Post by Pennyroyal_Tea (admin) on Dec 22, 2004 10:49:19 GMT -5
Don't be fooled by the corporate failures of 2000 and 2001. Crazy accounting and boardroom graft aren't the big killers of business. Ineptitude is. The tale of how giant Time Warner got knocked out of the wrestling business by the smaller firm World Wrestling Entertainment is not only a lot of fun to read, it's a cautionary tale for entrepreneurs in any industry. In The Death of WCW (ECW Press, $18.95), wrestling journalists R.D. Reynolds and Bryan Alvarez also show how one of the world's largest public companies paid for appearances by a drunken Dennis Rodman, a wrestler based on the rock band Kiss and a $100,000 junkyard wrestling venue that did nothing but get people injured.
Wrestling should be an easy business. As Reynolds and Alvarez explain, it's really just about presenting two guys who don't like each other and who settle their differences by fighting. Everyone knows the fights are fixed, but non-fans tend to make too much of that: Fixed fights are just part of the formula behind any martial arts movie--or behind the Oscar-winning Rocky. Scripted entertainment does, after all, make a lot of money.
So does wrestling, and so did WCW at its height. Long a part of Ted Turner's pre-Time Warner (nyse: TWX - news - people ) media empire, the source of the programming that made Turner's TBS Superstation famous, WCW was always second to Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment (nyse: WWE - news - people ) and it usually lost money, although never more than $6 million a year. The losses didn't matter so much because Turner liked wrestling and wanted to stick with it. In 1996, WCW's turnaround began.
Turner hired Eric Bischoff to run the show and Bischoff spent a lot of cash courting wrestlers away from McMahon. He snagged the legendary Hulk Hogan, a wrestler named Kevin Nash and another named Scott Hall. Without ever mentioning their former affiliation by name, they claimed to be the New World Order of wrestling and said they were invading World Championship Wrestling. Fans, who had long clamored to see a showdown between the WCW and the WWE, started tuning in. Bischoff, playing as dirty as he could, started broadcasting his flagship show, Nitro, live--while WWE taped its matches weeks in advance. At the start of every Nitro, Bischoff would read the results of the WWE's matches. McMahon didn't know what to do. He sued WCW, citing unfair business practices, but that tactic went nowhere.
Fortunately for McMahon, WCW killed itself. The New World Order (NWO) angle was so successful that Bischoff became afraid to try anything else. He hired friends of NWO members and he fired ... well, most everyone else. One wrestler Bischoff let go was Steve Austin, who went to the WWE and, after turning down the ring name "Chilly McFreeze," became "Stone Cold" Steve Austin--and perhaps a bigger star than Hulk Hogan ever was.
Bischoff left WCW for awhile to be replaced by Vince Russo, a writer who had previously worked for WWE. Russo had odd ideas, to say the least. They were so odd they were actually at odds with wrestling. For example, he had his performers openly talk about the fact that they're basically actors and that the matches are fixed. Of course, the audience knew that. But, as Reynolds and Alvarez point out, "Imagine what would happen if, during a key scene in a movie like Jurassic Park, there was a technical screw-up, and everyone suddenly saw the animated dinosaurs on a computer screen running after rendered versions of the actors?" Russo even conferred the world title, which the company had claimed was 105 years old, on diminutive actor David Arquette in order to get publicity.
Bischoff returned and tried his old tricks again, like telling the results of the WWE's matches on the air. But it backfired when he had his announcer say that wrestler Mick Foley, whom Bischoff had fired, was going to win the WWE World Championship. Most of the people watching then changed the channel to the WWE.
In another goof, throughout their tenures Bischoff and Russo took every opportunity they could to make a fool of WCW star Ric Flair. Hulk Hogan, very influential behind the scenes, didn't like that the crowds tended to cheer Flair. So they made sure Flair was portrayed as a loser whenever they could. Besides, they reasoned, Flair, then pushing 50, was too old to wrestle. He's 54 now and still wrestles on television just about every week.
In the end, WCW's ratings tanked and the company lost more than $100 million in a year. Ted Turner might have loved wrestling but other executives at Time Warner didn't, and after the firm merged with AOL, Turner lost his influence. Had WCW not been bleeding cash, it might not have been axed.
It's not hard to find case studies about business failures. But it would be hard to find another one with the same kind of bizarre and amusing twists, turns and "what were they thinking?" moments that are featured in The Death of WCW.
Michael Maiello is a Forbes staff writer.
Credit: Forbes.com
Wrestling should be an easy business. As Reynolds and Alvarez explain, it's really just about presenting two guys who don't like each other and who settle their differences by fighting. Everyone knows the fights are fixed, but non-fans tend to make too much of that: Fixed fights are just part of the formula behind any martial arts movie--or behind the Oscar-winning Rocky. Scripted entertainment does, after all, make a lot of money.
So does wrestling, and so did WCW at its height. Long a part of Ted Turner's pre-Time Warner (nyse: TWX - news - people ) media empire, the source of the programming that made Turner's TBS Superstation famous, WCW was always second to Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment (nyse: WWE - news - people ) and it usually lost money, although never more than $6 million a year. The losses didn't matter so much because Turner liked wrestling and wanted to stick with it. In 1996, WCW's turnaround began.
Turner hired Eric Bischoff to run the show and Bischoff spent a lot of cash courting wrestlers away from McMahon. He snagged the legendary Hulk Hogan, a wrestler named Kevin Nash and another named Scott Hall. Without ever mentioning their former affiliation by name, they claimed to be the New World Order of wrestling and said they were invading World Championship Wrestling. Fans, who had long clamored to see a showdown between the WCW and the WWE, started tuning in. Bischoff, playing as dirty as he could, started broadcasting his flagship show, Nitro, live--while WWE taped its matches weeks in advance. At the start of every Nitro, Bischoff would read the results of the WWE's matches. McMahon didn't know what to do. He sued WCW, citing unfair business practices, but that tactic went nowhere.
Fortunately for McMahon, WCW killed itself. The New World Order (NWO) angle was so successful that Bischoff became afraid to try anything else. He hired friends of NWO members and he fired ... well, most everyone else. One wrestler Bischoff let go was Steve Austin, who went to the WWE and, after turning down the ring name "Chilly McFreeze," became "Stone Cold" Steve Austin--and perhaps a bigger star than Hulk Hogan ever was.
Bischoff left WCW for awhile to be replaced by Vince Russo, a writer who had previously worked for WWE. Russo had odd ideas, to say the least. They were so odd they were actually at odds with wrestling. For example, he had his performers openly talk about the fact that they're basically actors and that the matches are fixed. Of course, the audience knew that. But, as Reynolds and Alvarez point out, "Imagine what would happen if, during a key scene in a movie like Jurassic Park, there was a technical screw-up, and everyone suddenly saw the animated dinosaurs on a computer screen running after rendered versions of the actors?" Russo even conferred the world title, which the company had claimed was 105 years old, on diminutive actor David Arquette in order to get publicity.
Bischoff returned and tried his old tricks again, like telling the results of the WWE's matches on the air. But it backfired when he had his announcer say that wrestler Mick Foley, whom Bischoff had fired, was going to win the WWE World Championship. Most of the people watching then changed the channel to the WWE.
In another goof, throughout their tenures Bischoff and Russo took every opportunity they could to make a fool of WCW star Ric Flair. Hulk Hogan, very influential behind the scenes, didn't like that the crowds tended to cheer Flair. So they made sure Flair was portrayed as a loser whenever they could. Besides, they reasoned, Flair, then pushing 50, was too old to wrestle. He's 54 now and still wrestles on television just about every week.
In the end, WCW's ratings tanked and the company lost more than $100 million in a year. Ted Turner might have loved wrestling but other executives at Time Warner didn't, and after the firm merged with AOL, Turner lost his influence. Had WCW not been bleeding cash, it might not have been axed.
It's not hard to find case studies about business failures. But it would be hard to find another one with the same kind of bizarre and amusing twists, turns and "what were they thinking?" moments that are featured in The Death of WCW.
Michael Maiello is a Forbes staff writer.
Credit: Forbes.com