Pretty long and great read:
The idea at the time was that WWF would continue to operate WCW as a separate entity. It would be Shane McMahon’s WCW (later expanded into a unit with Stephanie McMahon’s ECW in a quickly changing and eventually failing storyline) against Vince McMahon’s WWF.
The idea was that Vince McMahon would be caught with his pants down, with WCW’s Torrie Wilson, and Linda McMahon would catch him. This angle actually did air, but all the follow-up was abruptly dropped and never referred to again.
The on-camera storyline of Vince and Linda’s divorce would lead to Linda getting control of Monday night on USA in the dividing of the family assets. She would side with a babyface Shane, and WCW would continue as a separate group on the USA Network.
The WWF brand would use Thursday nights on UPN for Smackdown, as its flagship.
That showed how serious the company was, at first. You have to understand the situation in 2001 at the time. When Vince McMahon laid out his plans to me, his key point was that WCW would need help at first. WWF was established and on fire. In his mind, WCW would have to get the primary time slot to be perceived as an even match-up as opposed to a secondary brand. However, when it later came to actual practice, in booking, WCW’s stars were clearly positioned as not being on the same level of WWF’s stars. The argument was made that WCW didn’t have the stars who could compete, but it’s pro wrestling and you make the best of what you have. In addition, the obvious way to set up the big change, WCW getting the Monday USA time slot, would be to set up a major match for the slot that WCW wins. Instead, no such match giving them that credibility was to take place. Instead, WCW was supposed to get Monday based on breaking up of assets in a storyline divorce of Vince and Linda McMahon.
The feeling was the WWF brand was at an all-time peak, and in those days, the viewership on Thursdays for Smackdown was often ahead of that of Raw. Other company executives noted that there could be no failure with WCW. Vince and the company had a highly publicized failure in the XFL, and simply could not afford a failed relaunch of WCW, because that would be a failure in their own field.
In addition, Vince felt that by running the same stars every Monday and Thursday, that he was in danger of burning out the talent to the public. This would move back to where the stars would only be seen once a week on television. He continued that thought after the dropping of the WCW angle, with the brand extension and separate rosters for Raw and Smackdown. Eventually his thoughts were different and the same talent appeared for the most part on both shows.
Touring schedules with those marching orders had already been put together with arenas booked for “Shane McMahon’s WCW,” including Monday TV tapings. But it was on the first night of the beginning of the angle, in Tacoma, when the WWF fan base were so completely negative on everything WCW, including a test run match of Booker T vs. Buff Bagwell with Scott Hudson and Arn Anderson as announcers, that Vince changed his mind on everything.
I can recall that Monday night watching just how badly the crowd reacted, talking to a high ranking WWF executive about how, knowing Vince, that reaction being so negative was probably going to make him drop the idea.
I was told it was impossible, because everything had been laid out, with schedules, rosters, etc.
The next morning, Vince made the call his inner circle said he wouldn’t. He ordered everything changed. WCW would not continue as a separate company, but would just be used as an invading heel group in a feud with WWF. Not too many weeks later, with the Stephanie McMahon buying ECW storyline, it was “The Alliance” of WCW and ECW against WWF. The storyline was one of pro wrestling’s all-time disappointments. Few remember that the first PPV, called “Invasion,” did 775,000 buys, at the time the third biggest of all-time behind only the 2000 and 2001 WrestleManias. But ratings were falling weekly.
Behind the scenes, Kevin Dunn had convinced Vince McMahon that they had spent decades building up the WWF brand, and thus the idea of treating outsiders equal would undermine all they had created.
Even before the Tacoma disaster, Dunn was in McMahon’s ear about how the WCW guys coming in shouldn’t be beating the WWF guys in the ring because it would send the message that WWF wasn’t always the best, which may be why the idea of winning Monday night in the ring was not planned.
While WCW did get some wins, from the start, when WCW needed the early wins for credibility, not only didn’t that happen but some of the early matches were outright squashes.
By November, the storyline was dropped. To this day, WWE and pro wrestling in general in this country has never reached that level of real mainstream interest and popularity, whether it came to ratings, attendance or consistent PPV numbers, as the boom period that ended at that time.
A lot of different moving parts were happening in 2000 that led to the end of pro wrestling as we knew it. While WWF had clearly been the dominant promotion when it came to popularity by the spring of 1998, and by 1999 they had blown so far by WCW that it was embarrassing, this was still far from a monopoly business. The deaths of WCW and ECW, which had different styles, led to far fewer jobs in the industry, and far fewer people interested in becoming wrestlers. With less talent coming in, the number of people who could carry the future also diminished.
Those in WCW like to blame outside forces, most notably the AOL/Time Warner merger, or an executive decision by Jamie Kellner, for the death of the company. It’s a simplistic viewpoint that doesn’t really look at what had happened to the company the previous two years. That said, besides the awful product, which included a collapse of house show (there were months that actually declined 90% from the prior year) and PPV revenues (the same Hulk Hogan vs. Ric Flair battle of two of the industry’s all-time biggest stars fell from doing 450,000 buys on PPV in 1999 to barely one-tenth that figure a year later), there were other factors.
Had WCW not lost $62 million in 2000, AOL/Time Warner would have had no interest in unloading a successful television franchise. Perhaps, even with the losses, had the merger not taken place, Ted Turner, a big wrestling supporter, may have decided that wrestling always has its ups and downs and in time it would turn back around, and with his power, would have kept the company alive. While losses weren’t in the same ballpark, the company did lose about $6 million annually from 1989 to 1991.
The Turner Board wanted to fold the company, and came to Turner with a proposal. They showed him it would be more cost effective to put movies from their extensive library in the time slots, that they already owned, would save on costs, and even if the ratings weren’t as good, they wouldn’t take a hit in ad revenue. Turner, when presented with the proposal, didn’t listen, and made it clear that wrestling built the station and wrestling was always going to be on TBS.
Turner’s affinity for wrestling dated back to the early 70s, when TBS was Ch. 17 in Atlanta, called WTCG. Turner at the time was a local TV station owner, who made a deal with Ann Gunkel, the beautiful wife of Ray Gunkel, the wrestler who ran ABC Booking, to move the local Atlanta Wrestling show to his station.
In many markets in the Southeast in that era, the highest rated local programming, with the exception of the nightly newscasts, was the weekend wrestling shows. Wrestling was a key part of building Turner’s small UHF station.
In 1976, Turner put WTCG on satellite, making it available to cable companies nationally, and turning it into the first of what was called then, SuperStation. Today is would be called the first major cable station. By 1979, the station started to get a national following. Besides “The Andy Griffith Show,” and the Atlanta sports franchises, most notably the Braves, billed as “America’s Team,” the station’s flagship programing was wrestling.
While the Braves got the pub as the station started gaining a national profile, it was wrestling that led the way in ratings. Wrestling was the first show on the station to get 1 million viewers. It was the first show ever on cable television to reach 1 million homes.
By 1981, Georgia Championship Wrestling’s two-hour first run show on Saturdays at 6:05 p.m. Eastern time averaged a 6.4 rating. A Sunday show, “The Best of Georgia Championship Wrestling,” consisting of mostly repeated matches from Saturday and occasional matches from other territories featuring wrestlers being brought in to Atlanta for big shows, averaged a 6.6 rating. They were, by far the two highest rated shows on cable. Turner never forgot wrestling was the programming that showed the TBS concept of a national cable station could work, and draw on a national basis.
Things happened that weakened Turner’s wrestling. The actual company, Georgia Championship Wrestling Inc., presided over by legendary promoter James E. “Jim” Barnett, went from being successful in the 70s to losing money by 1982. Barnett lived a lavish lifestyle throughout that period. When the wrestling business was strong, nobody said anything because Barnett had a reputation for being able to make money in the business. But when things started falling, the other stockholders, and booker Ole Anderson (who Barnett had put in that position) when figuring out how much company money Barnett was spending playing big-shot, forced him out.
Barnett wound up being hired by Vince McMahon for the start of a nasty wrestling war, since Barnett was charming and mild-mannered to your face, but a cutthroat manipulator with contracts in the television industry and political world behind the scenes. His destruction of Ann Gunkel in the early 70s gave him the reputation as the guy you want on your side in wrestling war.
Several of the Georgia stockholders wanted to expand nationally, given the following the company had in 1981. Barnett did expand into Ohio, Michigan and West Virginia, where no strong NWA group had been running. But he wouldn’t go against the fellow NWA promoters. McMahon, who purchased Capital Sports from his father, changing its name to Titan Sports in 1982, had no such loyalty. When Vince Sr., Vincent Kennedy McMahon and Barnett all quit the NWA at its 1983 convention, the war was impending and obvious. Still, most NWA promoters were blindsided when it happened. WWF had already expanded to Los Angeles, but that was after the local promotion run by Mike LeBell had folded, so it was nobody’s territory. They moved into San Jose, a city that wasn’t running regularly, but it was 40 miles and the same metropolitan area as Verne Gagne’s AWA was running. The big move came at the end of 1983, when McMahon brokered a deal to get the NWA’s “Wrestling at the Chase” time slot on KPLR-TV in St. Louis by offering $2,100 per week and five percent of every house show in the market. They made a similar offer to KTVU in San Francisco to get the AWA’s time slot, and htat became the blue print, buy the time slot wrestling fans are familiar with, sign up the local stars, making the existing promotion have to build a new audience without its signature stars.
In 1984, GCW was no longer losing money. Anderson had cut way back on big name talent, but with the lower budget, the company was breaking even. However, Anderson was paying himself a huge salary. While not having to put money in like the previous years, the stockholders were frustrated that they still weren’t making any money, taking the viewpoint that all the money was going to Anderson. Behind Anderson’s back, minor stockholders Jack & Jerry Brisco reached a deal with other stockholders, including Jim Oates (who financed Barnett’s businesses for years and knew him dating back to going to college with him in the 40s) to have proxy of a majority interest, and sold their shares to Vincent Kennedy McMahon for $750,000. This gave Vince control of the Saturday and Sunday time slots on TBS, the two most valuable pro wrestling time slots.
However, ratings fell. The TBS audience didn’t want WWF wrestling. Turner immediately gave Anderson a 7 a.m. Saturday morning time slot and he started a promotion. Later, Turner reached an agreement with Bill Watts, who had owned a percentage of Georgia and was a successful booker during the early 70s war.
Mid South Wrestling in 1985 was still one of the strongest and most successful regional promotions in the country. The ratings its programming was delivering was mind-boggling. Turner further aggravated McMahon by putting Mid South Wrestling on his station. Even more humiliating is, with no promotion and in an unfamiliar time slot, Mid South Wrestling immediately became the highest rated show on cable television, averaging a 5.2 rating, far better than WWF was doing on either USA or in the familiar 6:05 p.m. Saturday and Sunday slots on TBS.
Turner wanted to cancel McMahon and move Watts to the better time slot. But Georgia Championship Wrestling, which McMahon owned, even though it really no longer existed, still had a valid contract, so Turner couldn’t do that. However, the contract was going to expire. McMahon was about to be kicked off the station.
Watts to this day maintains that Turner had promised him the Saturday and Sunday 6:05 p.m. time slots as soon as McMahon’s contract expired, before reneging on the deal and going with Crockett.
Before that happened, Barnett brokered a deal between McMahon and Jim Crockett, who ran Mid Atlantic Championship Wrestling. With the solid financial foundation and strong promotion that Crockett had, a deal was made. Crockett would buy McMahon’s Georgia Championship Wrestling for $1 million, and somehow in the negotiations, also garnered exclusivity on TBS. Watts never signed anything with Turner, who, once Turner had Crockett, a seemingly stable force with a deeper talent pool, delivering the kind of wrestling he believed his viewers wanted, lost interest in going into business with Watts. Had Watts become business partners with Turner, gotten exclusivity on the station when the McMahon contract expired, and had Turner’s financial backing to go national, that’s one of the biggest what ifs in history.
...that'll put butts in the seats....
