Yes, I’m reviewing a book about professional wrestling—but before half of you lose your respect for me and leave, hear me out!
Obviously, pro wrestling is not for everyone (it’s a guilty pleasure of mine), but as a book for doing business, it is probably one of the best I’ve ever read, in terms of learning what NOT to do. The prose is crisp, humorous, and easy to read, none of which belies the sheer, overwhelming, failure that emanates from the content of its pages. If you are planning on starting a business anytime soon, you need to read this book, and commit the many mistakes of WCW to memory.
For those of you who don’t remember the mid to late 1990s, World Championship Wrestling (more specifically it’s Monday Nitro show) was, at its height (a period of about a year and a half, from mid-1997 to January of 1999), the most popular television show in the world. And yet, a series of horrendous decisions (that truthfully started half a decade earlier), ended up killing the promotion stone dead by 2001.
That’s the basic story for those totally unaware of what happened, but if you want specific takeaways as to what you can learn…
1)Don’t be a one trick pony:
A recurring theme in the book is that many of the people involved in the clusterfuck that was WCW were extremely talented and had good ideas. The problem was that they repeatedly kept going back to the same well. The most obvious example of this is how the New World Order stable stayed on LONG after anybody gave a damn about it (For reasons that will be delineated below), but also that the bookers (Writers of the show) tended to have a very limited playbook of storylines and characters that they continually drew from.
2) Keep your subordinates subordinate.
Tying directly into the last one, one of the big problems with WCW was that Eric Bischoff (the guy running the show) was, to put it bluntly, kind of a nuthugger for the old established stars like Hulk Hogan and Kevin Nash, who managed to convince him that they were the only ones who drew money and eventually finagled their way into contracts with creative control clauses.
3) Don’t shit on your audience
And recognize what they want. To cite one example for the latter: Bischoff made himself famous with many new and popular innovations such as importing Mexican and Japanese talent (showcasing a new style of wrestling most Americans had never seen), and giving smaller, more nimble wrestlers some exposure (in the newly-minted Cruiserweight division). The audience, having never seen this acrobatic sort of wrestling before, loved it, and eventually started to boo the lumbering old meathead style of wrestling epitomized by the n.w.o. stuff. The obvious conclusion would be to put the popular wrestlers and style into the main event and the less popular stuff in the undercard—but this of course never occurred.
And as for the former…for a decade before the NOW formed, Ric Flair carried the WCW company on his shoulders (more specifically the NWA, but that’s a whole different story). To this very day, Ric Flair is idolized throughout the Southern United States in general and North Carolina in particular. This didn’t stop WCW from making him into a complete buffoon for the majority of his 90s run (being literally buried in the desert and being sent to an insane asylum, just to cite two examples). And of course the audience hated it, not that anybody cared.
4) Recognize the young and hungry talent
Going hand in hand with the last one, take a good look at your employees, see who’s performing well and getting good reactions, and promote them!
5) Don’t let ego get in the way of a good product
Needless to say, there were repeated opportunities to salvage the situation (the fact that the undercards were still popular, the rise of new stars like Bill Goldberg, and the fact that they had Turner Broadcasting’s money behind them this whole time), but due to the inflated egos of everybody involved, they missed every opportunity. In particular, an ego problem specific to wrestling is that oftentimes, those with creative control will do everything in their power to avoid losing, despite the fact that any story in which one side always wins is going to become very boring very fast.
The NOW story line was an “invasion” storyline, a storyline that had been done a few times in wrestling previously, and would be done a few times afterwards. And inevitably, they tend to suck because one of the groups (it varies from company to company whether it’s the invaders or the invaded) refuses to show themselves losing or being vulnerable (Despite the fact that this would make the story much more suspenseful and thus interesting), and by extension make the other group look like complete chodes. The NWA invaded WCW and was made to look like losers in the 80s, WCW was ultimately made to look stupid in comparison to the nwo in the 90s, and WCW was made to look like a bunch of morons when they invaded the WWF in the early 2000s. Sadly, professional wrestling still seems stuck in a “carnie” mindset where people are fighting to put themselves over instead of doing what will make the company on the whole succeed.
6) Provide what your opponent does not
WCW got big due to providing a new style of professional wrestling, as well as tapping into what was hot in popular culture. In turn, the WWF recovered and ultimately won the “Monday Night Wars” for doing similar (and to a greater extent) while WCW was beating the NOW horse.
7) Don’t oversaturate.
Related to the “beating a dead horse” idea, even if you have surefire idea, you can ruin it with over exposure and diluting the brand. Take the NOW-It started off a stable made entirely of former and/or current world champions, but after 1 year it had guys like Scott Norton and Virgil stinking up the joint.
8) Double and Triple Check To Avoid Looking Stupid
WCW pulled this one a LOT. From Goldberg being incapable of walking across the street in 30 minutes, to the commentators not being told what was going on and having to guess, WCW Monday Nitro did itself no favors in coming off as an incompetent clown show week after week. And that’s not getting into the embarrassment that was Thursday Night Thunder.
9) Throwing Money at Problems Rarely Works
Or, you have to attack the core problem, rather than rely on your backers to constantly bail you out. Ultimately, it seems to me that the problem with WCW was that they were complacent for a decade because they knew that Ted Turner loved wrestling and would never let the company go out of business, and the net loss that WCW represented for most of its life was a small fraction of Turner’s financial empire. And by the time the Time Warner merger occurred, it was too late to fix decades of incompetence.
Click here to buy The Death of WCW.