but here you have a situation where you can start to see a Ted Turner who really would be intrigued by the idea, even if it put the rest of his direct reports in an uncomfortable position. That you know, it's it's not only an ego thing to try to knock Vin's office perch, it's also sound

business, because that's why we're number two to USA Network. Yeah, I think when I heard those comments from Brad Siegel, that reminded me of something that I had talked about in one of my interviews for this series. Because

again, as you'll see, as the episodes progress. I ended up doing two interviews for this, and in one of the interviews, the question was asked, Okay, we've established that the Turner people hated wrestling, so why on earth would they at some point have been pushing for a second show? Right? This is when the topic of thunder came up. Exactly. They were asking me, I try to square that circle for us or make sense

of that. And you know, the phrase that came to mind in the moment as I was answering that question was, you know, you hear this phrase the institutional imperative, which kind of explains how organizations changed their behavior over time and people within those organizations as a result based on circumstances and the environment

changing. And I think what I'm getting at here is I interpreted Brad Segel's comments in episode one to say, you know, yes, I was clearly not a fan of the idea of wrestling being on primetime on Monday night, But seeing as Ted made up his mind, and as you know from reading the book, and if you do any kind of study on Ted Turner, you'll know that he was a guy that once he made a decision that was that he was going to happen. There was going to be no discussion.

Your job now is to make it happen to the best of your ability. I interpreted that as him showing us or giving us some insight into his rationalization of how do I proceed in my role now, seeing as the person who is, you know, the owner of this corporation has made that decision. So you know, again they were able to I think people like Brad Siegel

were able to rationalize it based on those terms. But I don't think that discounts from the fact that that long term I don't think there were any sort of visions or any kind of idea that this was going to be a staple

of the programming schedule. I'm sure the mindset was more along the lines of, okay, Ted said, it's going to happen, So it's going to happen, so let's try to milk this thing for as long as we can, which you know, that's a big part of the story of WCW as well, And we don't really care about the long term repercussions because we don't want it on the air waves anyway. Well, JP, it's pulse check

time. I want to start an episode one by asking you the question, and then after all four episodes have aired, I want to ask the question again. Yes, who do you feel like you are most likely to point the finger at when it comes to the central question here? Who killed WCW? My mom a fuck off totally because she didn't want me to watch aw W, and so that started the company. Let's still here. Yeah, now, you know I was trying to think of you know, I mean

there is the Okay, who do I think killed WCW? Jim Crockett selling the company? Okay, by selling the car, right, so you call it, well, by selling it to by basically selling his stuff to Turner. You know, it died there, It died eventually. But that's a little too you know, like kind of smart assy. It's interesting. I mean, it really is a question of how about far back do you want to go? I mean I guess, I guess. Here's the thing, like I think about it like this in actually, you know, to really

go there you look at it like this a guy. It's not even that he with the selling of it. I think that the Jim Crockett fucked his own company by by doing the spending that he did. You know, we've talked about that. We talked about during the Star Care Memorial tour. It's

like, Yeah, his excessive spending. I wonder, I question and and think maybe if he hadn't done all that spending, saved a little bit of money and stopped trying to be you know, vincig Mann and Rick Flair, if he had actually kept control of his own company, what would have happened with it? Would it have been would it have been more successful later on? I don't know, maybe not. Maybe, Well Crockett wouldn't have been

in my short list. I will say this, if you're going to start pointing the finger at the salaries that ww wrestlers were able to command and do the ATM Eric thing and talk about Cameru teen money and talk about creative control and all that, Yeah, if you're going to point the finger at that, you really do need to go back to Jim Crockett Junior, because he was the one that started slinging out guaranteed deals to Road Warriors, Luger,

anybody who's threatened to go to WWF after he had gone in on a million dollars in eighty five to take over the TBS time slot and became sort of the institutional thing we would come to know as WCW. And he was the one because he didn't want to lose this talent at a key time, Any structured the contract such that, you know, all right, eventually we'll get the pay per view proceeds in and we can pay a balloon payment at the

tail end of the contract. And those balloon payments came up the revenues either weren't there or weren't arriving at the cadence expected. Then no, Dusty blames the accountant, and the rest is history. But that's where it started.

I mean, I'm sure somewhere in the wrestling sphere, somewhere in the world there was a what we consider a guaranteed contract, unlike Vince's, where you know, you basically get paid based on your position on the card on the night, in the gate that night, and of course some very opaque formula that he has in his head about you know, where on the card you

sit and how much you deserve. But aside from that, I mean, it was it was Crockett doing that to keep people from going to Vince that led to Ted inheriting that way of doing business and those sorts of contracts that led to Jim Hurd, who was of course appointed to head WCW after Turner purchased it in November of nineteen eighty eight, to have to inherit that mindset

as well and further extend the guaranteed contract mentality at WCW. Bill Watts came and tried to dismantle it and of course got sunned Kip Fry before Bill Watts accelerated it big time and signed some deals that sent Bill Watts into a tizzy when he got his hands on the reins. And then Bischoff, you know, sort of continued a tradition. Is it's you know, of course he cut incredibly lucrative deals for Hull Kogan, unlike we've ever seen in the industry,

and you can fault him for that perhaps, but you can't. You can't rest at his feet the creation of it, you know, for Vince, he had to start offering it in ninety six because of Hollan Nash, and he offered it to Mark Marrow and stuff. But just because Vince started doing it then doesn't mean that's that's where it started. That was the genesis of it, I mean too, and the uh oh I lost it. Never mind, I don't know. Well, you were saying, Jim Crockett

a bit tongue in cheek. Yeah, I was saying, would you really point to somebody else? I mean not, I mean honestly, I don't know yet. You know, the the there were a lot of interesting aspects of the episode that I thought were really really cool. I don't know. I assume we're going to get there at some point, so I won't. I won't really talk about it till you're ready for it. But there are

just some parts in there. I was like, Wow, they like some some kind of truth that that has been denied in some aspects, not necessarily about about the way it was run or something or not whatnot. But I was just amazed at that, and I I I'll stick with Jim Crockett for right now, but I'll tell you what I really hope and I don't think it'll happen, but I really want someone to say in an interview, fuck it it was me. I killed w CW. Guy is that coming?

Guy? Guy? Wait until episode I'm still here. I know. Yes, Episode four is fantastic. I mean, let me just at this stage say what a fantastic job the vice people in the Seven Bucks people did with this series. You know, they reached out to me in October of last year, and originally I think the idea was for me to be one of the interviewees in the series. And they made it very clear that you know, the Nitro book had been you know, an inspiration for them. That

was the word they used. And I think Evan has said as much in the last week or so in some of his interviews, which obviously was you know, a huge compliment in and of itself, and you know, as we sort of talked a couple more times, that evolved into them offering for me to come aboard as a consultant on the show. And so I was really able to work very closely with Tara and Dave to really talented producers advice, and then later on Evan himself and Paul Taylor, who was the showrunner.

So I've been that's worth I can tell you. Sean Robb, who Evan is also credited, who I collaborated with a bit at the front end with Evan on how to frame this thing. He was also very brought up to speed by the book as well, I mean what it does and you know this better than anybody because you did it is it opens up a new category of people to talk to that aren't just wrestling, people who actually have

opinions about WCW, who actually remember w CW and how it fit. Until your book came out, I'm not sure we appreciated that there were, you know, people in the Turner hierarchy who were willing to hold court on this. That's right. So I just wanted to make that point before we went any further, because I was just so impressed with, you know, that professionalism and how they were approaching this project and the fact that you know, they really wanted me to be a big part of it. And you know,

as I was, I was going to go into there. You know, I've been seeing cuts of these episodes now. I think the first time they sent me something was in March, and you know, every cut was just getting progressively better and better. But I can't speak, I can't speak highly enough about the job that they did. I mean I told Evan and Paul directly, I said, this is this is an A plus project, and I think they for four episodes. You know this this could have been

a ten or twenty episodes. Series. When you think about the history of WCW, but with the time that they had especially and even if you put that factor to the to the side, they just did a wonderful job. So I just wanted to just wanted to recognize that before we get any further, because I was very grateful, you know, to have that opportunity and just you know, by the time people listen to this, they would have seen the first episode and got a feel. But trust me, as time

goes on, this series just gets better and better. Look forward to seeing that that play out. As for me, who killed WCW. Vince McMahon killed WCW. It's pracce we heard from him already, yess. Vince McMann killed WCW. What by regrouping when he was on the ropes, by rallying, by being resourceful, by striking the right court at the right time with Steve Austin and Mike Tyson, leaning into a direction count while risk Guay was

what the moment called for, stealing when he had to steal. In terms of ECW and its approach to the business, opening up the curtain, the curtain, opening up the kimono. If you will, to Vince Russo's approach and just having that bunker mentality of war under siege and we're going to survive, and we're going to surge back when the enemy is loafing about on Christmas

night. In general, Washington attacks, okay, crossing the Delaware. Bischoff didn't have that in a period when the nWo started to crack and it wasn't guaranteed ratings anymore and the momentum reversed in April of nineteen ninety eight. There was nothing there to punch back with of cough consequence short of the hot shotting of Goldberg winning the title, and they replayed the aborted DDP Goldberg match for the final time. They won the ratings in October ninety eight. There was

good stuff that happened W ninety eight. There was decent stuff that happened in wcw A ninety nine. There wasn't much of that in two thousand, but there wasn't anything that was coming back from being put down on the canvas. It was. It was. It was a one idea deal. And fortunately for Eric and and and his in his company, in his his inner circle. It was also something that put Hulk Hogan firmly in the spotlight, because, as we've talked about over ten years, the lapsed fan WCW could only

be as good as Hulk Hogan storyline. If Hogan stuff wasn't interesting in money

and drawing ratings, WCW wasn't going to It really was that simple. And when the nWo stopped working in terms of just like you know, mail it in and we're going to beat him every week, there was there was There was very little foundation being built for a day beyond that, And so I got to say, Vince McMahon off the top, I think I'm going to come around to a thesis that Brad Siegel actually killed WCW and was happy to do it, in that he he leaned in to what wasn't working in the

form of Vince Russo at a time when he could have shown a bit more interest in keeping the company alive, and switched up and reconstituted the brain trust, going back to Bischoff and putting Bischoff and Russo together, even though I haven't heard a single person tell me they thought that was going to work, unless you listen to the all the media. Rousso and Bischoff did that week where they couldn't have been more complimentary towards each other in that honeymoon phase.

But just that's that's where my head is at right now. We'll see how and if my mind changes as as as the week's progressed. But JP, we've talked about this. We did the Star Kid memorial tour, going through every starkad in order, and then we did a how the nWo should have ended? Yes, the central question here if we're talking about ninety six, seven, eight and nine, boy, WCW has to beat the nWo.

There has to be oh, yeah, game there has to be a game plan where WCW is enough on the other side of the hottest angle the business has ever seen. Yeah. Oh absolutely, there's no question about that. That's that is one of the uh, it's one of the big the big mistakes is that they I think is that they didn't allow WCW to get the real upper hand when they should have. I mean, it's it's it just didn't make sense. It didn't make sense to let it just draw out like

that. And they they you know, they made a bunch of they made a bunch of mistakes with that, not the least of which, of course, is the way they handled uh, you know, sting a starka. We saw on Star K ninety seven that even if they wanted to do precisely what they should have done, circumstances were such contracts were such leverage was such that it just wasn't going to happen. It was just a place where lay

up no brainer ideas went to die. And by the time it came out of the laundry in the dry cycle, it was like what were you thinking here? Yeah, like what is this? Why is Hulk Hogan trying to insert himself into the angle where Goldberg spears Brett hard in ninety nine in Toronto, Like what does he have to do with anything? Yeah, I mean it's all frustrating. It actually it actually makes me angry. It's even even think about it and go back there, because I wanted to be you know,

I wanted to have worked. I wanted it to to have you know, because we were watching, we know what was in the heart of the fan. Ye would have kept them watching WCW after the nWo angle came to a poetic end, and they just they couldn't They couldn't do it. They couldn't move beyond the NWOS Lapsed Fan Wrestling Podcast with Jack and Carno and JP Soros a Lapsed fan Wrestling podcast, and to the point they prostituted it so

much that it was unbelievably lame by like two thousand. Yeah, you guys are right, and I think, you know, as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about something in the book which really kind of gives you an idea of why it was so difficult for them, I think, to move on from the nWo, aside from some of the factors that you mentioned there.

And there's a story in the book about Brad Siegel, incidentally, sort of around February two thousand or so, holding a meeting with the creative team at the time, which of course was being led by Kevin Sullivan, and basically saying, according to all parties who have talked about it, all right, you know we had the nWo, what's the next big idea? Guys like that was the exact phrase or the exact question that he asked, what's

the next big idea? And so you can kind of see how within that corporate environment it would have been very difficult for them to move on from that, because here you've been able to develop a storyline which actually resonates with people who previously wouldn't have had any interest in wrestling or wouldn't have seen the value in it, but could could have got their heads around the idea that, okay, there's this group of rogue, you know, invading wrestlers who are

trying to take over. It's a hostile takeover, which was a phrase that was sort of on the public consciousness in the eighties and the nineties. That's that's something you can kind of see someone with a basic knowledge or you know, passing knowledge of wrestling, maybe they've heard of hul Cogan and so forth, being intrigued by that. Oh wow, whule Cogan is bad. Now he's wearing black, He's leading this group of bad guy wrestlers. That's something

you can kind of get your teeth into if you're not a fan. But of course, you know, you guys know you know better than anyone when you look at the history of wrestling, you know, wrestling isn't this succession of big ideas after the other. You know, there are times when you may stumble upon something you may you know, fortuitously sort of find yourself in a situation where you get into a position where an idea like that resonates.

But it's not as if you know you're you're developing a big idea, running with it for a season or two, and then transitioning into the next one. And so you can kind of see the dilemma there and see how that would have caused them problems down the road, because they set up this huge dynamic where essentially you know that people have used the phrase overarching storyline. I would even say the nWo is beyond that. It was you know, there

was a point where I actually went back recently. I'm working on well in

the very final stages of another book right now. And don't ask me why I know this, but if you look at the number of times that the phrase nWo or New Build Order is mentioned in a typical Nitro episode, we're talking about like sixty or seventy times, and I'm not kidding you, and that's not even taking into account you know, wrestlers promos and things like that, right, So it was almost like in every single segment, every single time a guy goes to the ring, even if he isn't feuding with Hogan,

he's got to mention Hogan somehow he's got a rant about the nWo. So you know, they just built this this huge dynamic that was, I would say, always going to be very, very difficult to pay off.

And I would just add very quickly in closing. One of the stories I remember including in the book, which I kind of found a little bit intriguing, came from DDP and he was talking about a conversation he had with with Eric in the early part of ninety nine where he basically said, you know, look, dude, we've kind of blown it, like there was never

that decisive victory or any kind of victory for WCW. The nWo basically have one because there are continued presence on the show and they're not going anywhere.

They're dominating the main event scene. So how about this for an idea, how about we decisively present things in such a way where they have one and let them take over for you know, two, three, four weeks, whatever whatever the case may be, and then have you know, the WCW guys, you know, DDP himself or Sting or Goldberg start the invasion from the other side. So an inversion on the original nWo idea. Now you might look at that and say, yeah, okay, nice idea. But

by that point the nWo was already stale. We you know, fans, a lot of fans wouldn't be interested in, you know, in that kind of spin on things. But at least it was better than what we got, which because you know, the storyline, this massive storyline, completely fizzling out, and it kind of beggars belief when you look at ninety nine and the fact that the group just kind of disbanded and that was that was the end of it, which is just unbelievable to think about it really is.

It's it's a scenario where you realize that you have to start planning the seeds for the next big idea while you're still hot. Yeah, you cannot, you know, sit in a meeting and kick your feet up after a thing the snowball started to roll downhill and you know whatever, Brad Siegel is entitled

to put pressure on on his people to come up with something. I know, JJ Dillon and his book kind of bristled at Siegel saying that, because it's like, you can't have a big idea in wrestling unless you spend a bunch of time being kind of cold but setting the table for something people can

start looking towards. I mean, even when you think about like the idea of the of the you know, quote unquote big idea regarding the end of I mean, I've we've talked about it before in that the nWo was such a product of so much backstory that had nothing to do with the nWo. You know, like the only reason the nWo worked was because people were sick

of Hulk Hogan at that time. And I clicked in like if you hadn't, like, you couldn't have done that in nineteen eighty eight or eighty nine, you know, you couldn't have done it were people were still high on a Hulk Hogan. You know, there was no you needed somebody of that stature. You needed Hulk Hogan. You couldn't do it with anybody else,

right. That's why it's so suspicious to me to say that Hulk Hogan, to put Hulk Hogan on your list of who killed WCW to me is very very questionable because I mean, without Hulk Hogan, especially Bash to the Beach ninety four and the ticker tape parade and the licensing attention, Hulk was able to bring to WCW. I mean, you can't lose sight of the contribution

versus the detraction ratio. You know, Bischoff did so much that it's really weird to say he killed WSW when he created the thing that got killed. Anyway, you can sort of debate what his ultimate legacy should be in terms of the creator or someone who you know, the wheels fell off and he wanted to pay all kinds of money to kiss for some reason to fix it, or the no limit soldiers but you know, or give away a million dollars on nitro. But but you can say all that, but you can't.

It's hard to say he's the biggest culprit when he's also the person that shot the angle to the moon. Like goddamn, that's enough of a contribution to take his name off the list automatically in a way. But to me, like you know, the idea about Vince killing WW two is not just that he were grouped in ninety eight and started winning the ratings and started putting together magnificent television in terms of being sticky and drawing the audience back and exploding

the audience. But further, it was his savvy to say come on over, Chris Jericho, come on over, the guy that should have had a six month program with Goldberg in a member of nineteen ninety eight until Nash started sniffing the book, and then all of a sudden, Jericho's getting punked out and never gets a pay per view pay day, and all of a sudden, Goldberg starts to think he's been He's above working with Jericho, according to

jericho'sccount of things in his book, and it's Vince taking the guys that WCW until they were absolutely forced to would not push ben Wan included Eddie Guerrero. These are guys who went to WWE and proved to be marketable heavyweight world title pay per view headliners who could draw you money in the way it was defined in ninety eight, ninety ninety two thousand, two thousand and one. So what's that not Perry Saturn though not Perry Saturn not fair enough. But Raymisterio

is another example. Yes, these are all guys WW had no excuses, no excuses. You did not have the eye or the gump shin to push the guys who would carry the ww for the next decade. You had them all just like you had Steve Austin, just like you had, you know, Mankind just had kid Nick Foley, you had I guess you could say you had Mark call Way in a way you had undertaker. I mean, should I go on? I mean Vince had to remove with all these WCW

cast offs. You know, you talk about WCW stocking up with WWF cast offs with Hogan and Friends in ninety four and on and onward. But i mean he Vince's building around Steve Austin and Vader and Mark Merrow. I'm thinking ninety six here, triple H WW had Triple H. Yeah, what's the problem. It's just it's just that's what the next chapter is going to look at. That's a very good point in that they they Yeah, like they had all these guys that they could have built around post nWo. That's right,

they didn't. The WCW that defeats the nWo was there. The WCW that the roster that carries and defines nw WCW makes you want to watch after the nWo disappears was there, and they proved it in WW Yep. Sorry, so there's that. But but to the seagull point to another thing. I was thinking about in terms of like kind of I don't know. Maybe I'm just taken by the fact that he sat for the documentary. It wasn't an easy thing from what I understand, to get him to talk about this.

I know they approached him for Bash at the Beach two thousand, in which he's a key player, gives depositions, gives testimony in a lawsuit, is you know, defending WCW against the whole kig and lawsuit and all that, And he didn't want to talk about that. But you know, buddies with Stu Snyder, who became WWF president and who was president when the sale to ww F was sfectuated. And I'm sure that's going to be the subject

of some tasty speculation because they are going there. There was hesitation on the front end necessarily go there, but things I've heard since indicate they are definitely

going to go there. But you have the you know, you have a Brad Siegel who's out there announcing the sale to Fusion Media in two thousand and one when the final deals were not when the final details were not settled, when the ink was not drying the contract, you had Brad Siegel out there putting Russell and Eric together when I don't know where that idea came from, but it definitely wasn't one you would do if you were looking to turn the

page and keep give WCW a new lease on life, as opposed to extend the pain. Yeah, and keep in mind on that specific point, both guys being under payroll at the time, right, So again going back, going back to sort of the wider if we zoom out a little bit and look at this in terms of you've got a guy at that time who was running the television networks, and he has bosses to answer to, and they're paying two individuals huge sums of money to sit at home and effectively do nothing

in their eyes. Okay, Brad, what are you going to do with these people? So you know, I don't necessarily know that in that situation those kind of decisions would have been motivated by anything other than that. We can't just let these people sit at home for a year and a half years get paid to do nothing. So why don't we try this? We haven't, we haven't tried this before as opposed to you know, these guys are free agents on the market. They're completely unattached this will be a great idea,

and I'm going to bring them in with new contracts. I mean, I think that was kind of the thinking at that time. Well he did, though, sort of coax Eric back under a newly constituted deal. Eric Eric was, you know, pretty much've done in September of ninety nine when he got ousted and then Bill Bush came in and Russo came in. But

Siegel made the decision to lean back into Eric. He did, and in the book you'll see actually all of the details of that contract down to exactly right, the exact dollar of what he was making and what he made under the new agreement. But yeah, so that wasn't someone just sitting on payroll looking to be used, so we're not losing money. That was someone Siegel chose. And why you would choose him, if you know, there is a lot of folks making the case that he was an author of the difficult

answer to the you know, the downslide. I think it's something worth pondering. I can see the conversation of you know, Eric's on the sidelines, he's not doing anything. We can't continue paying him. What's what's the idea? Okay, let me see if I can talk to him, bring him back into the fold. And then subsequent to that conversation, okay, here's an update. Eric's coming in. But here's what we've had to do to make that happen. You know, in that kind of situation, Eric has

representation. You know, these are things that are negotiated, and these are these are the details of the deal that would have been worked out at that particular time. Right. So I think, as and I'm listening to you guys talk, you know, I think one of the most underrated aspects of or overlooked aspects of this whole story really is just the collapse in WCW's paying audience. Because if we start to get into you know, creative waters and

all that kind of stuff, I mean, that's that's subjective. Right, So there's right, there's a lot of things that you know, anyone listening to this, and us three included as well, we can all sit here and say they should have done that, they should have done that. Well, none of us were in that position of that particular time. But it's a fun exercise and it's a fun thing to think about, of course. But one thing that really can be denied is just the extent of which WCW

chased away people who are actually willing to pay for the product. And again that kind of circles back to the comment that I mentioned earlier, which is sometimes you'll appear too well. The ratings were, Yeah, they weren't what they were at their peak. Relatively speaking, we were still doing pretty good, but hardly anyone actually wanted to purchase the pay per views and pay to see WCW. And that included the life of events towards the end as well.

And I know from conversations that I had with Harvey Schiller, for example, I I specifically remember him on a number of occasions emphasizing, like, man, we couldn't believe once we went to those twelve pay per views, we couldn't believe the revenue that we were bringing in from the pay per views alone. We would stare and look at that number in just in disbelief.

And so again, as the book goes into and Dick Cheatham is an expert in this area, you know, the complex and complicated nature of the accounting system within Turner should lead you to be very skectical about any figure as it relates to WCW or any division within that corporation, whether they were being reported to make money at the time or losing money. But one thing that they were keenly aware of is how much pay per view revenue was coming. And

I can guarantee you of that and so quick. Why it might be theoretically to the turner of corporation's advantage to say that WCW was losing money, Well, there's something called taxes. So for example, I mean, i'll give you a very specific example which is easy for anyone to kind of get their head around. So within TBS, of course, you know there were a number of properties they had at one hundred and fifty subsidiaries at the time that

Nitro started, and they owned the Atlanta Braves. Well, Major League Baseball at the time had a surcharge on team earnings of seven percent, so you know, whatever money that you're making, we're going to charge you seven percent on top of that that you have to pay to the league. So what the people keeping the books did is do everything in their power to make sure

that the Braves weren't making any money. And if that meant that on their books, it had to show that, you know, the television rights were being sold for I think Dick Cheatham uses the he says, a bus or a buck and a half or whatever, we had to do to make sure that the team wasn't showing that they were making money. That's what we were going to do. And so you know, there's many there's many specific examples

as it relates to WCW. I mean, you could start with the fact that you know, it's something that's talked about which is true, and I have the financial statements myself, so I can verify this. The fact that they were listed in a category labeled as other and grouped him with a number of other entities, which obviously makes it much easier to move money around.

A classic sort of tactics they used at the time would be, for example, you might remember Turner Home Entertainment would produce at the time the VHS tapes of the WCW shows and so on. One of the things that they would do would be to recognize all of the earnings for those video cassettes at the time under the Turner Home Entertainment umbrella, but all the expenses under WCW.

Now, when you think about TBS as a corporation, you know they are recognizing that revenue, and they're recognizing those expenses, but exactly where they were being recorded, you know, was kind of all over the place. So you can say, if you didn't give WCW the credit for the revenue generated, but you you you deducted their budget by the expenses to generate that revenue, and pretty soon you can start to play a handy little game if you don't want WCW around, oh my god, in which they lose a lot

more. Brad Siegel did say under deposition in the WCW bash at the Beach lawsuit, we pulled the documents that WCW lost around twenty million dollars in nineteen ninety nine and close to eighty million dollars in two thousand. That's not too much off from the numbers that have been battered about, but it's been to some. It's been in the interest of some to obfuscate that and pretend that

that wasn't what the guy who ran the whole division was saying. And here's something you may have picked up in the book as well, which is that in some cases there are differing financial statements. So I'm not sure if you

noticed that in one of the chapters. I make that point. So I think if you've worked in kind of a large organization before, a run a business before, you kind of have an appreciation of how things like amortization, depreciation, someone as so forth can be used to kind of obscure true accounting

of what is happening within a particular division. Like this thing's worth a million, but we'll just say it's worth one hundred thousand this year, and we'll do that ten times, right, amortization, So you have to you certainly have to take I think sometimes people talk about WCW as if it was an independent wrestling promotion, right, So like if us redecided we wanted to start promoting shows, yeah, we could have a very good idea. At the

end of the month, did we actually turn a profit this month. Let's look at all of the expenses it took to run these shows, Let's look at how much money we made in ticket sales, and we can evaluate very clearly how successful our business is. But when you're talking about you know, something like Turner Broadcasting and let alone once it merged with with Time Warner and then of course the AOL Time Warner merger, that's just not the nature of

how corporate accounting works. And that's not to say that WCW wasn't losing money. They were losing, you know, a tremendous amount of money. And we can kind of get into some of the mechanisms around that as well, which was a turner. They sort of had a longstanding practice that whatever your revenues in a particular year were, that was going to be used as a baseline for the following year, which is fairly typical. So they didn't have,

you know, what's called a zero based approach to budget. Soon next year, you're going to make as much as you did this year exactly. And the number that I was given by a couple of people was something like

seven percent, So they base. So picture you're working within the wrestling division and you have a pay per view that just goes crazy for some reason, right, maybe it's I don't know, although certainly this is not a highlight of the WCW era by any stretch of the imagination, right, But something like Jay Leno appearing at the Road Wild Show, right Obviously, for reviews were massive, in particular Leonard into a big by rate. The Rodman ones

were huge. The reason I used Leno as an example, is just because it was the August pay per view, right, which traditionally was not one of the right marquee events for WCW. So you're looking at that and you would expect, Okay, there's going to be some sort of uptick here with the involvement of a mainstream celebrity. Well, then that would then be used

as a baseline for the forecast of Road Wild ninety nine. So we're going to assume that there's probably going to be a roughly five to seven percent increase for next year, and so we're going to allocate a commensurate amount of resources to WCW because of that. And that's just obviously a fundamental misunderstanding of the wrestling business. And this cliche that's banded about all the time about it being

a cyclical business. We could, you know, debate all day as to you know what extent that's true, right, But obviously you can see how in an environment like that, how a company like WCW would have got themselves in a lot a lot of trouble very very quickly if they suffered a down in business. Not to mention the fact that the amount of guys who were getting paid guarantee contracts with very little wiggle room to get out of them was just absurd, and so it was almost a situation in which they had to

kind of stay. I would argue, you know, hot forever or the very least, you know, maintaining their popularity in order to justify all of them. You land on something hot, and the corporate budgeting mindset wants to say you landed on that because you discovered a new repeatable process that's going to generate that amount of money every time. And wrestling could not be further from

that kind of business, not even close. And it's funny you mentioned road Wild because and I mentioned Rodman July ninety eight, July ninety seven Bash of the Beach, huge pay per view numbers for WCW, Rodman teaming with Hogan in ninety seven, Rodman teaming with Hogan against Karl Malone and DDP in ninety eight, huge numbers for the company, and year over year, who wrestled and rode Wild ninety nine, Dennis Rodman against Randy Savage, who gave a

fuck nobody nobody, And the reason that Dennis Rodman did one point one million buys or well one point one by rate. Whatever the fuck it was in Bash at the Beach ninety eight and no one gave a fuck in Roade Wild ninety nine is why w CW one out of business. So, Boss, we've talked a little bit about this as guy's going through. This sounds like some of the stuff we've been talking about Under the Cinemat and that the Patreon specials about the movie business. Right, Yeah, it ain't no movie that's

too successful to not show a loss. Well that that's I mean, you know you're talking about that immediately, and and it just I immediately started thinking of the contracts we've talked about under the Cinemat and even more recently net percentage, net profit percentage. Yeah, not grid net here cod in that net. You better believe it. And that it's that bullshit. You know.

I don't know if you if you knew this guy, but so you know, the original Batman with Michael Keaton back in eighty nine, the the the two people who originally conceived or had written a ripped before it was passed off to Peter Goober and John Peters. They they they were given you know, in their buyout, they were given a percentage of net profits and they never saw dime. Never saw dime. Doesn't surprise me, right exactly, you know, right exactly. We may have made a billion dollars ball, but

we spent six hundred billion to make that. Just think about how much we're still spending money on on on all these things. You know, it's just not to say he ever played this game. It's just not economically feasible to continue to offer, you know, again when we get there. Look, you know, if nothing else, he was mister Hollywood. He was the

guy bringing l a sophistication to all this ship. And keep in mind, you know, Brad Siegel was not the head of finance, right, so I think he I mean, I mean, I'm maybe jumping ahead a little bit here. There's a quote that he makes in a later episode in regards to ww's profitability, which I know for a factor is not accurate, which may you know, look, let's be charitable. Maybe it's the passage of

time. Maybe it's the fact that, as I think he says in the first episode, out of all the things he was responsible for, wrestling was the bottom of the list. So it caused everybody to business a pathological liar by the way. Meanwhile, I think he just caught him in wait, fine was Wasn't that an incredible sign when he says that, I just oh, it blew my mind. It blew my mind. I loved it. More. Please more of that, I mean, talk about fodder for you

guys. Oh pretty much? Yeah, man, pretty much. So that's great. That's great, color guy. That's interesting. And I had had some conversations with him around twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, and we actually had something in the books to do an interview for the book, and at the very last second he pulled out. And the one thing that I distinctly remember him saying when we spoke on the phone is we were talking about different things and he said, he paused, and he kind of says, he said,

so many things went wrong. He just said so, And it was almost like I brought him back to that moment. Wow, he just I specifically remember him saying that just so much, so many things or so much went wrong. He's like, especially, you know, especially towards the end. And it was almost like I've opened the door here, which this person did not open. And so it was no surprise that shortly after that he decided he didn't want to go on the record. So wow, very that's

really interesting. That's that's wild. So he gets the you mentioned Harvey Shiller. He made an appearance on Nitro and early ninety seven. People remember him. He was he was an ally. He was someone that Bischoff could rely

on as sort of a filter between him and Ted Turner. So the Bischoff wasn't flying off the hinges and trying to think he had more leverage with Ted, that he could get his way, and that that ended up costing him, according to his account of things, sort of being a maverick and calling out the executive committee and things. But with Harvey Shiller, he was a guy that he could vent to and Shiller would water the message down as it

went up. The chain. Before Schiller was a guy named Bill Shaw, who's a very important character in this store in terms of someone who took the reins of WCW under the Turner corporate structure and said, all right, well, let's actually let's actually brush up here, let's actually upgrade the production. Let's lean into making this a television show instead of just seeking, you know,

more wrestling minds to plug in to try to fix this thing. But as for you know, when Harvey Shechler leaves sort of abruptly to go work for George Steinbrenner and Brad Siegel takes over responsibility for WCW, that's when you start to see like we were sort of alluding to the transformative initiatives kind of stop a bit and you're sort of, you know, just just kind of rearranging deck chair as it feels like he signed that huge Goldberg contract under with

Barry Bloom negotiating for Goldberg, and they turned him heel and just pissed all that money away. No chance Goldberg was going to draw after that to the

degree that he used to. We mentioned Eric being kept around. You got a thing for for Brad, it pisses him off that wrestling is still kind of his highest rated stuff on a network that he saw he saw himself bringing prestige to of course, whatever that means in case of course, come on, Yes, Jamie Kellner canceled WCW Television and the deal wasn't worth anything to

sell the bishoff after that. But you have to ask yourself who was in a better position to influence whether the wrestling show needed to be on TNT in TBS before Jamie Kellner made that call. Kellner who had nothing to do with it until he made the decision and just had come in. Or Brad Siegel, who oversaw the gradual bleeding away of this audience to the point that Jamie Kellner had, you know, no problem just just axing it. Nobody's saying,

well, that's a lot of audience to lose. So let me make a couple of points that if I could, yeah, please, you know, you mentioned a few names that one of the things that I found interesting in speaking to the people I did about the difference between Bill Shore and Harvey Schiller. People seem to describe Bill Store as more of a hands on sort of figure when it came to his relationship with with Eric, someone who I

know. There's a quote in the book from Dick Cheetam actually where he recalls, you know, Bill kind of tearing into Eric after one particular show and saying we've got to do better, and that was something that was never going to come from from Harvey Schiller. I think, you know, one of the things that's interesting about Brad Siegel, as you mentioned at the top, David Pedzer and David Penzer and I just put out a new book. And

David was actually on the booking team at the end of PCW. And that's kind of a fact that's got lost to history, right because we all think, of course he was a ring announcer, but as time goes on,

he was given more and more responsibility. And when we got on the topic of talking about Brad Siegel, he said, you know, he was almost like this mythical guy that you would hear the name, but it was impossible to get to And he said there were so many times in the booking meeting someone would say, well, we're going to need to check with Brad if we can do that, and it's like, well, does anyone know how to get in touch with him? Can we place the call to someone else?

And and may I suggest he made himself scarce because he had no intention of turning around him. That's right. Well, but and David text me because I you know, I'm sure a lot of people, well everyone by now has seen the episode, but there was a preview that was put up at the end of last week, the first fifteen minutes, and Dave I sent him that preview and he texted me back and he said, so that's

what Brad Segel looks like. This was a guy who was with WCW for for ten years, and you know, like I say, he was just someone that was in communicado, mi ia, whatever you want to say towards the end of w CW, which under you know, you can say what you want. And again there's there's no defense of just the absolute calamitous nature of those programming decisions and just as I said, the sheer insanity really of especially the year two thousand, which is kind of you know, infamous,

and rightfully so. But to work under that kind of environment where the person who's supposedly the figurehead is completely you know, you're not able to get into touch with him. I mean, that's just a very bizarre work situation. He's a lapsed fan wrestling podcast with Jack and Carneo and JP Sorrow. He's

a lapsed fan wrestling podcast. And you interviewed Lenita Erickson, who is someone who was working with Jerry Jarrett and JJ Niellen to put together a competing bid for WCW, and brilliantly in your book you talk about how Lenita Erickson, who actually had a brief on screen role at w CW as an interviewer and was I believe the girlfriend of Gene Simmons, isn't that right? Yes, that's right. She wants to talk. She has a way into Brad Siegel

that the others don't because she knows him from prior life and entertainment. And he didn't, you know, he was almost entrapped into listening to her pitch this guy. In my personal assessment of things, he just didn't want to hear anything. But we're gonna we're gonna offload this thing, and the rest is treading water. Honestly, Well, I mean, listen, Jack, by the time we get to that hypes up earlier, but I'm telling you

that final episode. I'll just say, when I first got the cuts for this and we got to the end of episode three, I was actually thinking, this fourth episode must be like an extended show or something. It must be like ninety minutes, because there's still a lot to get to here, and I wonder how they're going to tie this all up. They did it masterfully. I mean, the finale is so well done, and specifically some

of the comments made by Brad Siegel. Let's just say, they'll give us a lot to talk about maybe you might want to fucking go you might want to rewind the tape and play your comments that some of the comments that you just made a few weeks from now, when we talk about episode four, I'll just leave it at the thank you very much much for him, thank you very much. So so a huge part of this episode is getting us

acquainted with the story. You know, I remember in talking with the guys at the beginning of this, like, how do you where do you start? And the first thought was you start with Goldberg beating Hogan at Georgia, Dawm sold out Georgia, nome the new Messiah, WCW ready to lead a new era in WCW all the Turner executives in Atlanta on hand to witness this

massive success. And that was the end. That was that was That turned out to be the apex, not the beginning of a new era, right, And then you can get into how if you start, and if you start in July ninety eight, you really can then you know, reverse the timeline last dance style of the Michael Jordan documentary and just draw back like the people who start, you know, dealing with the holes in the leaky ship,

through ninety eight ninety nine. But you know, you can't ever escape the need to just lay the foundation of what the fuck WCW was in the first place, because you can't assume everybody knows that. You definitely cannot assume that. And so you know, it's built largely around Eric describing how he

made the transition from the AWA to WCW. But one thing I thought we could do here on this episode of this show and this podcast is sort of color in you know, some of the some of the leaps that they have to make to get to where they need to be in the story. But but WCW was you put your finger on it, boss. I mean, you know, Crockett selling to Turner is just sort of where WW begins.

It doesn't begin with Eric Bischoff taking and taking the realms, you know, and all the power to them, allowing Bischoff to categorize, characterize, I should say, the regimes that came before him, that that's that's all fair game. But what we do know is that all of Eric's predecessors, they didn't get a guaranteed rights fee for the programming from Turner like Eric did. We were lamenting, you know, the rights fee era we're in right now.

The guaranteed money thing, it's been bad at about. I'm not sure. I'm not sure precisely where it comes from. I know Bill Watts has talked a lot about it. He talks about it in his book, Jr. Has talked about it. Who, of course is Bill wats iss surrogate in so many ways on the WWF the WWE version of the Rise and Fall of ww documentary that they did, where Eric was able to talk Turner under Bill Shaw into actually putting eight million dollars a year on WCW's books, paying

for the television like you would an independent producer. And that is something that Jim heard that Bill Watts that kept Fry did not have the luxury of They had to survive on a mentality at Turner and Dickchtum talks about this live events and pay per view. That's it. You're not getting paid for your own television and able to count that revenue. And suddenly Bischoff is within striking distance of profitability, being able to access millions of dollars that his predecessors were not.

Guy, Guy, how does that strike you? There's no line item on financial statements from around that time that I've seen that refers to eight million dollars. So I don't know if that is, you know, an exaggeration or if that is, you know, again the passage of time. I'm not sure, but I can tell you that it was on the books, at least on the financial statements that I've seen, it was a very meager

sum that WCW was being credited for producing all of this programming. Again, obviously completely different environment today, but no, no, I mean I was in preparation for doing this because I knew we were doing this today. This morning, I was looking at a few things, and I can tell you straight up that's faced on what I have. That's not accurate, very good, very interesting. Yeah, it's bad at about but you know, look, Bischoff fired Jr. He would say, I didn't fire him. I

let him leave his contract because he wanted to leave. Whatever can tell me the different difference for both exactly, But you know, fuck Jr. Fuck Bill Watts. Bill Watts had no respect for Bischoff. He talks so much shit about him in the book. It's his book is not even funny. And they're gone, they're yesterday's news, you know, Bischoff gets hired by Bill Shaw because he's not Bill Watts and he's not Jim Ross in terms of philosophy on the business. So Jr. Goes right to WWF. Bischof sniffs

out that he wants to go, let him go whatever. And there was also this thing where Bischoff wanted to move Jr. From being involved in wrestling operations to being involved in syndication sales and sales, which is what he used to do for Bill Watts to get started in the business, in addition to

refereeing in the beginning and then of course announcing. But that's all, that's all, that's all necessary context when you try to interpret the source of this information that you know, the rights fee that Eric Bischoff enjoyed from from the Turner hierarchy was not available to predecessors. Jim Ross was also pretty close with Jim Hurd. He actually buddied up to him. He's critical of him and

remains critical of him. But you know, there are a lot of people who observe Jr. You know, nursing a few beers with with Jim Hurd the bar for several hours afterwards. You know, JR. Knows how to how to schmooze. He knows how to position himself. Don't don't let the uh, don't let the OKI gimmick fool you in that regard. But you know, David Crockett has said, you know, while people and other divisions didn't want us, we had to find a person who could channel Ted Turner's

money and Ted's wishes the right way so that WW was actually benefiting. And he gives the credit to Bill Shaw for doing that. He called Bill Shaw the person that used Ted's money the right way to buy equipment that we needed, handheld cameras, cable and lighting, power techniques, audio equipment. And of course David Crockett was VP of production for WW to the bitter end. He actually aid while after his brother Jim Crockett Junior exited the picture after the

effect after the transition was effectuated. But yeah, the Herd era, you know, was one that's that that's quickly worthy of analysis because Herd wanted Brandy Savage. Heard sat with Randy Savage. Herd didn't have the money to afford Randy Savage. Eric Bischoff did heard what assigned Hogan. He said he would assigned Hogan. He wanted Hogan, he wanted I mean when he came in, the mandate was hey, w w F seales all this ship to kids,

how can we do it? And so he creates Big Josh and the fucking ding Dongs of Railroads, racked a man, the candy man, all you know, class I would agree with you there. I'm glad you said that, because I wasn't gonna say it. The dynamic dude see all this stuff, the stuff that Cornett will just like rail On heard till he's in the grave for because he gets this sort of edict, the sort of mandate that this is how to make money in pro wrestling. This is what we're

not doing. This is what the Crockett nw A stuff that we inherited was not doing that Vince is doing. How can we reach kids? So Herd's trying to do this to hilarious and disastrous effect, And of course the way he rubbed Flare the wrong way led to just his whole regime being cast as

just an abject failure. And you have to say it was. Although eighty nine was a tremendous year and Jim Hurd was all over the product then and all over television as well, having directed the Wrestling of the Chase television specials out of Saint Louis, so it's not working for him, you know, just live events and whatever cut that Turner saw fit to give them for pay per view sales, which wasn't one hundred percent, it wasn't sixty percent,

it wasn't even forty percent, because when you sell a pay per view, sixty percent goes to the cable or satellite company, forty percent goes to the content provider. But unlike WWF, you then had to split your forty with Turnerhome Entertainment. And so what hits WCW's books is like, what is this? Like you said, we sold this many orders and this is how much money we get for it by the time everyone gets their fingers in the pie

to the accounting point earlier. So Herd has a lot of structural disadvantages and would have done what Bischoff ended up doing in terms of sign high high price WWF talent. Hi Brett Hart was talking to them after he was you know, in that period when he was in our Continental champ but lost it to

the Mountie. He doesn't talk about that anymore, and he skips over in his book, but it was all over the newsletters at the time how he was talking about making the jump and how material that would have been at a time when he was just ready to break through as a main eventor so we need to say that about Jim Hurd, I think. And then we moved to Kip Fry, who was basically, you know, a lawyer in WCW. He was assigned to w CW, but was actually a Turner employee and

he you know, he leaned into like performance bonuses. He signed Brian Pelman into a huge guaranteed contract as an example. He really tried to lean into youth and try to sign guys that had a lot of upside and tried to you know, change the way people felt about coming to work there, and and and and if effort led to more money in your pocketbook. And that was a very short lived tenure, I mean, just a matter of months. He needs one appearance of the clash we've talked about Kip fryd boss.

You've laid eyes on the man. Oh, yes, absolutely, he's trouble. He's trouble. He's unsuccessful, is what he is. And so you know, when when it gets when things get dark, and then tumbleweeds start blowing. You got to call the cowboy. You got a phone, Louisiana. Yeah, there comes the gown. Here come the galloping horses. You can see the oil. Derek's in the background as the cowboy answers the rotary phone because he's going to come and with this place in the shape, which

of course he absolutely did not. Takes the mats off the floor, starts fucking with everybody's money, like you don't deserve anything, And yeah, does he? You know, his his big thing. You know, Bischoff talks about turning a profit. I mean, and what was it uh in the

span of his uh, I guess you could say his administration. He's he said, Bill Watson said, I haven't heard it disputed that they were losing eight million dollars when he came in in ninety two, and by the time he was done cutting all the expenses he cut, they were only losing four hundred thousand dollars in the space of eleven months. Wow. And that's again, with all the creative accounting that's been talked about, he's still able to

show a four hundred thousand dollars deficit. And that's pretty much the game bishof ended up closing. Bischoff actually guy right when he was when he was chasing that bet he made with Turner executives that he could turn a profit and if I do, you have to hand me a dollar bill and eat shit. So as I proved you wrong. He's going into Ted's office when Nitro is

pitched to him by Ted. Essentially he's going to Ted's office to talk about a deal with the Star Network in China because that's some guaranteed money that would put them in the black if they could get this deal done in China. He's got this big investor deck presentation style ready to go to try to get Ted to green light because there were some some awkwardness because Rupert Murdoch owned the company, so it would be like, you know, taking money from a

competitor. And then that's when that's when Ted says, what faithfully, Well, the interesting the interesting thing about that is, you know the meeting that happened before that, and I think that's where the book starts, and that's that's one of the things that people took away from the books that they hadn't heard about before, is the fact that yes, you know, that that meeting did take place as described, and Ted did make the comment that has

been told many many times now as to you know, Scott Sassa giving Eric what would have been one hour of programming. I think perhaps in the series the you know, two hours is mentioned, but of course that didn't come until later. But they do that a lot with something. They do that a lot. I've noticed they do that a lot where they say the narrative has been two hours of prime time when it very clearly was not. I mean, you know, was even doing two hours at the time to compete

with right, yeah, right, right, right right. But that's something that you know had already been privately discussed and determined, and that was kind of another layer to the story that you know, I think was interesting to

people to find out at that time. And I think as the series outlines, if you think about where w CW was at the beginning of Nitro again, if we look could it strictly through the perspective of a viewer, you could say, well, you know, when it comes to talent, there was so much great talent in WCW, and they're having so many great matches and so forth. But I would say when you have one company earning four

times the revenue of another. When you have one company that is a perennial profit maker and another that has never made any money, and you have one company that is synonymous with the entire genre of professional wrestling itself and one that has never enjoyed anywhere close to that kind of status, I would describe that gap as distant. I would suggest that you can make a very reasonable argument that that could quite rightly be called a distant number two, which I think

is where WCW was at that time. Given what their mandate was as a Turner company. Ted Turner was not going to be in a position. It wasn't willing to be in a position where he was owning a wrestling company that was just getting by. He wanted to be number one. That's very touristic

footed any business that he's in, he wants to be on top. So yeah, he takes he takes the head of the table in the press conference when they sign Hulkogan in nineteen ninety four, it makes one of its extremely rare televised wrestling appearances because he he wants to stay in there and say we're coming for the WWF. Essentially, you know, this is us putting our best foot forward. And so just a year later, Nitro launches with that same ethic. We don't we don't want to have Raw win one week and

we win one week. That's that's not the idea. Yeah, And you'll often hear, you know, WCW employees turner employees, they'll kind of make a variation of the same point, which is where they'll say, you know, circa the mid nineties, if you were to watch I don't know, an NFL game or NHL maybe might be a better example, and there's a fight that breaks out or something, and the announcers would say it looks like something from the WWF, right, And they would never at that time mention

WCW in that breath. And you might say, well, great, big deal, what does that matter. I think it does matter when you put yourself in a position and of trying to generate revenue off your wrestling programming, so sitting down with potential partners and doing licensing agreements and merchandising and so so on and so forth, and you know, mentioning that yeah, we're you know, a wrestling company on the turn of networks. Oh kind of like

WWF right, kind of like hul Cogan and those guys. You know that that does matter, you know, from a in terms of perception when you're doing business with people outside of the wrestling world. Right. So I just kind of wanted to make that point because I think if you look at the framing in the first episode personally and it aligns with what's in the book, I would describe it as an accurate characterization. But again, if you're looking

at it, it's kind of like AW and WW today. Right, if you're a hardcore AW fan and you enjoy all of the great matches and all of the great talent, then the gap in your mind may be very slim and maybe nonexistent, But if you look at it on the level of business, you know, it's it's a completely different stratosphere where they are today in twenty twenty four. And so I just kind of wanted to throw that in that to very good. Yeah, that's it's a point worth making for sure.

And we talk about Bill Shaw is sort of like Eric's patron, and while he did take the plunge in hiring and Eric Bischoff, who you know, didn't come from a traditional wrestling background or even a turner background. Bill Shaw also hired Bill Watts, Let's be clear about that. And when Bill Wats came in, he had, you know, sort of like that tail

when we know what happened with Bill Watts. He he said, you know, racist things to the Pro Wrestling Torch, and they were facts to ed Landa Braves great handkaver or he came to his attention, and then that was that. Bill Watts says, well, in fact, you know, Bill Shawn knew about those remarks that I had made a year before they terminated me for it, and so it was just a way to get me out the door. Whatever. That that's just a proviser that needs to be added potentially

in fairness. But that all said. Here he is trying to write w c W ship and and you think back to the point you were making Evan a guy in terms of guy Evans, Evan Husny confuses me. Sorry, too many Evans. So the point you were making about, you know that sort of outside of the wrestling bubble reputation that WCW had to seek to foster. There one of the things Jim Hurdis said he did an interview with Conrad Thompson a couple of years ago, and they put the question to him.

You know, I mean, if if you were to get let's say more pay per view proceeds on your books, then in Turner Home Entertainment took less. You know, for example, do you think you actually would have been able to show a profit just like any other WCW administration And it hurts credit? He says, I don't know. I mean, but what's irrefutable is if you go back and look at the numbers. The sports package that Turner was selling on TBS and TNT without wrestling was a tough sell in New York.

And it was a tough sell in New York because the numbers weren't there. The numbers weren't there if you didn't include the wrestling audience and the cumulative audience you could reach selling advertising. So you can say that no one wanted to advertise during the wrestling show, and that was true, but they wanted to buy the cumulative audience that TNT and TBS sports could bring, and without

wrestling they ain't shit wow. And that is always driven people in cable nuts that they can't really, they can't really present a very appetizing advertising proposition in terms of cumulative audience without dishing out big money to sports. It continues to this day. We hear a gnashing of teeth at Warner at Warner Brothers Discovery about the NBA rights and David Saslov saying we don't really need them or something like that, because they can't stand the fact that without sports they ain't shit

in cable. My thoughts, I agree with that last statement in terms of the framing that you described there with Jim Hurd. That's the first I've heard of that, And I'll pose that to a couple of people tomorrow, some people who worked in ads sales, and see what their reaction is to it. Yeah, we look forward to reporting back as the sea that play out

as well. Yeah, that would that would be news to me. But certainly I agree with your sort of wider point that you made at the end there in terms of the importance to and sports has only got, of course more important over time. I mean you look at of course, you look at the just look at the money that's being thrown around, you know, in in rights fees and player contracts today, even though the audience is a fraction of what it was it's kind of a an inverse relationship that's occurred for

obvious reasons. But I'll see what I can find out by that. That sounds that sounds incorrect to me, but I'll see what I can find out. Yeah, that was his His contention working on the inside was that you know, you needed that that audience to be interesting to advertisers, to get a cumulative audience that really attracted people. He said, at wrestling and present it that way, it's an easy sale. The numbers don't lie. I mean the eyeballs. You know, it's like poles. He's talking about p

o l ls. How good are they? Well, I don't know, but I know that without them you're flying blind. And since your business side of the wrestling was dependent on eyeballs out there, you paid attention to the numbers. So that was his answer. I mean, I know that the general consensus of all of the ad sales people that I spoke to was the fact that they would give you a variation of the same statement, which was,

look, we couldn't. We couldn't package wrestling with anything else. It wasn't like today, where you know, there may be an opportunity to package it with I think that there's a quote in the book directly where someone raises the example of sort of extreme sports programming or something like that, something that may be more of a crossover, right, And so that's, yeah, that's the first I've heard of that. Who knows. I'm sure he's also

talking about selling ww syndicated network as well. It's not just you know that that's money that's real to them, and you know, worldwide pro these shows were on syndication, like Challenge and Superstars were on the WWF side, and that was money that was more within their ability to control how much they got in terms of like it's not from on high people buying T and T and TBS ads. Well, they weren't even on TNT when Jim Hurd was there.

But suffice to say so. In terms of Bishop, one of the things he says on this episode of Who Killed WCW Is that you know, soon after he arrived, there was kind of like this word that got to him through Bill Shaw that Turner had said basically, you know, we got to do this right or I'm gonna shut this down. It seemed like a revelation. In his book, he does say Bischoff that is that besides being president w W. Bill was a corporate vice president of administration for Turner Broadcasting.

This is Bill Shaw, And he said Ted Turner had added Wcwshaw's portfolio roughly a year before with the directions sell it, shut it down, or run it. He was determined to take another go at turning it around. So sell it, shut it down, or run it is not quite Ted saying I'm going to shut it down because everyone always thinks guy right that. You know, Ted always said over my dead body, will wrestling not be on a network that I own because I'm here in a large part because of

wrestling. Yeah, I can't speak to that. I haven't heard that from from anyone else. I can't sort of point you to anything objective that would give you an indication as to how true that is. So I have heard Eric, you know, make that point in other venues, but not in anything as high profile as this. But but I don't have anything to necessarily

tell you if that's true or not. No problem to just worth worth adding a little bit of context to some of the things you know you heard on this first episode of the Vice TV series in terms of you know, how they've been framed when said in the past. Here's an article from July of nineteen nineteen and Forbes headline Ted Turner and Elgionte. I'll tell you where this

is going, my god. One of Ted Turner's smallest investments is losing big money relative to its size, and nineteen eighty eight, Turner bought the privately held NWA for about eight million dollars and renamed it World Championship Wrestling. The ww with matches featuring wrestlers like Rick Flair and Lex Luger, is a distant second to the WWF, who stars include et cetera, et cetera. Trouble this WW is floundering. It has lost about five million dollars since Turner bought

it. This piece reports part of the blame goes to Herd, a former Saint Louis TV manager that Turner hired last year to run the wrestling operation, and Herd's first assignment was to boost ratings my luring the pre teen viewers. Like we said before, but it says Turner is hardly panicking. It's says the ww accounts for less than three percent of turner Communications total revenues, and it does keep him from having to air a screen full of snow, but

Turner hates to lose. At a press conference in May, the media billionaire personally introduced the ww's newest mount of muscle, the seven foot seven, four hundred and thirty five pound Argentinian George Gonzalez, who will wrestle under the nom

de guerre Elgihonte. As for Bill Watts, as we wrap up sort of you know, getting you set, getting you contextualized for the arrival of Bischoff and WSW and how it's portray here going forward on the series, what's as we said, you know, felt like he took a lot of credit for really cutting a lot of the fat out and serving up at WCW where a

lot of dirty work had been done ahead of time. Bischoff was sort of critical of some of the methods that Wats went about it, you know, sort of like with a sledge hammer instead of a scalpel kind of thing. But here's the final verdict for what it's worth from the cowboy on Bischoff. He wrote in his book, Bischoff took WCW, which everyone thought at one point he had turned around and broke it to the point where it could never

be fixed. His decisions led to Turner Broadcasting canceling something it had been associated with for more than twenty five years. That is his legacy. One of the things Bischoff does is pitch a game show involving wrestling to Turner, and that shows a little bit of an entrepreneurial spark. He gets involved with Jason Hervey. We know Bischoff loves to name drop Jason Hervey, and they were

close confidence and worked in a television production company for years and years. It's a it's a shoot, but it's something that he kind of he kind of used smartly to have him stand out from the other candidates for the executive producer role that Bill Shaw hired him for in nineteen ninety three, which is where the series kicks off. So the game show thing, you know, from selling Ninja Stars, which he it's brilliant. He pulls out the old box,

doesn't he? Boss? That was absolutely tremendous. I bet I'll tell you I was. I was a little taken aback, and I questioned the legitimacy of this claim that he said. He said that that that Vern only took fifty percent of a Ninja Star I don't know thought the vern we know at the last time, we let's go by the way it's is it a

big deal? Like, I mean, I've never heard him actually admitted, but he actually admits that he was trying to get you know, for the first time, that that he was trying to make people think the WE was invading WW. That's big, isn't it? Guy? There was a lawsuit about that. Yeah, it's interesting that. What was the exact quote, Eric said, it's it's been long enough, long enough. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. I think in the past, I know Conrad has tried to grill him about that, and he's tried to make the argument that the story was about something else about Old and Nash coming back to the w's kind of extract the revenge and so look, it's been what nearly thirty years, what's

what's the use in holding on to that name. Well, it's funny because you know, they they were setting it up in the way that I thought they were gonna they were gonna once again kind of go back with that with that narrative, because he he talked about Nash and Hall or he being in w c W when he got there. You know, it was like these things. I'm like, oh, we're gonna we're gonna fucking do this again. He's gonna go through this whole ship again. And then he doesn't.

I was like, oh wow, Like that's nuts. That is nuts. I mean you look, yeah, I mean exactly, it's not like a it's not a legal point anymore. It never was. But yeah, and it's not a secret. But it was like, you know, it's just it's nice to hear him actually, like, you know, say the truth. Indeed, Well, we'll see how much more truth is said. Unlike unlike uh uh, there's something that that that that Dwayne said that he said when when when the n W happened that he he said, oh we gonna

we're gonna be doing that. Yeah, he wasn't even on TV. He wasn't even there. I'm sure he was watching intention I'm sure he was down training with Tom Pritchard and in the gym there in Connecticut. But we're gonna hear from everybody. We're gonna here from Booker, We're gonna hear from Brett, We're gonna hear from Brad Siegel. We're gonna hear from Eric, We're gonna hear from uh, Dick Cheatham and and so many other people. Stu Snyder. There's a lot of revelations to come, but Boss, I think

you nailed it. Can't wait to hear what Big Sexy has to say. What does he have? What's one of his key contributions in episode one, as far as TLF is concerned, hit the clip? Well, yea, god damn right, when fucking when? When? When? When? When Vision's talking about about Kevin Nash's physique, they cut to him? Fuck yeah, oh so said that's it. I win, I win, I'm going home. I'm going to go to bed now. I can't wait to get to that part of it because when he takes the book, man, you

look, I mean, he's he's number three on my list. He's number three on my list because you know, Vince Siegal him because you know, while coming in he did contribute a lot of attitude to the nWo act and was a very important player and a big draw for WCW. I'm not sure you can point to anything besides star K ninety eight. Yeah you know what I mean, You can't, You can't, you can't. It was it was all Hogan and the nWo sort of essence, which you know he helped

characterize. And he did throw Ray Mysterio into a fucking trailer and that was really cool. I'm not saying it wasn't cool. He did, powered by Eric Bishoff through a stage. But when it was time for keV to deliver, things started going south in terms of n ring when he becomes world champion, and of course that last two weeks, which is just a tremendous way to end Goldberg's streak if you asked me, tremendous stuff. And then you

have him taking the book in ninety nine. And look, if you want to look at the ratings pattern to determine when WW fell off a cliff, it's when Kevin Nash gets the book hard stop. And when you consider that that aforementioned ratio of you got to consider the contributions to the boom in in

in comparison and in proportion to the to the detraction from from things. I think Kev's right there because he's there as through Russo and doing things on television that that hurt a lot of the upside of guys that WCW may may have been able to lean into a mischievous one. Is Kevin but always a fascinating guy to listen to. So can't we to see what we hear from Big sex A in the in the weeks to come as well. Well, guy, it was a real pleasure. You've you've sufficiently wet the appetite for what's

to come. On Vice it is TLF Tackles who killed WCW. I want to thank you for being here and I really look forward to connecting again as this plays out on Vice. Absolutely, thank you guys, thank you everyone for listening, and look forward to doing it again next week. See you next time. Folks is Persidil plays a production on the Labs Entertainment Group. It's content is intended for private use. Holy it could be a wizard, which can be OUs. We want