Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (10 page)

Where the hell had Wahoo McDaniel, Tony “Mr. USA” Atlas, and Ric Flair gone, Turner’s viewers wanted to know? They were icons. And who were these replacements? WWF stars grated on a fan of the National Wrestling Alliance like Harvard politics grates on a Vanderbilt man. They were too theatrical, too personality driven, and they didn’t mete out enough action. Hogan was the biggest offender. His steps were herky-jerky and his holds looked phony. After six months of watching him, Turner decided he needed to find a way to get out of his contract with Vince.

One of the few territories not entirely overrun by the WWF was headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and run by a forty-five-year-old ex-wrestler named “Cowboy” Bill Watts. Watts majored in finance at the University of Oklahoma and was a smart-enough moneyman to be able to wring profits out of an area that had a fraction of the big venues of the East Coast. But that’s not why his wrestlers fell into line. Watts kept the barrel of a Revolutionary War cannon in the yard of his Tulsa mansion and a World War II arsenal in his basement to complement it. His employees also whispered that he’d built a bomb shelter beneath the house to protect against a Soviet invasion. If the man was willing to arm himself for a Russian invasion of Oklahoma, they concluded, he wasn’t going to suffer their foolishness lightly.

Watts was a study in contradictions, a son of the segregationist South who was also the first promoter to create a black champion. His territory encompassed Arkansas, Louisiana, and parts of Texas and Mississippi, where, Watts reasoned, blacks wanted to see one of their own win. He found his star in Sylvester Ritter, a Houston Oilers draft pick who’d blown out his knee in training camp and was dumped off on the World Football League, where he spent an uneventful year before giving up on football altogether. Ritter was using his six-foot-three granite frame to wrestle in Calgary, Alberta, when Watts asked him to drive to Tulsa for an interview. When he laid eyes on the 260-pound prospect, all he could think of was a line from the hit song “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”: “Badder than old King Kong, meaner than a junkyard dog.” As he tells the story, he threw a dog collar around Ritter’s neck, dubbed him Junkyard Dog, and within a year had him headlining the New Orleans Superdome before thirty thousand fans, a record for an indoor crowd to that point.

“I knew a black would draw blacks,” he’d say years later. “But the real secret was not letting a white man save a black. I put JYD in situations that were fucking impossible and he always saved himself. And guess what? The whites loved him for it. Everyone loved him for it. He was a black man who was his own man.”

JYD wasn’t the only memorable character that Watts created. He popularized a Venice Beach weightlifter named Steve “Sting” Borden; a group of teen heartthrobs called the Rock & Roll Express and their doppelgängers, the Midnight Express; and a sweet-voiced announcer named Jim Ross. Every week, Watts would gather them in the cramped Irish McNeal Boy’s Club in Shreveport and put on the slickest, bloodiest, and fastest-paced wrestling show in the country, which he called the
Mid-South Wrestling Hour
. In January 1985, Turner called Watts and said he wanted to buy the rights to air
Mid-South
and put it on Sunday afternoons.

The show became an instant revelation for Atlanta’s viewers, largely because Watts was his own best salesman. He announced the action so urgently and convincingly that fans believed that
he
believed it was all real. “One of my favorite angles of his was when Ric Flair came to Shreveport to defend the NWA title,” says Jim Cornette, the high-strung manager of Watts’s Midnight Express. (He was literally high strung: He used a tennis racket to bash rivals.) “Flair was challenging Ted DiBiase, but the
work
was that Dick Murdoch thought he should have gotten the title shot. So Murdoch jumps DiBiase, runs his head into the post, and gives him a gusher. Well, Flair decides he’s gonna face DiBiase anyway. The place goes nuts. Watts is there cautioning the fans, ‘If there’s anyone squeamish, please, for your sake, leave right now.’ And, of course, not a soul moves because Watts has built it up like, goddamn, DiBiase is on a pilgrimage. So Flair gets in the ring, and right away he rips the bandage off and the guy starts gushing. And DiBiase is selling this like Rocky in the first movie. The crowd starts chanting, ‘Ted! Ted!’ Then Flair kicks his ass for a while. But just as he’s about to put him into a submission hold, Watts calls an ambulance and they cart DiBiase out. In one hour, Watts had convinced the people that Murdoch was mad at DiBiase for getting the title shot; that Flair was a chickenshit for even fighting a wounded DiBiase; and that DiBiase was the gutsiest guy who ever lived. It was beautiful, I mean
beautiful.”

Almost overnight, Watts’s
Mid-South Wrestling Hour
became the highest-rated cable show on TBS and, by extension, on cable. In fact, its enormous popularity led Turner to approach Watts with the idea of him taking over the Saturday night slot then occupied by McMahon.

“Vince had a contract, but Ted said he’d sue to get out of it,” Watts recalls. No sooner had they shaken hands on the deal than Watts went out and bought a half-million-dollar airplane, figuring that he’d be putting in a lot of miles shuttling between Tulsa and Atlanta.

He never got to use it.

AFTER EIGHT
months of producing
Georgia Championship Wrestling
on TBS, Vince was getting sick of Atlanta in general and of Turner in particular. He had clear reasons for wanting to be on TBS; he could use the Saturday night show to brand his stars in the South and expand his national advertising base. At the USA Network, Kay Koplovitz allowed him to sell 60 percent of the commercial time on each show and pocket the proceeds (in exchange for her paying an unconventionally low licensing fee). Vince and Linda reasoned that if they could get the same deal at TBS, they’d be able to combine both shows with their syndicated programs and create a single-block buying opportunity for big-spending national advertisers. There was just one problem. Turner balked at giving up a penny of commercial revenue. In fact, he considered it to be the height of hubris that Vince would try to use two cable rivals, USA and TBS, to make side deals for himself.

Turner was already furious at McMahon, anyway. For eight months, he had flatly defied his promise to do a studio show and was using TBS as a dumping ground for previously taped bouts. Not surprisingly, ratings were nose-diving. In February 1983,
Georgia Championship Wrestling
had a 6.9 rating on Saturday night under Jim Barnett. Ten months after Vince took over, it was down to 5.3.

So a week after he’d started airing Watts’s show on Sunday afternoons, Turner asked McMahon to a meeting in his Manhattan office to say he’d had enough. “I want you off my network,” he said, “and if I have to sue you to do it, I will.”

McMahon left the office fuming. Turning to Barnett, who’d come to work for the WWF after the Georgia takeover, he said, “I should have thrown Ted out that goddamned window. I invested a million dollars in Georgia. Now what do I do? It’s no good without the TV.”

Barnett had one idea. He knew Watts had the inside track to move from Sunday afternoons to Saturday night. He also knew that if Turner sued to get Vince off TBS and signed a successor deal with Watts, Vince would lose his million-dollar investment. In order to prevent that from happening, Barnett decided to call the only person he could think of who might be willing to buy Vince out of his jam before Turner ousted him.

THE CAROLINAS
were known as a prestige territory in wrestling, and that was thanks to “Big Jim” Crockett, a jack-of-all-trades who staged Tommy Dorsey concerts and shows like
My Fair Lady
in the fifties while putting on wrestling matches and running restaurants with names like the Ringside. As the company bearing his name grew into one of Charlotte’s largest, he added a minor-league baseball franchise to the portfolio and built a stadium in Charlotte called Crockett Park. His four kids—Frances, Jimmy, David, and Jackie—learned about life while driving to towns like Lumberton on weekends and helping to set up wrestling rings.

From an early age, Jimmy was embarrassed about that part of their lives. When friends would ask, he’d tell them that his father made the family money by promoting concerts, which was true to an extent, since Big Jim also arranged Saturday night dances for the city’s blacks. But the old man was under no illusion about who or what he was. After he was offered the right to promote Harlem Globetrotters dates east of the Mississippi River, he turned it down because it would take too much time away from what paid the bills: wrestling.

Jimmy traveled with his dad the most and heard all of the stories he had to tell. Inevitably, they ended with such aphorisms as “Never promote what you like, son. Promote what the fans like.” But when the old man died on April Fools’ Day of 1973, the family’s matriarch, Elizabeth, could see that Jimmy didn’t want any part of it, so she handed the reins to her son-in-law, John Ringley, Frances’s husband, who’d been Big Jim’s right-hand man. Unfortunately, he didn’t last long in the job. When he was caught having an affair with a former Miss Tennessee, the family gathered and voted to kick him out. At twenty-four, Jimmy was the only one in a position to take over.

Jimmy had no burning desire to become a public personality. While men like Watts and McMahon enjoyed calling their own matches, Jimmy considered it such a chore that he flipped younger brother David for the announcing duties and was happy to lose. Depending on how one saw him, he was either painfully shy or an aloof son of privilege. Either way, when his friends in the Charlotte GOP pushed him to run for the North Carolina Senate in 1974, he waged a reluctant country club campaign that left him sixth in a field of six. The round-faced southerner dropped politics after that and contented himself with controlling wrestling in cities like Norfolk, Richmond, Columbia, South Carolina, and Charlotte, which made him a regional power in the National Wrestling Alliance.

Like everyone else in the business, Jimmy Crockett was desperate to get on TBS and had been since the first time he’d met Turner in the mid-seventies. He’d made himself unforgettable by wearing a pair of white wool pants with cream and yellow checks, a blue shirt, and a yellow tie to that meeting, and while the station owner passed on doing business with Crockett that day, the outfit worked. The two maintained a casual friendship for years afterward, with Turner even inviting Crockett to a party he held on his yacht for the 1977 America’s Cup time trials.

That’s why Barnett decided Crockett was the only man who could bail McMahon out. He had the money, and Turner liked him.

Once he was approached, in March 1985, there was no hesitation in Crockett’s reply. TBS meant national exposure and a chance to break into the hyper-lucrative arena of national ad sales. Madison Avenue advertising agencies wouldn’t look at a tiny Charlotte promoter, but they would have to do business with one that had a top-rated TBS show that was capable of reaching 80 million homes.

It was a win-win situation for just about everyone. Vince got out of Georgia without losing a cent. Turner got McMahon out of his hair. And Jim Crockett Promotions, already the most successful southern wrestling company, became the second-biggest promotional outfit in the country.
¹
The only odd man out in the sweepstakes was Bill Watts, who got dropped from TBS as soon as Crockett’s deal was done.

Watts was sick about being outplayed. But what could he do? Unless he wanted to run up a white flag—something the combative Cowboy wasn’t close to considering—his choice was clear: He had to go national, like Crockett and McMahon, to compete.

In early 1986, Watts quit the Irish McNeal Boy’s Club in Shreveport and moved his operation to the six-thousand-seat Convention Center on the Tulsa fairgrounds to give the show a bigger, airier feel for television. Then he rechristened his Mid-South Wrestling company the Universal Wrestling Federation and sent his announcer, Jim Ross, on the road to sell it. Ross was a remarkable salesman. By late 1986, he got Watts into seventy major markets, up from a dozen the year before. But the size was deceiving. Most of the deals Ross struck were barter arrangements: The station got his show for free and most of the commercial revenue that came with it, while Watts got exposure to promote his arena shows.

The problem was that almost overnight, the UWF became the toughest driving territory around. Its wrestlers were driving up to forty-five hundred miles a week, and some were so tired that they had to take heavy doses of speed to get to the next gig. When the UWF branched as far west as Los Angeles, and as far east as Philadelphia, Watts had to start paying for his forty wrestlers to fly. Then he leased space in a gleaming office tower in Dallas, which he reasoned could serve as a way station between the coasts and present a better image. But week after week, he was paying the wearying price of being the third horse in a three-horse race. In better days, he could put on a shoestring show at the Arkansas fairgrounds and gross $70,000. Now he was playing unprofitable midlevel arenas like the nine-thousand-seat Olympic Auditorium in Los Angeles and taking a bath on it.

Maybe the Cowboy could have made it work with more time. But just as he was starting to expand, the oil-producing nations of OPEC caused an international glut by stepping up production. As a result, the economies of Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas got hammered. Not only were Watts’s ticket buyers defaulting on their mortgages, but four bank failures in Oklahoma meant that the loan pool for risky new businesses was drier than a used Texas well. Watts was trapped. At the very moment he was having trouble selling tickets in Los Angeles, he’d lost his ability to sell out Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The regional wrestling empire that had made him $2 million in 1985 was hemorrhaging $50,000 a week. He had to take out a $20,000-a-month mortgage on his home just to stay afloat. As the Cowboy would say later, “When you’re losing fifty grand a week out of your ass like that, you’re either lying or you’re dying if you claim it doesn’t give you nightmares.”