nightmares.”
Before he lost it all, Watts picked up the phone to call Vince McMahon with an offer to sell out. But Vince already had more stations than he knew what to do with. Moreover, Watts’s UWF looked like it wouldn’t last through the summer. Why should Vince pay for something that he could get for free just by waiting?
On the way back to Dallas, Watts decided he had one more card to play. Vince may not have been interested, but Watts decided that Jimmy Crockett didn’t have to know that. So once he got back to his office, Watts had Jim Ross call Crockett with a deception, saying that McMahon was close to buying the UWF. Watts followed up the call personally a week later.
“Vince is just about at the table, Jimmy,” Watts purred. “If he buys us, he’s gonna put you guys out of business.”
Crockett had recently expanded into Florida, giving him a presence from Philadelphia to Miami. Watts was offering him arena contracts and local TV deals in the mid-South, the Midwest, and parts of the West Coast. And the more markets that he had for his show, the more he could promise advertisers a large single block of exposure. In March 1987, he flew to Tulsa to buy the UWF from an exhausted but relieved Cowboy Bill Watts.
“It was our downfall,” Jimmy’s younger brother David would say years later. “If we’d just sat back and let him go under, we could have had his TV contracts for free. Instead, we spent a million and inherited all of his past-due bills. And what the hell did we need with an office in Texas?”
FEWER THAN a million homes were wired for pay-per-view when the first Wrestlemania was produced in March 1985. By 1987, the figure was 10 million, and Jim Troy, McMahon’s right-hand man, thought the time was ripe to test the new technology.
Troy realized it in 1986, after they’d drawn one hundred thousand pay-per-view buys to the second Wrestlemania , a three-city event broadcast from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. At the cable conventions he subsequently visited, cable operators were coming up to him to say that they had done unparalleled numbers. The technology was still primitive, and to enable it customers had to go to the office of their local provider and rent a cylindrical device that unscrambled the event’s signal when inserted between the television and the cable jack. Still, cable operators who served as few as ten thousand customers were renting the devices to as many as 18 percent of their viewers. That buy rate “made them superheroes in their markets,” Troy says. “It also created a buzz among the bigger cable providers.”
In anticipation of the third Wrestlemania , Troy started bringing Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, and Macho Man Randy Savage to the conventions, creating even more of a stir. By early 1987, the Saturday Night Main Event was pulling in strong ratings on NBC, All-American Wrestling was placing in the top fifteen of the new Nielsen cable ratings for USA, and the WWF’s syndicated offerings were being seen on three hundred stations from coast to coast. Looking at the remarkable forces arrayed in their favor, Troy walked into Vince’s office one day and said, “I don’t want to scare you, but we’re on track to do five times what we did last year.”
Affiliates of the fledgling Fox television network were the biggest buyers of WWF’s syndicated shows. The largest among them was in Detroit, home to the ninety-three-thousand-seat Pontiac Silverdome, where the pope had delivered Mass on his tour of the United States. Vince joked that since he was nearly as big as God, he should play the Silverdome, too.
To fill an arena of that size, he’d need the industry’s two biggest draws as the main event, that much was clear. Hogan, the number one gate attraction in the business, was the obvious choice as the baby-face. The choice of the heel was more problematic, because the only other man who Vince knew could guarantee a sellout was waiting to die in
Before he lost it all, Watts picked up the phone to call Vince McMahon with an offer to sell out. But Vince already had more stations than he knew what to do with. Moreover, Watts’s UWF looked like it wouldn’t last through the summer. Why should Vince pay for something that he could get for free just by waiting?
On the way back to Dallas, Watts decided he had one more card to play. Vince may not have been interested, but Watts decided that Jimmy Crockett didn’t have to know that. So once he got back to his office, Watts had Jim Ross call Crockett with a deception, saying that McMahon was close to buying the UWF. Watts followed up the call personally a week later.
“Vince is just about at the table, Jimmy,” Watts purred. “If he buys us, he’s gonna put you guys out of business.”
Crockett had recently expanded into Florida, giving him a presence from Philadelphia to Miami. Watts was offering him arena contracts and local TV deals in the mid-South, the Midwest, and parts of the West Coast. And the more markets that he had for his show, the more he could promise advertisers a large single block of exposure. In March 1987, he flew to Tulsa to buy the UWF from an exhausted but relieved Cowboy Bill Watts.
“It was our downfall,” Jimmy’s younger brother David would say years later. “If we’d just sat back and let him go under, we could have had his TV contracts for free. Instead, we spent a million and inherited all of his past-due bills. And what the hell did we need with an office in Texas?”
FEWER THAN a million homes were wired for pay-per-view when the first Wrestlemania was produced in March 1985. By 1987, the figure was 10 million, and Jim Troy, McMahon’s right-hand man, thought the time was ripe to test the new technology.
Troy realized it in 1986, after they’d drawn one hundred thousand pay-per-view buys to the second Wrestlemania , a three-city event broadcast from New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. At the cable conventions he subsequently visited, cable operators were coming up to him to say that they had done unparalleled numbers. The technology was still primitive, and to enable it customers had to go to the office of their local provider and rent a cylindrical device that unscrambled the event’s signal when inserted between the television and the cable jack. Still, cable operators who served as few as ten thousand customers were renting the devices to as many as 18 percent of their viewers. That buy rate “made them superheroes in their markets,” Troy says. “It also created a buzz among the bigger cable providers.”
In anticipation of the third Wrestlemania , Troy started bringing Hulk Hogan, Roddy Piper, and Macho Man Randy Savage to the conventions, creating even more of a stir. By early 1987, the Saturday Night Main Event was pulling in strong ratings on NBC, All-American Wrestling was placing in the top fifteen of the new Nielsen cable ratings for USA, and the WWF’s syndicated offerings were being seen on three hundred stations from coast to coast. Looking at the remarkable forces arrayed in their favor, Troy walked into Vince’s office one day and said, “I don’t want to scare you, but we’re on track to do five times what we did last year.”
Affiliates of the fledgling Fox television network were the biggest buyers of WWF’s syndicated shows. The largest among them was in Detroit, home to the ninety-three-thousand-seat Pontiac Silverdome, where the pope had delivered Mass on his tour of the United States. Vince joked that since he was nearly as big as God, he should play the Silverdome, too.
To fill an arena of that size, he’d need the industry’s two biggest draws as the main event, that much was clear. Hogan, the number one gate attraction in the business, was the obvious choice as the baby-face. The choice of the heel was more problematic, because the only other man who Vince knew could guarantee a sellout was waiting to die in
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