Vince McMahon once said on the “Monday Night Wars” DVD, "My philosophy is help yourself, don't hurt the other guy."
Anyone who has followed the career of WWE owner and current super-duper-trillionaire Vincent K. McMahon knows that the wrestling business is a serious thing for him. For example, this past week Ring of Honor thought they had been dealing with kinder, gentler McMahon as of late, acting as a kind of feeder system to NXT over the past few years and even getting shout-outs on WWE TV shows as a result.
Guys like Adam Cole (BAY-BAY!), Bobby Fish and Kyle O’Reilly are currently ripping up NXT as top guys, and ROH was a big part of their development and success. Everything seemed happy and we were all cool, bro.
Oh, and then ROH decided to book Madison Square Garden for a show later this year, and man oh man, did that not go well for them.
Suddenly it turned out that the date they wanted was now unavailable after a call from WWE , and we all had flashbacks to the bad old days again. But it shouldn’t be surprising, really.
Where to start with that one? How about…
1. Black Saturday
If you think that Vince ignoring the wishes of his audience and shoving whatever crap down their throats amuses him is some kind of recent development, you’re way off.
Back in 1984, Ted Turner’s Superstation TBS had been the longtime home of Georgia Championship Wrestling’s “World Championship Wrestling” flagship program at 6:05 p.m. ET every Saturday for more than a decade. Business was getting weak and McMahon pounced, striking a deal with Billionaire Ted and the Brisco Brothers to buy the promotion and their time slot out from under everyone else involved; most notably Ole Anderson, who reacted by calling Linda McMahon a very rude name at a party (which is why you won’t ever see him inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame).
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So on July 14, 1984, fans of “World Championship Wrestling” tuned in to see Ric Flair and Dusty Rhodes and instead got Vince McMahon introducing himself to a horrified audience, who were then treated to a series of boring squash matches recycled from McMahon's other TV shows. Having secured his time slot and destroyed his enemy, he immediately lost any interest in developing the show further. For the next few months, “World Championship Wrestling” sunk lower and lower on the quality scale, along with the ratings.
Complaints to the station were immediate and vociferous, with fans outraged by the loss of their favorite wrestling program, and after a year Turner was losing faith in his deal with McMahon. Seeking to get out of the deal, Turner allowed Jim Crockett Jr. to buy the slot from McMahon for a reported $1 million, thus relaunching “World Championship Wrestling” as an NWA property using guys from Crockett’s Mid-Atlantic territory. This began the long, bitter McMahon-Crocket rivalry that raged through the '80s, although McMahon mostly rebounded with a show called WrestleMania that did pretty well.
Granted, I don’t think he learned much of a lesson from that one.
2. Starrcade ‘87
Moving ahead a few years, the hot new thing with all the kids was pay-per-view, with Vince’s WrestleMania III basically revolutionizing the business in that area and making millions. Jim Crockett also decided that it might be a worthwhile idea to get into that business himself, especially after the success his Starrcade shows had enjoyed via closed circuit broadcasts in '85 and '86.
Starrcade ’87 was announced as the first foray into PPV for the NWA on Thanksgiving, with Ric Flair trying to regain the World title from Ron Garvin in the main event. Deals were struck with cable companies, advertising was launched and all systems were go.
By a staggering coincidence, Vince McMahon and the WWF decided that they also wanted to launch a Thanksgiving tradition, called the Survivor Series, and America would demand that it be on PPV. Clearly not realizing that their competitors had already booked that night for their own show, Vince went to the cable companies with his idea for the show, which were delighted with the idea: buy both the NWA and WWF PPVs that night, and get six hours of business from wrestling fans instead of three.
Well, that situation wasn’t going to stand either, because once the cable systems and PPV carriers made known their intentions to show both, Vince suddenly went Darth Vader-on-Lando Calrissian and informed them that he was altering the deal, and they should pray he didn’t alter it any further . What would now happen is that they could have Survivor Series, and if they wanted to show Starrcade, then they could never have another WWF show again.
One or two cable systems stood up to him and showed the Crockett PPV in addition to McMahon's, but there weren’t many of them. Starrcade ’87 was a giant financial disaster for Jim Crockett, with the money lost on the endeavor one of the reasons why the company was in such rough financial shape by 1988
In all fairness, Survivor Series was by far the superior show on the night. I mean, one of them had Ron Garvin in the main event, so it was fighting from underneath right from the get-go. Still, not cool.
No problem, though. Crockett decided to regroup and try the whole PPV thing again in January with Bunkhouse Stampede. What could go wrong this time?
3. The Royal Rumble/SummerSlam
Crockett announced the show and this time cable companies were lined up on his side. Vince again tried to undermine the time slot and launch his own show, but burned from losing revenue on the Thanksgiving debacle and disappointed in the revenues earned from Survivor Series, the PPV distributors sided with Crockett and the Stampede was a go.
However, in another stunning coincidence that will no doubt be pondered for years to come, McMahon decided that he had a new concept for a show he wanted to try. It was called the Royal Rumble, and his vision was to air it on free TV, on the USA Network, astonishingly at the exact same time as Crockett was airing his PPV show. So that way everyone could just watch his battle royal instead of Crockett’s battle royal. He’s really just looking out for the little guy at home who wants to enjoy wrestling.
Needless to say, the free TV show destroyed the PPV show, giving Crockett a second straight financial disaster and seemingly killing his chances of succeeding in the supposed free market of PPV wrestling shows.
In this case, however, he quickly got revenge on McMahon and proved that two wrongs do make a right sometimes. Vince was promoting the lackluster WrestleMania IV and headed for a terrible number on PPV, and to really rub salt in the wound, Crockett came up with a super-card on free TV called “Clash of Champions," featuring Ric Flair defending the World title against hot challenger Sting. It aired on TBS, at the exact same time as WrestleMania, and scored what was up until then the highest rating for any wrestling show on cable TV in history. As a bonus, it completely destroyed Vince’s profits on the night.
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Jim Crockett was suddenly hot again, and decided to strike back with another PPV show in July, the Great American Bash, with hot newcomer Lex Luger on top, and then another show in September to follow up, rumored to be dubbed Fall Brawl .
However, like a twist in a bad Vince Russo storyline, Vince McMahon went to the PPV distributors with a new contract, informing them that they needed to read the fine print. In this case, he had a new deal for them, where in order to prevent burnout of wrestling fans who might tire of oversaturating the market with grotesque numbers of shows (six PPVs a year? Who can watch all that wrestling?) he was graciously writing a new rule into his contract. In order to continue carrying the WWF’s fine product on PPV, cable companies and PPV providers would have to agree to a 60-day exclusivity window around the WWF product, so that no other promotion could air a show 30 days before a WWF show or 30 days after a WWF show. By another staggering coincidence that McMahon had just plain forgotten to mention up until that point, it turns out that he was running a brand new PPV show called SummerSlam '88 at the end of August, about 20 days before the Crockett show in September was supposed to be happening, which meant that under the terms of this new and very fair deal, the Crockett show in September was dead.
Not that he really needed to bother sabotaging poor Crockett at that point, because losses from PPV combined with ridiculous spending habits had left the promotion on the verge of death anyway until Ted Turner bought them and bailed them out in late 1988. Great American Bash was the final PPV promoted by Crockett, although Starrcade lived on after his promotion ended. With Turner in control of the company now, suddenly Vince couldn’t go to the cable companies and play hardball anymore.
In another twist to the story, in 1989 TBS decided to mess with WrestleMania again, airing the live “Clash of Champions” TV special against it just like the year before, but this time cable companies had enough of the petty war cutting into their own profits, and they collectively served both sides with an ultimatum that it would never happen again — it didn’t.
So McMahon decided to mess with someone else for a bit.
4. SuperClash III
The short version of this story, is that by the end of 1988, McMahon and Crockett had collectively taken over the landscape of wrestling and destroyed everyone else left in the business still promoting. The remnants of the Von Erich dynasty in World Class Championship Wrestling teamed up with Jerry Jarrett out of Memphis and Verne Gagne’s dying AWA and came up with a multi-promotional supercard called SuperClash III, featuring Jerry Lawler vs. Kerry Von Erich in a match to unify the various “World” titles being defended in those areas into one mega-belt: The AWA World title. It was a good idea in theory, but as Vince himself said later on, the problem was that the people involved couldn’t agree on ordering a cup of coffee, let alone organizing a major show.
But that didn’t stop him from screwing with the main event anyway.
As everyone knows by now, Kerry Von Erich lost one of his feet in a famous motorcycle accident in 1986 and was forced to wear a prosthetic replacement for the rest of his career, which he attempted to keep quiet from wrestling fans. However, the myth about no one ever knowing about it is somewhat undermined by the fact that Vince McMahon and the WWF filed an injunction with the Illinois Athletic Commission just before the SuperClash show, citing an obscure law that stated no combatant (ie, boxer or wrestler) would be allowed to compete in Chicago if they were missing a limb.
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It was a truly classless cheap shot on McMahon's part, but luckily the politicians involved were smart enough to beat him at his own game, and scheduled a hearing for the matter that fell after the SuperClash show was scheduled to occur.
Funny how the matter never came up two years later when McMahon signed Kerry Von Erich himself and had him compete in matches in Chicago under the WWF banner.
5. Arena Wars
Finally, without even getting to the Monday Night Wars, McMahon had one more salvo to fire against Turner’s WCW heading into the '90s.
With the PPV companies no longer at his beck and call, McMahon changed tactics against the enemy promotion once it became apparent that WCW was starting to gain a foothold in certain cities, especially in traditional WWF strongholds in the Northeast. So, once again, Darth Vince decided to alter the terms of the deal.
Much like his PPV “agreements," McMahon went to the arena management for all of his major cities (most notably MSG in New York and Nassau Coliseum on Long Island) and made them sign 30-to-90 day exclusivity deals, where no other wrestling company would be allowed to stage events in those arenas within however many days of a WWF show, should they want to continue putting on WWF shows. Wouldn’t you know, for every city where WCW had a show booked, McMahon suddenly “remembered” that he had shows booked within that time frame. As long as he kept coming back to the big cities a certain number of times per year, WCW would literally be locked out of running shows in that city unless they had a secondary venue.
This actually extended well into what we consider the “modern era," with WCW trying to book MSG as late as 1994 during Hulk Hogan’s initial WCW run. They announced and advertised a November date in MSG with Hulk Hogan vs. Ric Flair on top, which would have marked the first time in more than 30 years that someone other than McMahon had booked the Garden.
Wouldn’t you know, McMahon invoked a “right of first refusal” clause with MSG and decided that he wanted to run his own show that night instead. Oddly enough, that show was the one where Diesel won the WWF title from Bob Backlund in eight seconds, so add Kevin Nash’s push to the list of horrible things done by McMahon in the name of “helping himself and not hurting the other guy”.
