rating on Saturday night under Jim Barnett. Ten months after Vince took over, it was down to 5.3.
So a week after he’d started airing Watts’s show on Sunday afternoons, Turner asked McMahon to a meeting in his Manhattan office to say he’d had enough. “I want you off my network,” he said, “and if I have to sue you to do it, I will.”
McMahon left the office fuming. Turning to Barnett, who’d come to work for the WWF after the Georgia takeover, he said, “I should have thrown Ted out that goddamned window. I invested a million dollars in Georgia. Now what do I do? It’s no good without the TV.”
Barnett had one idea. He knew Watts had the inside track to move from Sunday afternoons to Saturday night. He also knew that if Turner sued to get Vince off TBS and signed a successor deal with Watts, Vince would lose his million-dollar investment. In order to prevent that from happening, Barnett decided to call the only person he could think of who might be willing to buy Vince out of his jam before Turner ousted him.
THE CAROLINAS were known as a prestige territory in wrestling, and that was thanks to “Big Jim” Crockett, a jack-of-all-trades who staged Tommy Dorsey concerts and shows like My Fair Lady in the fifties while putting on wrestling matches and running restaurants with names like the Ringside. As the company bearing his name grew into one of Charlotte’s largest, he added a minor-league baseball franchise to the portfolio and built a stadium in Charlotte called Crockett Park. His four kids—Frances, Jimmy, David, and Jackie—learned about life while driving to towns like Lumberton on weekends and helping to set up wrestling rings.
From an early age, Jimmy was embarrassed about that part of their lives. When friends would ask, he’d tell them that his father made the family money by promoting concerts, which was true to an extent, since Big Jim also arranged Saturday night dances for the city’s blacks. But the old man was under no illusion about who or what he was. After he was offered the right to promote Harlem Globetrotters dates east of the Mississippi River, he turned it down because it would take too much time away from what paid the bills: wrestling.
Jimmy traveled with his dad the most and heard all of the stories he had to tell. Inevitably, they ended with such aphorisms as “Never promote what you like, son. Promote what the fans like.” But when the old man died on April Fools’ Day of 1973, the family’s matriarch, Elizabeth, could see that Jimmy didn’t want any part of it, so she handed the reins to her son-in-law, John Ringley, Frances’s husband, who’d been Big Jim’s right-hand man. Unfortunately, he didn’t last long in the job. When he was caught having an affair with a former Miss Tennessee, the family gathered and voted to kick him out. At twenty-four, Jimmy was the only one in a position to take over.
Jimmy had no burning desire to become a public personality. While men like Watts and McMahon enjoyed calling their own matches, Jimmy considered it such a chore that he flipped younger brother David for the announcing duties and was happy to lose. Depending on how one saw him, he was either painfully shy or an aloof son of privilege. Either way, when his friends in the Charlotte GOP pushed him to run for the North Carolina Senate in 1974, he waged a reluctant country club campaign that left him sixth in a field of six. The round-faced southerner dropped politics after that and contented himself with controlling wrestling in cities like Norfolk, Richmond, Columbia, South Carolina, and Charlotte, which made him a regional power in the National Wrestling Alliance.
Like everyone else in the business, Jimmy Crockett was desperate to get on TBS and had been since the first time he’d met Turner in the mid-seventies. He’d made himself unforgettable by wearing a pair of white wool pants with cream and yellow checks, a blue shirt, and a yellow tie to that meeting, and
So a week after he’d started airing Watts’s show on Sunday afternoons, Turner asked McMahon to a meeting in his Manhattan office to say he’d had enough. “I want you off my network,” he said, “and if I have to sue you to do it, I will.”
McMahon left the office fuming. Turning to Barnett, who’d come to work for the WWF after the Georgia takeover, he said, “I should have thrown Ted out that goddamned window. I invested a million dollars in Georgia. Now what do I do? It’s no good without the TV.”
Barnett had one idea. He knew Watts had the inside track to move from Sunday afternoons to Saturday night. He also knew that if Turner sued to get Vince off TBS and signed a successor deal with Watts, Vince would lose his million-dollar investment. In order to prevent that from happening, Barnett decided to call the only person he could think of who might be willing to buy Vince out of his jam before Turner ousted him.
THE CAROLINAS were known as a prestige territory in wrestling, and that was thanks to “Big Jim” Crockett, a jack-of-all-trades who staged Tommy Dorsey concerts and shows like My Fair Lady in the fifties while putting on wrestling matches and running restaurants with names like the Ringside. As the company bearing his name grew into one of Charlotte’s largest, he added a minor-league baseball franchise to the portfolio and built a stadium in Charlotte called Crockett Park. His four kids—Frances, Jimmy, David, and Jackie—learned about life while driving to towns like Lumberton on weekends and helping to set up wrestling rings.
From an early age, Jimmy was embarrassed about that part of their lives. When friends would ask, he’d tell them that his father made the family money by promoting concerts, which was true to an extent, since Big Jim also arranged Saturday night dances for the city’s blacks. But the old man was under no illusion about who or what he was. After he was offered the right to promote Harlem Globetrotters dates east of the Mississippi River, he turned it down because it would take too much time away from what paid the bills: wrestling.
Jimmy traveled with his dad the most and heard all of the stories he had to tell. Inevitably, they ended with such aphorisms as “Never promote what you like, son. Promote what the fans like.” But when the old man died on April Fools’ Day of 1973, the family’s matriarch, Elizabeth, could see that Jimmy didn’t want any part of it, so she handed the reins to her son-in-law, John Ringley, Frances’s husband, who’d been Big Jim’s right-hand man. Unfortunately, he didn’t last long in the job. When he was caught having an affair with a former Miss Tennessee, the family gathered and voted to kick him out. At twenty-four, Jimmy was the only one in a position to take over.
Jimmy had no burning desire to become a public personality. While men like Watts and McMahon enjoyed calling their own matches, Jimmy considered it such a chore that he flipped younger brother David for the announcing duties and was happy to lose. Depending on how one saw him, he was either painfully shy or an aloof son of privilege. Either way, when his friends in the Charlotte GOP pushed him to run for the North Carolina Senate in 1974, he waged a reluctant country club campaign that left him sixth in a field of six. The round-faced southerner dropped politics after that and contented himself with controlling wrestling in cities like Norfolk, Richmond, Columbia, South Carolina, and Charlotte, which made him a regional power in the National Wrestling Alliance.
Like everyone else in the business, Jimmy Crockett was desperate to get on TBS and had been since the first time he’d met Turner in the mid-seventies. He’d made himself unforgettable by wearing a pair of white wool pants with cream and yellow checks, a blue shirt, and a yellow tie to that meeting, and
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