TNN

[Guest Jobber of the Week]

More of the Vince story.

----

 

It was a vintage performance. Afterward, when he'd climbed into his limousine for the ride back to Stamford, he got a suprising phone call from his friend Dick Ebersol. The president of NBC Sports had tried and failed to get his own idea for a spring football league off the ground some years earlier, but the notion of placing one in the lead-in spot before Saturday Night Live still had enormous appeal to him. "Don't do anything until you've spoken to me," he'd told Vince.

 

Now, as McMahon finished listening to the presentation being given by Baker, he found himself becoming incensed. There was nothing even remotely resembling what Chao had suggested in his e-mail to Diller about the XFL, just vague allusions to future talks. It was meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Nothing had changed. USA was taking him lightly.

 

But not McCluggage. In fact, while Diller's aides were dithering, McCluggage was having his own lawyers look at the contract that gave USA the right to match rival offers. If he was going to make a play for the WWF, he wanted to make this a clean sweep and not leave USA any room to counteroffer.

 

So on Feburary 24 - five days after Baker's visit - the studio chief led his own contingent to Stamford. He'd gotten together an all-star cast from the various divisions of Viacom. It included John Dolgen, McCluggage's boss as the head of Viacom entertainment; Tom Freston, head of MTV, who controlled the music channel's offerings as well as the Nickelodeon family of kid's stations; and David Hall, the head of TNN. Vince and Linda were impressed. These were busy people.

 

McCluggage started by saying the package he was about to unveil had been approved at his company's highest level - by Viacom's president, Mel Karmazin, and it's CEO, Summer Redstone. It started with their desire to move all four of the WWF's shows currently on USA to TNN. In addition, he was prepared to link that with a thirteen-week pilot for a Steve Austin drama, a book deal with Simon & Schuster, five annual events at their theme parks, seven specials a year, and a boatload of cross-promotion and billboards. UPN was also serious about wanting a piece of the XFL.

 

With slightly more than a month to go before the McMahons had to give USA their final answer, they were on the verge of getting everything they had ever wanted, including respect from some very heavy hitters.

 

Saturday, April 1, was cool in Anaheim, the perfect kind of day to prepare for the biggest show of the year and bank $60 million at the same time. Ebersol had been right. NBC had been willing to go along with McMahon's idea for a new football league. In fact, it was in the midst of acquiring $30 million in stock in the recently renamed World Wrestling Federation Enetertainment - which equalled 3 percent of it's outstanding shares - in order to become a part owner in the XFL. "In Vince McMahon, we're getting the best marketer in America," Ebersol enthused.

 

Now, as Vince was going over the final preperations for the next day's Wrestlemania 2000, McCluggage thought he'd put the finishing touches on his own wet kiss. The evening before, he'd broken open a bottle of Kettle One vodka and toasted the lawyers arrayed around his conference room table for sealing the deal that would trump USA and bring the WWF to Viacom. ALl that remained was for the McMahons to sign the short-form agreement he'd faxed over that morning to the Arrowhead Pond auditorium. McCluggage assumed this was a formality. But he learned otherwide when his office phone rang shortly after noon.

 

"Kerry," Vince said. "We have a problem."

 

McCluggage winced, then sank into his seat, preparing himself for what would come next. "It's this exclusivity thing. I can't do it." The studio chief told himself to be patient. He had a deal worth more than $100 million on the table. Surely he had the right to demand that the WWF produce it's programming exclusively for Viacom. But McMahon, the Hollywood outsider, didn't see it that way. No matter how much he was getting, he still bristled at the idea of being tied down. McCluggage tried to read into what was happening. Had he misjudged Vince's willingness to follow these talks all the way through? No, he couldn't have. They'd be fools to walk away from this; it was what their whole lives had been building toward. Surely all Vince needed was a little hand-holding before. So that's what he did. He told Vince that this was going to be the best thing he'd ever done, but he had to trust his new partners. And as far as they were concerned, exclusivity was a deal breaker. After a flurry of phone calls, Vince finally agreed. The McMahons of Havelock, North Carolina, would be Hollywood outsiders no longer.

 

(...)

 

The next day, Linda would call USA and say they were accepting Viacom's offer, ending a relationship that started when Kay Koplovitz allowed Vince to replace a wrestling show in which two Texans jousted in pig shit. That was seventeen years before. Now, as Vince scanned the fresh faces of the sold-out Arrowhead Pond auditorium, he had to wonder what his father would think. He'd gotten America's mall majority to scream at him, to hurl cups on his tousand-dollar suit. He'd twisted their well-scrubbed faces into a rage. He'd gotten them to believe in what he was selling.

 

Most of the kids in that crowd in Anaheim weren't even alive when Vinnie walked into the Warwick Hotel with two bags full of contracts and the smoke-and-mirror financing to take over the World Wide Wrestling Federation. That was two wrestling lifetimes and a bloody war with Ted Turner ago. That was before the feds tried to convict him as a drug pusher, before he'd watched Brian Pillman and others die. Now anyone who attacked him - a conservative activist, a publicity seeking attorney, even a billionaire - could expect to be met with the full force of his rebuilt machine. Wrestling wasn't nearly as innocent, funny, or well mannered as it once was.

 

 

But neither was Vince McMahon.

 

 

---

Last part of this later when I feel like typing it. Basically, USA sues and Vince pisses off the wrong people as things flush into the toilet.

[Guest JaKyL25]

Wow, that's all really cool. I had been thinking about getting that book. Is the rest of it as interesting as this stuff? If so, then this is a must-read.

 

Thanks for the work you're doing, I know I really really hate transcribing like that.

[Guest Jobber of the Week]

Kind of. It's all interesting enough but there's a lot of author no-nos. I noticed a good deal of spelling errors and stuff of that like that passed proofreading. Also, if you want in-depth talk about things that happened on TV (such as Montreal, Owen's death, etc) don't look here. If you want behind the scenes stuff that mostly focuses on McMahon (steroid trial, dealing with the Pillman death, the various Turner suits that tried to run WCW but never could, Dusty trying to make Flair quit, etc) then it's far more interesting.

[Guest Gary Busey]

Yeah, Jobber, thanks for doing all of that work. I can imagine it's tedious, but it's *really* interesting information. I've been thinking about picking that book up for awhile now, and you've sealed the deal for me.

 

The old "how does the author know what happened in secret meetings between Vince and TV executives" alarm does go off, though. I guess if I put faith in the sheets, though, I can trust these guys.

[Guest Jobber of the Week]

Here we go. The final post from this book. People who don't care about the network stuff will probably be entertained with the bit in bold anyway.

 

---

 

Linda McMahon was on the French Riviera, in Nice, for an international television convention when she received a fax copy of USA's response to Viacom's offer.

 

Had she known what kind of discussions had been going on at USA, all the red lines through the paragraphs would have made more sense. Over the prior weeks, the company's executives and lawyers huddled, trying to figure out what to do with the mess they'd made. If the network matched the deal, USA stood to lose $6.79 million the first year, $6.60 million the second year, and $4.96 million duirng the third year of the contract.

 

Viacom's lawyers had played dirty, they decided, by dissecting USA's matching agreement word for word and then creating a deal designed to thwart it. Why else would a studio chief like McCluggage throw theme park events into the mix? In the end, they concluded that they were only obliged to match the part of the offer that dealt with the WWF's five programs. Everything else was irrelevant. That was why Barry Baker faxed a copy of the Viacom offer sheet with cross-out markings everywhere.

 

Irritated, Linda called her office in New York, where it was morning, and had her assistant get Baker on the line. Baker tried to sound cheerful, saying he hoped that there might still be fruitful negotiations ahead. But then he added "We also believe that this is ultimately going to be an issue for the courts to decide, so we've asked their opinion.'

 

"How have you done that?" Linda asked warily.

 

"Well, we've sued you."

 

At a four-day trial in June 2000, USA's lawyers offered their narrow interpretation of what their matching rights required. To the McMahons, it was nothing more than the last desperate gasps of a network trying to keep them on the cheap. "There was very little dialogue on the part of USA," Vince testified. It came "only from the standpoint of Stephen Brenner, who I consider to be intellectually challenged. He presented a proposal to us in its initial state which was, I think, embarrassing."

 

In ruling on the case, a Delaware judge agreed that Viacom indeed put together a package that it knew USA didn't have the assets to match. But that didn't mean USA was out of the woods, the judge said. Even if USA's strict interpretation of the contract was used, Viacom still presented the better offer. For instance, while USA belatedly agreed to pony up $500,000 per week for it's WWF shows, it continued to balk at giving the McMahons a guarantee that they wouldn't be preempted for special events like the U.S. Open or the Westminster dog show.

 

When the ruling was made public, Steven Chao tried to put the best face on things for USA. Since the WWF kept most of Raw's advertising inventory, he said the network would actually do better because it had more ad time to sell. "It wil have a negligible effect on our ratings and a positive effect on our cash flow," he insisted.

 

Brenner was the first to be called to account; he was summoned to Baker's office and told he was being reorganized out of a job. Shortly thereafter Baker also resigned. Ultimately, Chao would be fired, too, as USA's ratings nose-dived by 15 percent and the loss of the WWF caused it to lose it's claim to being the highest-rated network on cable.

 

As for Linda McMahon, she went on CNBC the day after the Delaware ruling to boast that the WWF was expecting to post a 15 percent increase in revenues in fiscal 2001, helped by the $85 million that the WWF expected to earn in the first season of the XFL.

 

(Skipping stuff: XFL fails, WCW fails, Vince buys WCW, ECW fails, Vince buys ECW and remakes the Monday Night Wars on Raw albeit shittier [but they don't talk about that])

 

Barely a year into his new relationship with Viacom, Vince was already demonstrating that he was ill-suited for corporate monogamy. When MTV programming executives presented him with an idea for a reality-bsaed show, he went behind their backs and offered it to his friends at NBC, infuriating Tom Freston, the head of MTV networks. He also irked Kerry McCluggage when, during the course of his negotations to purchase WCW, he argued that he should be allowed to produce a version of Nitro for TBS. McCluggage scratched his head in disbelief, wondering what Vince thought he'd signed when he agreed to the exclusivity clause with Viacom. Ultimately, McMahon gave up on the effort, contenting himself with buying the WCW name and using it to further his storylines on Raw and SmackDown!

 

By late 2001, McCluggage's reign as a player at Viacom would be over. Once CBS boss Les Moonves got tired of waiting for UPN to turn around, he assumed control of the struggling network, cutting the legs out from under McCluggage, who resigned shortly thereafter, and laying the groundwork for Dean Valentine to be fired.

 

By then, Wall Street became skeptical about whether Viacom would ever earn back it's investment in the WWF, and whether Vine would regain the momentum he had in the late nineties.

 

In April 2001, the WWF reported that it's wrestling-related revenues had grown by 20 percent, less than half what it grew during the preceding year. While the growth was respectable, the company's ballooning expenses troubled analysts. Thanks to a new layer of upper management that the McMahons added in the belief that they could model Disney, operating income grew in fiscal 2001 by a measly 5.5 percent. When the cost of shutting down the XFL was factored in, the couple had barely eked out $16 million of profit on $456 million in revenues. The news got worse when the slumping economy finally hit the media sector in the summer of 2001. That July, the WWF announced that its television advertising plummeted by 17 percent, and its stock hit an all time low of $10.31 - 60 percent off the price it closed at when it went public in October 1999.

 

It didn't help that Vince was ceding many day-to-day chores to his kids. Shane had evolved into one of the show's largest daredevils, taking such risks as a fifty-foot fall from a scaffolding rig. Stephanie, meanwhile, embraced the post-Sable archetype of the heel slut, encouraging the chants of "bitch" that accompany her ring entrances. As one of the show's key writers, she even placed herself in situations to provoke them. On the same day that the New York Times carried a story about teen magazine editors declining ads for breast enlargement surgery, the twenty-four-year-old paraded her newly (re-)enlarged breasts on Raw. When asked why she did it, she replied that she had seen a sign in the audience that read, "Steph's puppies sag."

 

But audiences tired of the self-involved stories that centered on the family, sending Raw's ratings to their lowest points in years. The McMahons reacted by cleaning house, firing thirty-nine employees, or nearly a tenth of their workforce. Vince also made a much-discussed appearance at a meeting of his department heads, many of whom were wondering if he still had the energy to produce ten hours of weekly television. He acknowledged that he'd allowed himself to get out of touch but assured the gathering that he was going to be hands-on once more. "It's time to have fun again," he said. "If Wall Street doesn't like it, fuck 'em."

 

Linda carried a less combative message to a conference of analysts in November 2001. Conceding that the XFL had taken it's toll, she said matter-of-factly: "Sometimes you're sharper creatively than at others. It happened before and it will happen again."

 

The rest of the year found McMahon searching for new ways to revive his TV persona. He spent one show humiliating his latest Sable knock-off, Trish Stratus, by having her get on her hands and knees and bark like a dog before ordering her to strip down to her bra and panties. On another, he whisked a breast-enhanced blonde named Torrie Wilson to a laundry room and moaned in delight as she unbuttoned his shirt, pulled his pants past his ankles, and disappeared beneath the eye of the camera (When she told him to close his eyes for a "big suprise," he did as he was told, only to open them and see his wife standing before him.) In a show that aired at Christmastime, he made a series of wrestlers kiss his bare ass.

 

Recognizing the need for a new foil, Vince next brought Ric Flair aboard, creating a role for the white-haired legend as the WWF's "co-owner." Their scripted struggles led to McMahon's most violent ring work since the Austin era, including a graphic end to the January 2002 Royal Rumble in whic Flair sank his teeth into Vince's bloodied forehead after belting him with a lead pipe.

 

Finally, McMahon did something few would have thought possible in burying the hatchet with Hogan, who hadn't worked for him since 1993. Revisiting a contentious piece of his past, he used Hogan to reprise the nWo with Scott Hall and Kevin Nash.

 

The length of the road they'd all traveled was demonstrated on a Feburary 2002 night in Chicago. Hogan challenged The Rock to meet him in the main event of the forthcoming Wrestlemania, and after the typical stare-downs and boasts, things took a dark turn. Nash and Hall ambushed The Rock, leaving him prone on the mat, whereupon Hogan grabbed a hammer and brought it down "hard" over the movie star's head. As the scene unfolded, paramedics rushed The Rock into an ambulance, only the be ambushed again, this time when the old (and old-looking) Outsiders blocked it's departure with their limousine. As the segment built to it's climax, Hogan commandeered the cab of a 16-wheeler and used it to ram the side of the ambulance.

 

To approximately five million people watching in the ten o'clock hour, announcers Jim Ross and Jerry Lawler left the impression that The Rock lay inside, dying. "Some things happen in real life and some things happen in wrestling, but this isn't good... Tragedy has struck a WWF superstar," Ross exclaimed in a voice much like the one he used three years earlier as he watched Owen Hart fall to his death in Kansas City.

 

Anyone who watched Vincent Kennedy McMahon battle for ratings over the past twenty years instantly recognized the formula: the blending of unsettling fiction and frequently tragic fact. It may not be everyone's idea of entertainment, but it has made McMahon the consummate survivor on TV, where he continues to wrestle with his demons every week, live and in front of all America.

---

 

Can't really type much more than that, that's where the book ends.

[Placebo Effect 0]

And Sony was a rising power with shows like Party of Five and Dawson's Creek, both hits on the WB.

Negative.

[Guest Jobber of the Week]

Negative.

Eh, it's dated. If they held the book back a few months and ended it with Bischoff working for Vince, everything would have felt full circle and appropos. They barely scratched on the problemse of the XFL, mostly ignoring things near the end when they started scripting conflicts, and ignoring the problem inherant with putting Jim "BAH GAWD THAT MAN MUST BE DEAD" Ross in your primetime NBC announce team.

[Placebo Effect 0]

Negative.

Eh, it's dated. If they held the book back a few months and ended it with Bischoff working for Vince, everything would have felt full circle and appropos. They barely scratched on the problemse of the XFL, mostly ignoring things near the end when they started scripting conflicts, and ignoring the problem inherant with putting Jim "BAH GAWD THAT MAN MUST BE DEAD" Ross in your primetime NBC announce team.

No, I mean, Negative in reference to Party of Five being on the WB. It was on FOX, as I'm sure Dames could tell you in a heartbeat.

[Guest Jobber of the Week]

Ah, okay.