Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW

by Guy Evans

Mall became a viable idea only after initial discussions regarding a New York City debut were swiftly thwarted, the consequence of the WWF’s exclusivity agreement with Madison Square Garden.

“WCW wrestling will become the centerpiece of a brand new franchise on TNT called Monday Nitro,” continued Siegel. “Each week at eight o’clock - leading in to the telecast - we will present the action adventure television series Thunder and Paradise which stars Hulk Hogan. After both airings of WCW on TNT, we will present a very heavy duty action movie to make Monday Nitro a very action-driven night [of television].

After a deft Harley Davidson plug, Hogan prepared to conclude his comments with a modification of a catch phrase he made famous in an earlier time. “What are you gonna do,” he asked rhetorically, “when Hulk Hogan and Monday Nitro run wild on you?” Curiously, the line was delivered, but devoid of reaction. Hogan’s eyes darted as he repeated himself, fighting back against an apparent glitch in the matrix. “What are you gonna do when Hulk Hogan and Monday Nitro run wild on you?” he demanded again, achieving some mild applause in response. For the first time in a long time - maybe forever - the usually willing media greeted the Hulkster routine with a collective yawn.

If Bischoff was indeed aiming for a knockout, it appeared to be of the first round variety. His inflammatory on-air comments, which included giving away results from the taped Raw show in opposition, set the tone for the gamesmanship to come. “By the way,” he brashly advised viewers as Sting entered the ring for a match, “in case you’re tempted to grab the remote control, check out the competition, don’t bother. “[Their show] is two or three weeks old. Shawn Michaels beat [Sid Vicious] with a superkick that you couldn’t earn a green belt with in a local YMCA. Stay right here - it’s live, it’s where the action is!”

Furthermore, Bischoff reported regularly to a superior - the President of Turner Sports (and, by proxy, WCW) - Dr. Harvey Schiller. Inside the corporate offices, Schiller, an athletic, 6-foot-4 renaissance man of sorts, responded almost always to ‘The Doc’ (sometimes ‘Dr. Schiller’, a former subordinate reveals, but never simply ‘Harvey’). His resume read like the bullet points of a screenplay; indeed, it was hard not to respect a man who served in Vietnam as a war pilot, earned a PhD in chemistry, taught at the Air Force Academy, ran the SEC conference, oversaw the United States Olympic Committee, and completed marathons in his spare time. As one author breathlessly described his exploits, “think Indiana Jones....James Bond...still, you have not reached Dr. Harvey Schiller. Simply, he is the most interesting man alive.” Perhaps Dos Equis were also paying attention.

“Sales was everything. Their deal was, ‘a dollar of sales revenue is worth more than a dollar of expense cutting’. To me, the impact on the bottom line is the same, but their deal was, ‘no - I need a dollar more in revenue, even if it takes me two more dollars in expenses to create it’. It was all revenue-driven - the whole company was revenue-driven.”

“The [financial] characteristics of the whole company bled through every one of its entities. Probably one out of every five transactions had been improperly recorded. You couldn’t rely on the information, and you [certainly] couldn’t rely on it for decision making.

As a result, Cheatham says, TBS’ corporate overlords worked to popularize a performance measure called EBITDA - Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization. “[They said], ‘Ok, what can we do that will tell people that we’re really doing a good job?’ With EBITDA, what you end up with is a modified form of cash accounting.”

Conversely, EBITDA’s critics - Warren Buffett famously among them - pointed out its ability to obscure reality. “People who use EBITDA,” Buffett reportedly observed at a shareholder meeting, “are either trying to con you, or they’re conning themselves. Interest and taxes are real costs.”

net income’.”

Indeed, in the eyes of many fans, Souled Out would unfold as one of the more bizarre telecasts in company history, with a mostly flat crowd, ambiguous match finishes, and a puzzling ‘Miss nWo’ contest featuring middle-aged housewives. “The ‘Miss nWo’ contest was a disaster,” Pruitt states matter-of-factly, noting its questionable inclusion in the show format.

“I don’t think we often had a plan,” concedes Pruitt, who was asked to make sense of a paltry set of instructions while filming at Alcatraz. “I just think [the creative team] were kind of running out of their hip pocket, so to speak, and that was kinda scary. In the case of Piper at Alcatraz, they wanted us to film him leaving the cell and running outside to a boat - all in one shot. Well, that’s impossible.”

The show closing surprise was big news to wrestling fans, but to the mainstream audience, an advertised appearance by Chicago Bulls forward Dennis Rodman stole all of the headlines. Fully decked out in an nWo shirt, ‘The Worm’ proudly wore Hogan’s title belt over his shoulder, attracting significant publicity in his role as merely a bystander at ringside. While it remained unclear how WCW could possibly control Rodman in future appearances - his on-court antics, including an attack on a cameraman, were setting new records for NBA fines - the bad-boy of basketball appeared to foster a genuine affection for Hogan, effectively his counterpart in wrestling. Indeed, a week prior to Uncensored, TBS viewers noted Hogan and Bischoff sitting behind the Bulls bench for a road game at Madison Square Garden. Later that night, Rodman filmed a vignette that aired on Nitro, contributing to an impressive pay-per-view buy rate that would easily outdraw (by almost 100,000 purchases) the WWF’s flagship event in March, Wrestlemania.

On the day of the show, however, Nash called out sick, later claiming that a batch of pot brownies gave him chest pain.

learned, Turner EVP Terry McGuirk couldn’t stop talking about WCW. In the halls of Techwood, Steve Heyer (the incumbent corporate CEO) was adopting the ‘nWo’ hand sign when passing staffers at work.

On January 8th, 1998, the first edition of WCW Thunder aired on TBS, reportedly becoming the most watched (4.0) cable debut in history.

“But Ted was very inventive, not only in programming, but in technology also. He really got it. It’s no accident that Ted is a genius and a billionaire. I’ve sat in the room with him, where everybody in the room disagreed with where he was going - except for him. And it turned out to be successful - CNN, for one [idea]. If you were in Atlanta in the media advertising business, and you weren’t studying Ted Turner, you weren’t alive!”

As far as Bischoff was concerned, the new era of WWF programming - eventually immortalized as The Attitude Era - simply adapted the formula that made Nitro successful. “Vince McMahon adapted the formula that we perfected, and decided to do it even bigger and better,” he says. “He went after our audience, and he was willing to take bigger risks. He used Mike Tyson to [help] do it, and it was fantastic.”

For his part, Nash showcased such charm as to almost halt the proceedings. “The deposition nearly had to be stopped,” says one source, “because the questioner was laughing so hard at his answers. It’s still the only case I’ve ever seen where that’s happened.”

Step one unfolded on Monday, March 16th - the date of the Spring Break Nitro in Panama City. Accompanied by a case of Budweiser and matching Hawaiian shirts, the duo showed up halfway into an all-day drinking session, causing Bischoff to reportedly blow a gasket before show time. Are you gonna go in? Bischoff prodded at Hall, referring to the need to attend a rehabilitation facility. Unmoved, Hall quipped back with the wit that his character was famous for, noting the presence of a swimming pool surrounding the ring. Yeah, I’ll go in the pool - make sure nobody else goes in.

“In fact, I think that in a short time, Nitro will be back to a 1.0 to 1.5 advantage. They gave it their best shot with Tyson. Their best shot was weak at best. I don't think the future looks very bright for the WWF on USA Network."

Over on USA Network, meanwhile, the WWF was promoting a match between Vince McMahon and Steve Austin. Although it was eventually revealed as a ruse, their ‘match’ created enough interest to finally turn the tide. At last, Nitro’s 88-week win streak was over.

“I was once with the crew in Florida,” remembers wrestler Bobby Blaze, “for a Thursday Thunder, [before] they flew me to Atlanta. I worked in Rome, Georgia - about 60 miles north of Atlanta - and then flew home [to Kentucky] on a Wednesday morning. I wasn’t home more than probably two hours, and I get a call saying I need to be at Thunder - the next day in Salt Lake City, [Utah]. So instead of flying me from Atlanta - with the rest of the crew - out to Salt Lake City, I went from Atlanta to Huntington Tri-State…in West Virginia…and then home to Kentucky. That’s a couple thousand dollars to go back to Atlanta, and then connect to Salt Lake.

Surely at its peak, the latest wrestling boom felt like “it would never end,” reminisces Wrestleline journalist Ben Miller. “Pro wrestling in the ‘90s,” he says, “was like Marvel movies today. It was pervasive among teens and early-20’s males.

In his customary, often hilariously descriptive style, Bischoff later provided his own evaluation of the logo. It looks like fluorescent vomit, he said with disgust.

“I had to figure out their soft spots, and to their credit, it would often be children. Wrestlers had the philosophy to ‘comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable’. They could be kind of gruff and difficult with the VP’s and people that wanted stuff from them, but with the kids that saw them as superheroes…they were tremendous. I was able to put up with the attitude, the anger and the drama, because I saw how wonderful they could be.”

“When I first arrived in ‘99,” reports Jason Glast, “I was given a company credit card and [informed], ‘you can just buy anyone at the hotel bar anything they want’. It was just shocking to me, and that expense was nothing in the whole scheme of things. But you had just carte blanche to buy all the wrestlers, all their hangers-on, all the fans…y’know, just ‘take care of everybody’. It could be anywhere up to $2,000 after a Nitro…that’s a lot of beer in 1999.

In the eyes of some fans, the ongoing story was becoming increasingly confusing - not only had Hennig apparently developed a Texas accent out of thin air, but he was also being booked as a heel despite being outnumbered by Miller’s group.

I think one of the top 10 people I ever met in my life was Diamond Dallas Page.

“So our deal was, ‘well, find a way to make it look like we’re not making any money’. Simple things like, ‘we’ll sell the broadcast rights to Braves games to TBS for a small amount of money - a dollar, buck-and-a-half, hundred dollars, whatever’. And that way, all the income - the real income - is recognized at TBS, not at the Braves.”

“WCW already has a Dec. 19 Starrcade PPV and a January PPV scheduled,” wrote Wade Keller of The Pro Wrestling Torch. “The New Year’s PPV is an added event, making it one of three WCW PPVs in the span of about five weeks. For a number of reasons, WCW wrestlers and production staff are more upset by the added PPV than anything in recent memory. A lot of the wrestlers and staffers, who previously believed they would have that day off, had made plans with friends and family to celebrate. Also, there is potential for Y2K computer problems and no one wants to be away from their family and friends during that time.

says Jason Shaya, a former WCW Hotline personality-turned NHL announcer.

Eric told everyone he was sick of the bullshit, and [that] if anyone wanted to get out of their contract, that would be fine. He said they could be on Raw the next day for all he cared.” To the shock of the room, one wrestler took Bischoff up on his offer. “Raven left the meeting,” Shaya says, “and tried desperately to get to the WWF. I think it was all a bluff on his part though, but that was pretty exciting.”

“I don’t think there was an ending [in mind],” confirms Diamond Dallas Page, speaking of the nWo storyline. “Dusty used to call that, ‘livin’ on the edge of a lightning bolt!’”

“I remember Dusty telling me,” adds producer Chris Larson, “‘let me tell you one thing about a good storyline, brother. You get on top of it, and ride it like a horse until it falls over dead. Then you get off, and drag it behind you until it starts to stink. Then you go find another one!’”

As the digital growing pains continued, a team of videographers and technicians prepared to deal with the next challenge: streaming video. “When we first started doing live video webcasts,” remembers Sites, “there was no infrastructure to support it. Dial-up was king, so anyone who had the Internet was on either a 28k or 56kbps connection. YouTube, Ustream and all the on-demand providers wouldn’t hit the market for another five years. Wifi at the arenas did not exist, nor did access to any wired connectivity.

More specifically, the crucial introduction of Internet service producers (ISPs) soon democratized the ability to build a website; consequently, thousands of rudimentary wrestling pages abounded on Geocities, Angelfire and the like.

“I think the introduction of the Internet,” points out Joe Uva, a key Turner executive, “had as much to do with the success and growth of [wrestling] as the product itself. “Before if you were a wrestling fan, you’d have to go to a news stand and buy a wrestling magazine that was two months old. Now, for a generation of fans who were in their ‘tweens’, teens and for young adults, it brought them closer to the action and characters.”

Russo interjected with the following statement: I’m going to tell you something right now that you will absolutely not agree with, but I’ve been a wrestling fan my whole life and I will live and die by this. It is hard enough - believe me, I write this shit - it is hard enough to get somebody over. You will never ever, ever, ever, ever see the Japanese wrestler or the Mexican wrestler over in American mainstream wrestling. And the simple reason for that is…even myself, I’m an American, and I don’t want to sound like a big bigot or a racist or anything like that, but I’m an American...if I’m watching wrestling here in America, I don’t give a shit about a Japanese guy. I don’t give a shit about a Mexican guy. I’m from America, and that’s what I want to see.

To reiterate, fans would not only have to be a) acutely informed as to the inner workings of pro wrestling, but also b) willing to believe that something real had taken place within the context of a live Nitro. The inherent flaw with this concept, it would seem, is that the most knowledgeable of fans were precisely the group least likely to lose themselves in such a manufactured moment. In contrast to Montreal two years earlier - when the events appeared real because well, they were - the hardcore obsessives would likely be quick to spot any obvious signs of contrivance.

“I was supposed to act like I didn’t care that La Parka was beating me,” recalls Bagwell. “Should we have ran the angle...or just have Buff win, do his little dance, and pose with his little hat on? It could be that simple. For some reason, Russo always wanted to put the square peg in the round hole. I mean, all you gotta do is, ‘Buff hits his Blockbuster [finishing move], Buff puts his top hat on, Buff does his Buff strut, Buff hits a double bicep [pose]’, and says ‘look at me’ in the camera. Everybody’s happy. “My point to Russo was, ‘I think there’s more people that would rather see me do my little dance and get my hand raised’ [in victory]. He thought it was better to have shock value. I said, ‘in that case, have La Parka beat Goldberg! If you wanna shock ‘em, you can shock the fuck outta them by La Parka beating Goldberg tonight!’ Of course, he didn’t want to talk about that. I didn’t get it - all you had to do was just let me be me.”

“Vince Russo takes that idea, and he starts interfering with people’s ability to suspend their disbelief. He did it in ways that seemed fun - for a second - like ‘oh wow!’ But then you think, well, ‘if I’m not suspending my disbelief, and we’re openly talking during the performance about the fact that this is a performance...how does the narrative continue? Because [that discussion] is happening within the realm of the show itself. And if I’m ironically distanced from everything, how do I play my role as fan? “Previous versions of [this concept] in WCW had been really successful, because they had drawn on more realism, but kept it fictional. The earlier WCW stuff with the nWo, or even what McMahon did, was pretending to give people a glimpse behind the curtain. They were listening to what the fans were finding out, and then fictionalizing a representation of it that made it feel more real. But, of course, it was always part of the script.”

It was certainly a memorable moment, but not as enduring as another image from the same show. “Burying Ric Flair in the desert,” begins Kevin Sullivan, referring to an angle in which ‘The Filthy Animals’ did exactly that, “if that wasn’t a Freudian slip… “I mean, I took Psychology…and that’s Psychology 101 - ‘let’s get rid of the guy’.”

In 1960, for example, NBC censors deleted a relatively risqué joke from The Tonight Show, causing host Jack Paar to abruptly resign on-air. “There must be a better way…” mused Paar in an emotional sign-off, “of making a living than this.” Within a month, Paar returned to the show, poking fun at himself in an uproarious monologue. “As I was saying before I was interrupted,” he began, “there must be a better way of making a living. Well, I’ve looked…and there isn’t!”

“Hall and Nash couldn’t show up to work drunk, but they were allowed to get high on cough syrup [as part of the show]. These were the things I was constantly dealing with.”

“The pressure really came from when things touched on some actual event, or if it was instructional. They wanted to take a certain group, [for example], and have them throw Molotov cocktails at a school bus. That’s not good. It’s like, ‘think a little bit beyond that’. Having been in this business for 25 years, [I know that] there are creative ways to do things without crossing the line. That’s the easy way in my book.

Mere months earlier, Ferrara was enthralling McMahon with an impression of Jim Ross, the venerable lead announcer for Raw. To break up booking meetings, Ferrara occasionally adopted Ross’ southern drawl, even mimicking the partial facial paralysis he suffered after two Bell’s palsy attacks.

Ross expressed disappointment at the skit, broadcast as merely the latest - albeit most disdainful - affront in the wrestling war. “I thought that because they were both working here,” Ross told journalist Mike Mooneyham, “they knew about when I got sick the last time. I got Bell’s palsy just a few hours after my mother passed away. That was a real sudden death, and I was a long way from home (at a WWF pay-per-view in the United Kingdom) when it happened. “…I thought those guys understood that better, because they were working here when all that occurred. But I guess it just didn’t make any difference to them.”

“And so it was,” reported Munk, “that Time Warner’s board of directors voted a second time, wholeheartedly approving the sale of their illustrious firm to an Internet company not yet fifteen years old - a company with a single product and with one-fifth the revenue of Time Warner. It was, as the media would soon report, a historic moment.”

In July 1999, the company continued its UK growth through the syndication of a one-hour program, edited specifically for the British audience - WCW Worldwide. Although the show consisted mostly of weeks-old matches, bungled together with taped commentary from Scott Hudson and Larry Zybysko, it developed a cult following by virtue of its consistently wacky editing, strikingly bizarre censorship, and infinitely amusing production gaffes (including the particularly infamous occurrence of Zybysko calling his own interference in a match).