Original subtitles

Ladies and gentlemen, we welcome you to Nitro!

It was the most exciting time of my professional life.

You're either with us or you're against us.

It was like being a rock star. It really was. Everywhere we went, people

followed us.

It was truly expect the unexpected. You just did not know who was going to show

up. You can call this the New World Order of Wrestling, brother!

And that was my first go around.

When I went back in 99, things had drastically changed.

When Bischoff took a step away, shows totally took a different turn.

But he's got the belt still out.

WCW was so miserable. The morale was so low.

This company is more dysfunctional now than it has ever been.

Definitely the craziest, wildest two years of my life.

I would hear all the rumors about the new owners and whether it was Eric

Bischoff. He was going to buy it outright himself.

It was a reset. What are we going to do with championships?

What are we going to do with current existing storylines? All that.

Every question we asked got answered by three or four more other questions

because nobody knew.

So the idea of the Big Bang pay -per -view, we knew we were going to do one,

we had no idea who was going to be on that show or what that show was going to

look like. We just knew we were going to do it.

That pay -per -view obviously never happened.

You have to have lived it to believe the insanity.

In 1998, I remember it was in the summer of 98, I got a phone call. I was, you

know, asked to come over and be a part of a meeting.

And I walked into that meeting, and there was probably, you know, 15 or 18

people seated around a long table who I'd never seen before.

And after the pleasantries in that meeting, they proceeded to go around the

table and tell me, not ask me, not suggest, but tell me how I'm going to

fix something that was, quite honestly, without patting myself on the back too

much, was outperforming beyond anybody's expectations.

When Bischoff took a step away, Vince Russo was pretty much at the helm at

point in time. The shows totally took a different turn because we started doing

a lot of crazy matches, gimmick matches, everything. It had a theme to it. It

had a name to it. It was just a bunch of crazy stuff.

This match is now officially a Judy Bagwell on a forklift match.

A what?

Vince Russo, who had convinced everybody in Turner that he was single -handedly

responsible for turning WWE around. And, of course, it took about three months

for them to figure out that they made a mistake.

And I got a call from Brad Siegel. And Brad called me and said, basically,

what would it take for you to come back?

It was obvious to me that hiring Vince Russo was a cataclysmic mistake. They

finally realized it.

And I knew when Brad called me that they must be pretty desperate.

There was a lot of disgruntled people, both talent and employees, staff,

administration, you name it. The fans were getting frustrated.

So I took advantage of the situation just to be truthful about it. I was able

essentially write my own ticket. And I said I would come back.

I would oversee creative. But I have to say, I didn't feel like I was coming

back to the company that I love. The company that I love died in 1998.

I met with Rousseau.

I felt like there was a chance that we could collaborate and do so

And if Turner was still going to support the brand, I felt that there was a good

chance that I could make a difference or help make a difference.

Well, I know they made one final last push, you know, to try to make that

last. Everybody wanted WCW to stick around.

I know they did.

And me personally, I don't know.

I don't know what it was. I had a gut feeling. I had a really, really sick

feeling in my gut that the company was not going to last. I felt like the

company was going to go under. I just, I could foresee it happening.

We're going to go now to Mean Gene Okerlund, Gene.

Okay, one of them little technical difficulties that your announcer's got

cover up for here.

It was a mess.

The July pay -per -view being the straw that broke the camel's back.

And I went to Brad and I said, Brad, this company is more dysfunctional now

it has ever been.

You guys are never going to give it the type of support that it needs.

Why don't you sell it while it's still worth something?

And at first, Brad laughed at me.

And I went home and about a week later, Brad called me and said, are you

serious? about trying to find somebody to buy the company.

And I said, absolutely.

And he gave me the green light.

I heard all those rumors. I heard that Derek was, you know, planning on, you

know, trying to buy the company himself.

And, you know, but one thing you got to understand is Eric Bischoff had signed,

you know, so many wrestlers to that company. A lot of those guys would just

at home, collected money.

Even thinking about buying the company, it would have been a lost cause. And

that was the biggest mistake Eric, I think, made.

you know, trying to corner the market, you know, trying to beat WWE.

It took a little while, but through a company called Fusion Media, which was

headed up by a guy by the name of Brian Badal and Steve Greenberg, looked at it

and said, okay, let's do it.

It was as random as getting a phone call out of left field from Eric. He gave me

the pitch and I thought, you know, this could be, if the deal is right, this

could be fun.

The first I ever heard of it, My father, he basically said, hey, I want to give

you a heads up.

Ownership is going to change hands.

I literally went in one ear and out the other. I didn't believe it for a minute.

Turner was desperate to get out of the business.

Whatever the number was that we were paying, we were getting in return a

big check from Turner to effectively cover.

almost all of the talent contracts.

More importantly was we had negotiated a 10 -year agreement to control

the Wednesday night slot on TBS.

They raised $67 million.

Turner agreed to sell it. We were making our plans to acquire WCW from Turner

Broadcasting and relaunch it as a separate autonomous entity.

to our staff that Turner Broadcasting, Time Warner, has

sold WCW, World Championship Wrestling, Inc., to Fusient Media

Ventures. I just wanted to comment on how excited we are to

be making this acquisition from Turner and to be partnering with Eric Bischoff

to do this.

We believe in the product. We believe in the future. And I think all the

ingredients are here to produce a winning franchise again.

We were nailing down our strategies and tactics on how to relaunch the brand,

what it was going to look like, feel like. We knew that we weren't going to

able to travel the show the way we did with Nitro.

I had a relationship with Peter Morton, who owned the Hard Rock at the time.

We had reached.

a handshake with a hard rock to create a permanent venue for

WCW in Las Vegas.

Eric had talked to me about moving to Vegas.

I was going to be Eric's right -hand man to help run the company once Fusion

bought it and we moved the whole operation out to Vegas.

I think having somebody like Johnny in there that would have really allowed us

to come up, and I used to refer to it as two - and three -dimensional finishes,

where you think you see the finish coming or you think you know what the

is going to be, and just when you're absolutely convinced you're right, bam,

story in the ring kind of takes a different direction.

Now you're really sure you know what the finish is going to be, and bam, it

changes direction again.

Well, I mean, everybody was on edge, as you can imagine, because...

everybody's thinking, what if this happens? How does that include me into

And as a talent, especially, they would be asking, what is going to be my role

within this company, or am I out of a job?

We had to overcome a lot of bad branding. It was my opinion that we

a hiatus for three to six months.

During that period of time, building anticipation for the resurrection, if

will, the rebirth, the rebranding, whatever you want to call it.

So the idea of the Big Bang pay -per -view, we knew we were going to do one.

We knew we wanted to call it the Big Bang, but we had no idea who was going

be on that show or what that show was going to look like. We just knew we were

going to do it.

We weren't interested in going back to what we used to do in any way, shape, or

form, and the emphasis would have been much more on wrestling.

I think it was going to be from the hard rock, and I think it was just going to

be... You know, a pyro filled, you know, I think that part of the name of Big

Bang was that, you know, there were going to be sort of, you know, the kinds

explosions that, you know, happened in action movies, but not in wrestling. It

was going to be a spectacle.

And then you started hearing rumblings of the relaunch. And I don't think I

saw any documentation about the Big Bang, but I remember going, OK, I like

name. It's new. It's fresh. We're heading somewhere. But what is it?

Anything is better than the environment we're working in now.

I remember thinking that I thought the Big Bang thing was terrible.

Because the Big Bang is you create something out of nothing. So you would

admitting that WCW is nothing.

I can honestly say this is the first time I ever heard about the Big Bang.

heard anything about pay -per -view that was going to bring us out of all that

debt, put us back on the map, and get us back in a winning position.

We started looking at the talent roster and determining who we could afford to

keep, who we wanted to keep, who we didn't need to keep, who we couldn't

and just going through that analysis.

We were looking to get away from sort of the in -your -face, day -to -day

sort of competition that we thought, let's go and build something that

is similar but feels very different.

establish our own tone and personality, and at some point,

you know, sort of go and begin to be the battle brand.

And I remember being really excited about the creative plan.

You like to think it would work, but, you know, who knows?

What would have been, I think, a crisper, more fluent storytelling team

creative team?

along with the execution in the ring that would have really brought a great

story to life in a much bigger way. The majority of the people that I talked to

really genuinely.

you know, miss WCW. And it had its own loyal audience.

Despite the fact that we lost many of them, if we would have been able to,

through the absence makes the heart grow fonder factor by, you know, shutting it

down for a period of time and building up the right kind of anticipation from a

marketing and PR point of view to make people even more excited about what it

could be, that kind of thing takes time. But I firmly believe that as I do now.

That had it been done properly and executed properly, we might not have

everybody back, and we may not have made people decide that they would rather

watch us now, but we would have certainly been able to reclaim a good

if not the majority, of the audience that had just grown sour on us.

Nobody could really fathom this whole thing's going away overnight.

burned down like instantaneous.

I don't think anybody could really fathom the thought of that.

So it was more of, in my opinion, okay, what is the transition going to look

like? They're going to rename it.

They're going to throw out some old stuff, add some new stuff. It was more

less a rebranding with new ownership.

We had some high hopes that we were going to come out of the corporate funk,

to speak.

We were literally a week or so away from closing.

And I knew that once we closed the deal, I knew that I was going to go back to

working 18 -hour days, seven days a week again, which I was excited about. But I

also knew that I wouldn't have a lot of time for my family.

So I flew my wife and my kids and a couple of their friends, and we all went

to Hawaii.

And it was while I was in Hawaii, I got a phone call from Brian Badal. And he

said, Eric, it's done.

I was about ready to jump in the air at the beach and spill my Mai Tai all over

me and my wife and scream like a village idiot on the beach in Waikiki.

And he said, no, Eric, get it. It's done like it's over. We're not going

forward. All of a sudden, everything I thought that was going to go on for the

next couple of years just evaporated into thin air. I was stunned.

The big get was owning this two -hour Wednesday night slot on TBS for...

10 years.

And ultimately, that was a big part of what killed the deal.

You know, I got a call one day, I think it was from Brad basically saying, great

news. You know, I think it was Jamie Calder had come in.

Jamie has approved the deal with just one slight tweak.

The Wednesday night slot, instead of being guaranteed for 10 years, we get a

day out.

It wasn't acceptable to us. They made it clear that the Wednesday night slot was

off the table, and I think that we said, you know, without that, we just don't

know how we can make the deal work.

Eric had had his ups and downs.

had the highs to highs and lows to lows, if he had that other opportunity again,

knowing what he went through, the good and the bad, I believe he would have

taken the reset of a huge opportunity to sort of get out of the weeds of the

corporate BS that him and so many others had to deal with.

Eric Bischoff, he did a whole lot for me.

If it would have been a pay -per -view there for us to have been able to try to

pull off, I would have been there for it.

It wasn't personal.

TBS during that period of time was, you know, the comedy network.

TNT was the drama network.

Jamie Kellner came in and decided that he didn't want wrestling, not because it

was WCW.

He decided he just didn't want wrestling on the network, regardless of how

successful it was or wasn't.

a word that, all right, this is it. It's ending this weekend. It was in Panama

City. You kept hearing, it's over, but nobody could really slice and dice what

actually that meant. But as the days got closer, the word events and the

rumblings, and you still were like, how is this going to happen? The simulcast

wasn't discussed, but there were rumblings.

A little bit more information would come out, a little bit more, a little bit

more, and you go, wow, this is interesting.

You see, it was just a matter of time before

I, Vince McMahon, bought my competition.

That's right.

I own WCW.

Nobody really knew what was going on when Shane McMahon walked in that room.

That's the only time everybody concretely knew what had happened.

So one man that I was working with had an idea, and he realized this was going

to be the last day.

After hearing what was planned for the show, that there was going to be a

simulcast, he...

came to me and said, I got an idea.

Let's go out with a bang.

And proceeded to tell me his plan to jump the ring and tackle Shane McMahon

the simulcast went live.

And I'm standing there with him at go position. They go live, and I'm looking

him like, you know, he could hit the ring. He could jump in the ring.

would not stop him because everyone knows who he is.

And he could really ruin this moment.

And I looked at him, and he looked at me. He smiled.

And I said, don't even think about it, man. I said, not worth it.

He said, all right.

But it literally was, I'd say, about a 51 % to 49 % likability that he was

actually going to do it. It was that close.

And what would have happened, I don't know, but it certainly would have

history at least for a few moments.

The right thing happened.

When I look back at it all now, the absolute best thing that could possibly

happened. It did happen.

I think WCW could still be here today if that company would have been managed

properly. I really, really do.

It happened on God's time, but it happened perfectly.

I mean, Jeremy Morash, who's here now, we call it the summer of no worries. I

went out on a lake every day and had time to sort of like clear my mind.

TNA was born out of a lot of lake time the summer of 2001.

It's just that simple.

It worked out magnificently for me. You know, if it wasn't, if the buyout didn't

happen, there might not have never been a hurricane. And that was, you know, of

course, the best thing that I did in my career and still continue to do is to be

the hurricane.

I always believe that things happen for a reason.

And I believe that had I not taken the opportunity and retired.

in Japan and went to work for Eric that I would not have learned as much about

production, creative writing.

So I have no regrets.

I'm confident that.

It turned out exactly the way it should because wrestling is bigger now than

it's ever been.

I still get an opportunity occasionally to do some things with WWE.

Nitro lives on in the WWE network. I have fans that I meet at different

autograph signings and conventions and things that are 12 and 14 years old that

tell me how much they love Nitro.

Nitro still lives on to this day.