1996

by Peter Edge

On May 6th, it was announced that Ted Turner had passed away at the age of 87. What followed was an outpouring of adulation for the life and accomplishments of a man who used his wealth, not to cosplay the Simpsons episode “You Only Move Twice” from the perspective of Hank Scorpio but to actually do cool things with it.

Had life and work not got in the way, I’d have done a bio on Ted in the last issue of the SoSu newsletter, looking at all the cool things that he did, such as the sporting endeavours he accomplished, like his progression as a competitor in the Americas Cup and his ownership of teams in Atlanta. I would have talked about his founding of CNN, albeit with the unintended consequences that came from the 24/7 news network (the first of its kind), plus I would have devoted around 1,000 words to the Doomsday video that Ted commissioned in the chance that the world did in fact come to an end, and yes, I would have mentioned his views on birth control being aligned to China’s one-child-per-family view and also the anecdotal evidence that Ted said some atrocious things about minorities whilst in college.

Is it? That explains why my pitch to explain the Bricks & Minifigs scandal got rejected, then.

Wrestling played a part in Ted Turner’s empire. His impact on the art of wrestling is so much so that he’s been a topic of interest in the annual debate of who could be inducted into the Wrestling Observer Hall of Fame, and he will get in this year via death bounce like Eddy Guerrero and Rollerball Rocco did in years gone by.

And of course, Ted Turner came up with the NWO storyline that helped “Monday Nitro” beat “Monday Night RAW” in the ratings for 83 consecutive weeks (bet that’s new information for you guys) and also booked the successful Ric Flair vs. Randy Savage feud that did the first consistently good numbers at house shows for WCW in the 90s.

Well, that’s what Vince McMahon probably believed.

There is a lot regarding Ted Turner and WCW that were figments of McMahon’s imagination, but as the calendar flipped into 1996, the rhetoric that had built up in the owner of the WWF regarding Ted and WCW ended up becoming very public.

The ill feeling towards Ted you could say started in 1988. WWF had tried to squash Jim Crockett Promotions with tactics of sabotaging PPVs. The Fed were putting PPV distributors in quandaries by telling them that if they wanted to show “WrestleMania IV”, they had to show “Survivor Series 1987” and not JCP’s “Starrcade” that was also held on the Thanksgiving day in question (guess who booked that day first?) or they wouldn’t get “Mania IV”. The WWF also put on a television special on USA Network called the “Royal Rumble” head to head with a PPV Jim Crockett had on their schedule called “Bunkhouse Stampede”. It is quite fitting that of the ‘Big 4’ PPVs of the World Wide Wrestling Federation big show calendar, two of them were the Fed trying sabotage tactics.

JCP’s attempts to become as big nationally as the Fed saw the bank balance dwindle and huge debts mount up, and there was nowhere left to go for Jim Crockett Jr. and what was the family business. Enter Ted Turner.

Turner’s burgeoning television empire had started in 1969 with a purchase of several radio stations, which he flipped, and he then bought a struggling station out of Atlanta called WJRJ-TV. He filled it up with syndications of shows that had been popular in the 60s and also original content, with the most notorious being an early hours show from the satirical comedian Bill Tush, who would read the news in a less than straight manner, even having his dog be an co-anchor at one time (the dog was still better than any Bari Weiss hire for CBS, I’m guessing).

Turner would buy the rights to Atlanta Braves games for the station, which was the stepping stone for his purchase of the Major League Baseball team in 1976 when it was in danger of leaving the city of Atlanta. He would buy the rights to Atlanta Hawks games for his station and also go on to buy the NBA franchise, a year after he bought the Braves.

What was becoming the ‘Superstation’ showed its first wrestling content in the mid-70s with the World Wide Wrestling Federation. That didn’t last long, and the Superstation would start showing Georgia Championship Wrestling (GCW) for the next several years.

Everything was hunky dory. Every Saturday at 6:05, wrestling from Georgia would show. Great moments would air. Great wrestlers would populate the screens of Georgia residents.

But then something happened.

The July 14 program opened with show co-host Freddie Miller on his own (his partner Gordon Solie was absent for reasons that were never made clear; he either resigned in protest or was terminated following the purchase, as were many other people involved with the former GCW regime) and he introduced Vince McMahon, the host of WWF television content. People also knew him as the owner of the WWF. Their worst fears had come true. The man who had driven a national expansion of his wrestling company had bought the 6:05 timeslot just like he bought many a timeslot on many a television channel.

McMahon promised the GCW fans who were tuned in that they would enjoy his new program just as much as what they had watched in the years before.

They didn’t.

GCW’s core audience began writing to and calling the channel’s offices in droves, furious over the fact that GCW was no longer airing on the station and demanded to know why. (I’m guessing money.)

Thousands of complaints were received, many of which focused on the loss of Solie, and Ted Turner himself was angered by the sinking ratings that followed and made two decisions that would fix the problem.

First, Turner made an offer to Bill Watts, a promoter who ran Mid-South Wrestling out of Oklahoma and New Orleans, to take a Sunday afternoon timeslot on WTBS. He also entered into negotiations to bring Championship Wrestling from Georgia, an NWA affiliate founded by Anderson after his ousting by McMahon (Ole wasn’t a willing seller but that’s a long story and I’m trying to do this story in less than 8,000 words), which the NWA regarded as the successor to GCW, to the station on Saturday mornings with Solie as announcer.

McMahon was not happy with either of Turner’s decisions, thinking his control of GCW would make the WWF the exclusive wrestling company on WTBS. Both Mid-South Wrestling and Championship Wrestling from Georgia outdid the WWF in ratings.

Losing money on the deal and desperately looking for an out, McMahon turned to Jim Barnett, one of the characters that had been around the territorial system for three decades, who directed him to NWA President Jim Crockett Jr., the owner of Jim Crockett Promotions (JCP), who promoted wrestling shows and he bought the 6:05 timeslot for a million dollars. It was something Vince wasn’t too impressed about, by the way, considering Crockett was coming to be Luke Skywalker to Vince’s Darth Vader as JCP was becoming the No.2 promotion in America after the carnage that the Fed unleashed during their expansion.

Darth Vader thought he won the war. Vince thought he had struck that vital blow into the heart of his main opposition and his boyhood dream had come true: monopolization of the wrestling industry in the United States.

But when Ted Turner bought the assets of JCP and WCW was born out of it, the wrestling war would continue – but now Vince’s biggest rival was richer than him.

Because WCW was WCW, there was no real threat to the Fed. Despite the money that Time Warner had, the bad business decisions from Jim Herd, Kip Allen Frey being the ultimate nice guy but not cut out to lead a company, and Bill Watts still thinking it was 1986 (and the 1950s when it came to civil rights) kept WCW in a place of no man’s land in business terms, even if the product from World Championship Wrestling was better than the Fed.

Things changed when Hulk Hogan came to WCW. The line went up for the company and WWF had no answers. Creatively the Fed was at its worst. 1995 is up there in the Death Valley of Fed Years with 2019. “King of the Ring” in Philadelphia went down like a lead balloon. Diesel was the worst drawing WWF Champion to date, locker room morale was at its worst and the final “RAW” of the year had an evil Santa Claus on the show.

Vince McMahon was panicking so much that he was thinking of bringing back The Ultimate Warrior, someone he fired twice and was a nightmare to deal with. WCW was on its heels and on the verge of overtaking WWF. Before the May 20th episode of “Nitro”, when the show beat “Monday Night RAW” in the ratings for those 83 weeks in a row, “Nitro” was in a healthy lead against “RAW” on the scoreboard.

By the time 1995 turned to 1996 on the calendar, they had an 8-5 lead in the head-to-heads on Monday nights, with “Nitro” taking that 8-5 lead thanks to three wins in a row, albeit those wins were by an average of 0.2.

The first “RAW” of the year on New Year’s Day saw the ‘creativity’ of Vince McMahon come with a spoof of the college football bowl games that ‘RAW’ was going up against.

Safe to say, the Citrus Bowl contest between Tennessee and Ohio State on the first day of 1996 was better than the four corners match between Yokozuna & Owen Hart vs Smoking Gunns vs Razor Ramon & Savio Vega vs Sid &1-2-3 Kid. The Cagematch score for the show was 2.50, the third worst rating for an episode of “RAW” in the 20th century.

But it was another ‘parody’ on this episode that made the headlines coming out of the hour of “RAW”.

I’m using the word ‘parody’ because it’s a word that is important later in the series of events that unfolded.

The first episode of Billionaire Ted’s Wrasslin’ War Room aired. It’s more a piss-take of Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage, as the segment compares the two WCW main eventers to the WWF stars by saying that Hogan and Savage can’t keep up with the stars of “RAW”, with an emphasis on the term ‘New Generation’. It’s the second episode that things get low.

Accusing Hogan and Savage of being on steroids and trying to claim the moral high ground, Vince, who was in negotiations with the Ultimate Warrior at the time, put out a statement to coincide with the segment, challenging WCW to provide drug tests for their roster.

These segments continued for weeks and things got nastier and more vindictive. The February 5th “RAW” played the sixth weekly vignette and part two of a ‘press conference’, in which the first part mentioned Ted Turner’s lithium use to treat his bipolar disorder in an uncomplimentary way, written as if Vince (who wrote the vignettes himself) thought Ted was popping lithium pills (which says a lot).

This vignette accused Ted of “using predatory” practices to kill the WWF and that he was using shareholders’ money on a passion project and seemed to mention his dad’s suicide in a mocking way.

Some people could say that these vignettes were self-defense after Eric Bischoff, WCW President at the time, made digs at WWF on air in the early episodes of “Nitro”. But remember, never give Vince any semblance of doubt.

These vignettes were an attempt to have the major media outlets in the states look at Ted Turner to find dirt that could stop Time Warner purchasing Turner Broadcasting. Vince even took things up a notch by taking out an advert “alerting” TBS shareholders about Ted Turner’s “vendetta” against the WWF.

WCW would have been part of one of the biggest media companies in the world had the merger gone through (which it did) and Vince was rattled. McMahon even did an interview for a wrestling newsletter, Wade Keller’s PWTorch.

In the now unfortunately named article “From Predator to Prey”, Vince talked to Keller, the only time he did an interview for a newsletter. Starting off as a piece on his path to riches as the leader of the main company in wrestling, it was kinder to Vince’s road to being the “godfather” of pro wrestling than my eventual obituary on him will be. It then went into Vince’s mindset about Ted Turner. Vince insisted to Wade that Ted bought WCW because of a grudge Turner held against McMahon because he tried to buy the World Wrestling Federation from Vince and was rejected and was going to try to put Vince out of business in revenge.

Now we know the actual meaning behind Randy Orton’s theme song.

The whole piece comes under the “don’t touch it, it’s poisonous” column, with Vince’s frequent lies about the dynamic of WWF and WCW coming unchallenged.

Vince was becoming irrational. He complained to the FTC, claiming that Turner had been involved in a systematic plan to destroy WWF. He also wrote a letter to Ted complaining about WCW promoting “bloodbaths” on Superbowl adverts and that Turner was allowing “barbaric geeking” (that’s the actual words he used) and would say that he and his company were “fighting for their lives”.

Is it ironic that I had Alanis Morrissette playing on my playlist while I was writing this?

I’ve heard it said that Vince, in his head canon, was fighting corporate America in his fight against WCW and Turner, while conveniently forgetting that he was enacting the “greed is good” way with his national expansion in 1984, when he put a lot of promoters way down in the hole financially.

The Billionaire Ted skits would be the final moment on the show as “RAW” faded to black every Monday nigh,t and it was getting so crazy and bad for business that USA Network president, Kay Koplovitz, intervened and told WWF to end the skits as the skits had moved away from parody to being towards McMahon’s personal opinion of Ted.

Eric Bischoff did bite back. On the “Nitro” episode that went out on Feb 5th, the lights went out and Eric on commentary claimed the Fed had sabotaged the power saying that “desperate people do desperate things”. But on the whole, WCW stayed silent because they had an ace up their sleeve.

Two of the big names of the New Generation of WWF wrestlers, Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, had their contracts soon to be expired and an option to extend respectively within weeks of each other; and in reality, it was the first free agency for which both the Big 2 wrestling companies in the U.S had competed for the services of a main event in-ring act in Nash, since the territory system had consolidated into the two big companies, but ultimately WCW outbid their rivals to get the signatures of Hall and Nash.

In the months that followed, Nash and Hall served out their time. Hall got suspended for a “failed drug test” that had been completed months before and obviously kept in a cabinet for later use and Nash actually put out the best work of his career as he was saying goodbye to the Fed.

His “In Your House 7” match against his mate Shawn Michaels is one of the most under-talked matches in Fed history, with Michaels being a great underdog fighting from underneath and sometimes literally holding on for dear life, as Nash in the Diesel gimmick was a brilliant monster with a bad attitude who wreaked havoc as the match went on.

The curtain call after Nash and Hall’s final matches as Fed-contracted wrestlers brought its own controversy, and it meant that Hunter Hearst-Helmsley was so buried by creative in the aftermath that he won the intercontinental title five months later. (It’s almost as if Paul Levesque is a massive liar in retrospectives regarding this period.) But the fourth wall-breaking that came with the events of the Madison Square Garden main event between Diesel and Michaels on May 19th, 1996, was a sign of things to come, with WCW’s end eight days later.

The Memorial Day “Nitro” was the first “Nitro” to have a two hour runtime and it felt longer on the whole. With matches that wouldn’t look out of place on WCW Saturday Night, like Bobby Walker vs Brad Armstrong and Steven Regal vs Alex Wright plus Lex Luger and DDP facing prelim talent such as Maxx Muscle and Sgt. Craig Pittman, it was a show that looked like it was filling obligations on a federal holiday.

The Mauler vs Steve Doll was one of those matches that had “it’s a holiday and no one is watching” vibes. But halfway through, those who weren’t watching missed a seismic moment in wrestling history.

Halfway through Mauler vs Doll (3.74 on Cagematch), a denim-clad Scott Hall looking like Razor Ramon if Ramon was in street clothes came to the ring through the crowd (in WWF at this time, their stars were in either full gear or wearing merch). The match stopped and Hall got a mic and did a promo unchallenged, along with some “he doesn’t work here” vibes from Tony Schiavone on commentary.

In his faux-Cuban accent that was part of the Razor Ramon gimmick, Hall (who wasn’t named on the night) gave the tone of someone who was coming to WCW to invade the company on behalf of the WWF. Scott used the words “Billionaire Ted” and “Scheme Gene”, another character in the litany of gimmicks in the “parodies” at the start of 1996.

Eric Bischoff on commentary later in the show played up the “outsider” element to the Hall appearance by refusing to say who had invaded the Mauler/Doll match, saying that they didn’t want any legal letters.

WWF weren’t impressed by all this, though.

On the same night, Vince McMahon on commentary on “RAW”, wedged in a statement during the Jake Roberts vs. Hunter Hearst-Helmsley main event on the broadcast dissociating themselves from the Hall promo, saying that the pair were taking part in a ruse and that TAFKA Razor Ramon and Diesel were claiming that they were still contracted to the WWF.

WCW still tried to do the “invasion”, with Hall saying “chico” in his faux Cuban accent that he had used for the past three and a half years the next week.

A couple of weeks later, Hall and Nash turned up on “Nitro” a fortnight after Hall turned up at the “Great American Bash” and in the segment, which would end with Eric Bischoff getting powerbombed by Nash, we saw the pair named as “we know who they are” by WCW announcers and the pair saying that they weren’t WWF employees as legal threats from the Fed were coming.

The legal action from WWF did come. Included with the copyright infringement lawsuit, the Fed claimed that WCW had “falsely and deceptively tried to confuse viewers into believing WWF is affiliated with or involved in an inter-promotional angle with WCW”. They also claimed that WCW had repeatedly defamed WWF on their broadcasts, which was rich after the Billionaire Ted skits on “RAW”, and that WCW had spread false rumours privately about WWF about their financial state, as well as saying that WCW had used their “unlimited” checkbook to persuade WWF talents to leave them to go to WCW.
WCW and WWF lawyers would appear before a judge to make arguments in the case, but the judge in question was in the midst of a major organized crime drug case and said he didn’t have time to devote to the case at the moment (because some things are more important than a dick-measuring contest between wrestling companies) and that when the organized crime trial finished up, he would take hearings on the case.
However, by that time, the “Bash at the Beach” PPV in which Hall/Nash and their mystery partner vs Sting/Lex Luger and Randy Savage would main event would have already taken place.
Dave Meltzer in the Observer at this time would write that WWF’s end goal was to try to get the angle that was already planned – in which the third man would be revealed at Daytona Beach on July 7th, 1996 – changed before the PPV. (Is it right that I wished that the Fed had used their money and power to get the MJF/Adam Cole storyline changed?)
The speculation of who would be the “third man” would fill the Observer, with ideas on the “third man” going from the interesting with Lex Luger, who had joined WCW from WWF in time to be a shock appearance on the first “Nitro”, an early favourite; to the long shot of Davey Boy Smith; to the absurd of Mabel, one of the architects of the annus horribilus that was 1995. The mention of Mabel in the Observer as a rumoured partner for Hall and Nash in the weeks before “Bash at the Beach” is still used as a stick to hit Dave Meltzer with. But it’s funny but actually not surprising that critics of Dave’s work don’t mention that, the very next week, Dave said he thought it would be Hulk Hogan that was going to be the surprise – and it turned out that he was right.

Oh shit, did I just do spoilers for everybody?

That night in Daytona Beach is one of the most famous nights in wrestling history. According to Cody Rhodes in the Hogan documentary on Netflix, it made children ask their fathers, “Why did he do that?” – which, coincidentally, I asked my dad the same question when I saw on twitter that Cody dropped the title to Sami Zayn at the latest Saudi show. My dad, to his credit, did point out (in British sign language) that it was because Cody really doesn’t want to job to another big star in that “company you hate.”

It’s an event that is so memorable that it doesn’t need to be looked at by me (honestly I’ve had enough Hogan to write in this brilliant product we do), but the months and years after are an interesting look at what was the ever-shifting landscape of wrestling and how the concept of heel heat dominated WCW in its most successful period, as well as how bookers learnt the wrong lesson from it.

But that’s an article for another day.