Wrestling questions thread

[Big Boss Man]

That was what Paul E was doing with ECW. Accentuating the positives and heading the negatives. Which is why only a handful of guys got over when they went to WCW & WWF. Because Paul was so good in highlighting the strong aspects of their gimmick but only in a few occasions did they gel elsewhere.

With Demo, WWF at the time really only had Arn & Tully as their top heel team. Arguably they had Akeem and the Big Boss Man too and maybe if they paired up Andre and Ted DiBiase longer but that team fizzled out seemingly after Summerslam 88. So it would have made more sense WWFs merchant department put more emphasis on The Rockers, Hart Foundation etc. and keep Demolition as the top heel tag team and be the team to beat.

Today you could put out merch for them regardless but back there was no shades of grey and more cut and dry Babyfaces and heels. I think with their look and the theme music they had that 1980s heavy metal/heavy rock appeal with the Kiss-esque face paint. If it wasn't for the lawsuit and the fall out between Vince & Bill over the trademark (if I'm correct) then Demolition should have been in the HOF a long time ago.

[Ocelot]

Oh man.

Remember when they teased a three way feud between Demolition, the Hart Foundation, and the Rockers?

God I remember wanted to see a match with three times so bad back then.

[Big Boss Man]

Watched the Timeline WWF Bret and he mentioned he thought Lawler was working with Vince before he brought him in back to 92. Said he might've been behind the Kaufman/Lawler stuff I believe that was '82, so I'm not sure.

With the whole revelation on Rise & Fall of ECW about ECW being on the WWE payroll or something similar, when did the working relationship with ECW & WWF begin, around 97 I'm assuming. Unless sooner, although wasn't WCW working with them kinda at one point too.

[Bandit]

Watched the Timeline WWF Bret and he mentioned he thought Lawler was working with Vince before he brought him in back to 92. Said he might've been behind the Kaufman/Lawler stuff I believe that was '82, so I'm not sure.

Kaufman really wanted to work for WWWF because he was from New York so he'd been a fan of it since he was a kid. But while Vince Jr. wanted to work with him, Vince Sr. said no because he thought Kaufman would expose the business. So Vince Jr. told Andy he knew Memphis would work with him. Andy was a year too early because Vince hadn't bought the territory yet and he'd definitely have used him.

With the whole revelation on Rise & Fall of ECW about ECW being on the WWE payroll or something similar, when did the working relationship with ECW & WWF begin, around 97 I'm assuming. Unless sooner, although wasn't WCW working with them kinda at one point too.

It wasn't quite like that. Vince was friendly with all the territories until he bought WWWF from his dad and informed them at an NWA meeting he was going national. Jarrett and Lawler ended up becoming friends with Vince in the 90s, but in the 80s they were very angry with him taking Randy Savage and Jimmy Hart. Vince also messed with Lawler in AWA in 1988 by almost getting Superclash III shut down and their Illinois license revoked when he called the athletic commission to tell them Kerry Von Erich only had one foot and there was a law you couldn't box or wrestle with an amputation.

[Big Boss Man]

Thanks, I think Lawler/Kaufman still is a great angle years on & if Vince was behind it maybe it would have predated the whole Hulkamania thing in terms of taking wrestling more mainstream.

With ECW, I believe Tod basically ran the financial side until Paul E took over so I imagine if there was any WWF involvement, I can't remember it in detail, just ECW was getting help from the WWF. They did the ECW on Raw thing & had them ringside at one of the PPVs.

I'm assuming this might've been because Paul E worked for Vince Sr as a photographer, I think Freddie Blassie was nice to Paul too & Vince seemingly has a loyalty to those who worked with or for Vince Sr. So helping ECW, which they could've more so by letting the bigger stars stay there once WWF business was booming & use it like a developmental territory of sorts.

Hearing Tod talk about it ECW was very much his promotion too until Paul E took much more control, I forget which year Tod left, can't recall him being part of Barely Legal PPV so maybe he'd gone by 1997.

He was also saying Eddie Gilbert talking about he had 49% stake back in the Eastern days & that it was a work, so seems even back then maybe Eddie had the foresight it was going places & wanted to be involved.

Did Paul E thank Tod Gordon in his HOF speech & Eddie, as I believe it was Eddie Gilbert who brought him into ECW.

[Bandit]

The ECW-WWF relationship was when WWF took 2 Cold Scorpio to become Flash Funk Heyman was paid a consultant fee like Jerry Jarrett was as well. WWF was also sending guys who needed help before they went on TV or weren't over to Memphis and ECW for free. Like Al Snow and Justin Credible were being paid their WWF contracts in ECW. And Vince sent Rocky Maivia and Kurt Angle to Memphis to learn and paid them. That stopped once OVW became the official WWF indie promotion.

[Big Boss Man]

Thanks, I believe Jerry Jarrett was going to be in charge if Vince lost the steroid trial.

JR said WWE were paying Paul E $50,000 per month to keep ECW running, this must have been towards the end of the company to keep them afloat. He wasn't exactly sure on the dollar amount either, so maybe it was more or less, they were helping Paul out & there was a good working relationship between ECW & WWE.

Article about it here:
https://cultaholic.com/posts/jim-ross-w ... p-ecw-open

[Bandit]

After WWF caused them to be cancelled by TNN so Raw could move there Vince gave Heyman some money so he wouldn't take things to court. That was September 2000 and they were out of business by February 2001 and Heyman showed up on Raw.

[Big Boss Man]

Thanks, such a shame ECW went out of business as they innovated so much of what WWF were doing back then & WCW too. ECW 2.0 could've been so much much better than it was, Paul E could've innovated stuff that WWE could have "borrowed" to keep wrestling moving forwards. As it still very much relies on nostalgia that's why WWE brought back Rock & AEW brought in Edge, Christian, Sting etc

Watching the timeline 93 & Tod mentioned the "Mole" story. From what I gather he was phoning Kevin Sullivan at WCW getting ECW wrestlers who wanted to leave better deals.

Also read InDemand owed ECW $2.8m but wouldn't pay up, as they heard ECW were going out of business & if they waited til they filed for bankruptcy they'd pay just a tiny amount. Could a PPV company withhold revenue that way, doesn't sound right to me as surely ECW were legally entitled to all the 2.8mil.

[Bandit]

Watching the timeline 93 & Tod mentioned the "Mole" story. From what I gather he was phoning Kevin Sullivan at WCW getting ECW wrestlers who wanted to leave better deals.

This is Tod Gordon's side of the story from his book

Most of the boys thought I was still in charge and would come to me with an issue that I could usually resolve without going to Paul. Over time, I saw more and more workers complaining about not getting their payoffs, and that was putting me in a tough spot. The locker room was becoming more divided and miserable. Some of the guys started coming up to me asking if I could get them work elsewhere, knowing I’d done it in the past with Public Enemy.

In late 1995, Teddy and Johnny came to me and said they wanted to go to WWE. I thought they would get over anywhere they went, but I suspected they’d be treated better in WCW and I could use my relationship with Kevin Sullivan to get them a better deal. Kevin was booking for WCW, and he was fond of using our people. I called him and said Vince had made Public Enemy an offer, but I thought they were better suited there. Sullivan said he’d check with WCW’s Executive Vice President Eric Bischoff and get back to me. That offer from WWE was a good thing—once Eric heard that, he told Sullivan to double the amount for WCW. It was a super offer and I didn’t want them to leave, but I loved those guys and wanted them to do as well as possible. They took the offer and worked in WCW for a couple of years before going to WWE and getting squashed by the tag team APA when Teddy and Johnny didn’t want to lose by going through a table, which was their gimmick. Though I was happy to see our guys move on to make real money, Paul was not. He saw leaving ECW as the ultimate act of betrayal. These workers took such risks, enduring inhumane punishment for ECW, and they were paid a few hundred bucks for it. When they were finally offered a $100,000 guarantee with upside potential, how could you not be happy for them? Their investment in us finally paid off for them.

Whenever someone came to me about leaving, I told them to go, but to Paul if you left, you were dead to him. Sandman and Fonzie came up to me in 1997 and said they were miserable without me at the helm and had had enough. They said they hated Paul and needed to get out of there, and asked me to call WCW. In doing so, they started a shitstorm I’m still asked about today. In short time, Sabu also got wind of Sandman and Fonzie’s overture to me and asked me to help him get out too. I called Terry Taylor, who had worked for me in our early days and was now in a talent relations role for WCW. I told him about Sandman, Fonzie, and Sabu looking to leave ECW, and if they were interested, he could probably get them. He checked with Bischoff and, in a daor so, he called back saying they were only interested in Sabu at that time.

I let Sabu know the good news, and then I broke the bad news to Fonzie and Hack. I told Sabu to call Terry Taylor. A short time later, Paul pulled me aside. “We have a mole,” he said. “A what?” “Someone is trying to get our talent to sign with WCW. They’re going to send everyone over there and kill ECW.” I suppose Terry Taylor called Paul and let him know about the inquiries made on behalf of Sabu, Sandman, and Fonzie. I was hoping Sabu cut a good deal with WCW, but it seemed Taylor called Paul before Sabu returned the call to Taylor. Paul said that Sabu was not free to go. I couldn’t believe it. “Paul, this guy broke his neck for us. How can you begrudge him for wanting to get paid?” He didn’t care. I never saw Paul display genuine feelings for anyone, so I was appealing to something that simply wasn’t there.

I’m sure you’re thinking this is a free country and no man can stop another from taking a job where they want to. Here is a perfect illustration of the lengths to which Paul would go in controlling the talent. Paul went to Sabu and told him that he couldn’t leave and violate the contract he’d signed with ECW, which was ridiculous as we never offered contracts to anyone. The talent were independent contractors, not employees. I actually couldn’t legally bind a contractor to us. I was furious and went to Sabu. “Sabu, you never signed a contract,” I reminded him. “Paulie said I signed one, so maybe I did. I don’t remember.” The guy was barely literate and had about a hundred concussions. Paul probably scribbled his name on a piece of toilet paper and held it up to show him. “Fuck that,” I said. “You tell Paul you’re going.” Sabu wouldn’t have a chance to do that. Paul jumped the line and spoke with Terry Taylor and told him that Sabu was under exclusive contract and ECW would sue WCW if they meddled with him again. I tried to call Taylor and smooth things over, but he said it wasn’t worth the risk. WCW was going to pass on Sabu. Now he’s standing there telling me we have a mole.

"Paul, you have no mole. I called Terry Taylor for these guys because they’re miserable here. The morale in the locker room is terrible, and we never had that here before. I’m just trying to help out my friends so they can have a career.” Paul’s instincts kicked in, and he read the landscape like General Patton. He realized Sabu was one step from leaving, and Raven, Perry Saturn, and Stevie Richards had already jumped ship to WCW on their own. Even though they didn’t take Hack or Fonzie, I told Paul they wanted to go too. A mole wasn’t moving talent—his leadership was.

Then I told Paul that I was leaving too. I’d already given away the company, and now I was burning all the bridges I’d built in the business, like Fumi Saito. I gave Paul my final date, and he looked at me for a while, then had one final request. “I’m losing the locker room, and I need to pull everyone together. You have to help me here.” He had one big ask—would I agree to be the heel so he can fix the morale? “I have to get them back or else this thing will fall apart. You want that to happen?” I didn’t. But I also didn’t yet know the full scope of what Paul was preparing to tell the locker room. If it was going to keep the talent working and not fighting with each other, I would deal with their knowing I had tried to get Sabu, Sandman, and Fonzie a job. None of them seemed to mind when I’d called for Public Enemy back in ’95.

Paul went into his worker voice. “If you don’t tell anyone about this, after a while you can come back as the greatest heel ever in the pro wrestling business. What’s better than a heel owner?” He was very expansive on the idea, but I told him I knew he was full of shit. In truth, it was a really good idea. I never said he wasn’t brilliant. I told Paul to go tell them whatever he wanted, and he did. He went off and apparently called some of the New York crew to his house and before I knew it, the sheets started printing that ECW had “a mole” looking to destroy the company. Joey Styles did a story on the weekly 900 hotline saying, “Someone in the company is trying to bring ECW down!”

The story was everywhere, and Paul used it to create an “us versus them” solidarity in the locker room. He’d told them a mole inside the company was planning on sending all the talent to WCW for an invasion angle that would leave ECW empty and bankrupt. Paul gallantly told the crew that this mole was looking to sink anyone who wasn’t lucky enough to be stolen away, and fuck all our fans over. He used it to galvanize the locker room, and it worked.

Anyone truly in the know was aware that I could’ve sunk the company back in ’95 when I walked away from running the operation and pulled my financing. I could’ve done it again by not relinquishing the video rights to Paul when he asked. I did that to keep everyone working, and some of those very people were showing up in newsletters with shitty quotes about me. Meltzer, Scherer, and all the writers were reaching out for comment. “Are you the mole?” they were all asking. I told them I had no comment. There was no point in going into the whole story, and doing so would’ve violated what I’d told Paul he could do to restore order in his locker room. My contradicting him or revealing it was a plan I’d agreed to would be shitting on the company I built. I just couldn’t do it. I still looked at the logo, the ECW Arena, and the talent and saw my creation. When your child grows up and moves out, they’re still your kid.

Also read InDemand owed ECW $2.8m but wouldn't pay up, as they heard ECW were going out of business & if they waited til they filed for bankruptcy they'd pay just a tiny amount. Could a PPV company withhold revenue that way, doesn't sound right to me as surely ECW were legally entitled to all the 2.8mil.

They were probably claiming they were still looking into the buyrate figures to make sure it was right to string them along. They knew ECW couldn't afford to take them to court.

[Ocelot]

The Tod Gordon book is really good and I'm surprised how matter of fact he was. Probably as close to the real story as we'll ever get.

[Big Boss Man]

Tod seemed sincere telling the story too on the Timeline doc, so I believed what he was saying & thanks for sharing the excerpt from his book.

The PPV thing, how it all works is interesting, I believe nowadays it's probably a lot faster, but didn't it take a while for the PPV company to tally up all the buys & have a few months to pay up.

Found this interesting article about boxing & PPV

Business of Boxing: How Does the Pay-Per-View Deal Work?

by Charles Jay

Where does the money go when a fan plunks down $49.95 to see a pay-per-view fight on television? Does it go directly to the fighters? Does it go into the hands of promoters? What role do the networks play? Maybe this piece will, in a basic sort of way, shine some light on it for you.

As the apparatus of pay-per-view has matured, it has evolved into a process that customarily works like this: the promoter will make a fight between two combatants, along with an undercard to support it. He approaches the pay-per-view distributor, like HBO PPV or Showtime PPV (or the new entrant, Epix) with that fight, and the distributor makes the decision as to whether to carry it or not. If the fight gets the green light, the distributor goes to work clearing the fight with the MSO’s (multiple system operators) who control virtually the entire cable universe. These include companies like Time Warner, Cablevision, Comcast. Cox and Charter.

The cable systems are in on the deal; that’s their price tag for carrying a certain amount of weight on the local and regional level. They are going to run commercials for the event, and sometimes the promotional materials can be provided by the promoter, although often the cable people will put together their own, because they may have certain special promotions they will do in association with the event.

The standard breakdown as far as money is concerned is a 10% fee off the top for the distributor, with 45% each for the cable system and the promoter. So when you see a price tag on a fight, you know that the promoter will get about 45% of that.

Let’s say a fight is priced at $49.95, which for the sake of simplicity we are going to round up to $50. If it’s HBO PPV that is being used, HBO is not a party that is at risk as far as the fight itself is concerned but will take the 10% fee off the top ($5). The promoter and the cable companies both wind up with $22.50 per “sub” (or subscriber).

If a fight sells a million pay-per-view subscribers, HBO’s pay-per-view arm will get $5 million and the promoters will pocket $22,500,000. If that level of revenue, along with the other revenue streams (live gate or casino site fee, merchandising, international rights, etc.) did not meet what the promoter guaranteed the fighters, well, let’s just say that would be an unfortunate occurrence.

Some semantics might be in order at this time. The term “pay-per-view,” as it applies to fights that are transmitted into the home in exchange for a fee, is kind of a misnomer, as promoters have discovered. When fights go into a movie theater or another venue that gets it via closed circuit, it is much closer to the actual concept of “pay-per-view,” because it gets much closer to the ideal that everyone who views it has to pay for it. When it goes into homes, it may turn out to be, in fact, pay per MANY views, as buyers often invite multiple friends over. As we mentioned in a story last week, that’s why promoters are interested in experimenting with going the theater route.

That method does not necessarily involve HBO PPV, but don’t get the impression that they are just going along for a free ride when they engineer the pay-per-view distribution. The strength of a company like that is that it not only can instantly make an event happen and effectively coordinate it over the television platform (not to mention produce it as well), it can also apply some marketing muscle on a national level. You have seen that with the “24/7” series that HBO airs, which doubles as an entertainment piece and a de facto infomercial for the pay-per-view telecast.

Now Time Warner is expanding that promotional vehicle to other outlets like CNN, which they control. Showtime Pay-Per-View has done the same through its “Fight Camp 360,” which was used in four parts to promote the Manny Pacquiao-Shane Mosley fight, and aired not on Showtime’s premium channel but to a wider audience on CBS, which is also owned by Viacom. This kind of programming might be the most effective in selling an upcoming fight to the more casual audience, because it shows the fighters in a more human “reality” setting.

In this atmosphere where media conglomerates own many properties across the spectrum of broadcast, cable, premium and even satellite programming, they are starting to expand their horizons and operate more creatively for a potential constituency that has many more choices on their remote than they had when pay-per-view first became a prominent part of the boxing culture. You can expect that activity on the part of HBO, Showtime and even ESPN (which has a pay-per-view apparatus), all of which are owned by a different conglomerate, will reflect that into the future.

Source: Boxing Insider

[Bandit]

Which wrestler that died young do you think would have had the biggest impact on the business if they had lived?

[Dr. Zoidberg]

Probably Bruiser Brody if he ended up going to WWE and feuding with Hulk. He did have a big impact anyway, but it would have been bigger.

It would have been interesting to see guys like Eddie Gilbert and Gino Hernandez in the Monday Night War era. If Eddie was clean he would have been a big player behind the scenes. Gino would have been 35 when Nitro started.

[Ocelot]

Eddie Gilbert would have been a huge deal from 96 on, as his creativity would have blossomed. I think he would have made his way back to ECW and I think the promotion might even still be around today.

Owen Hart was the original choice to be The Game and the idea of him as a veteran main event heel is intriguing.