The Road Warriors: Danger, Death, and the Rush of Wrestling by Joe Laurinaitis Page B

considered Union country and not tolerated very well, if at all. Having World Championship Wrestling taken over by Vince and his Yankees meant war. The emotionally charged fans retaliated by simply not watching the WWE program, sending ratings and advertising revenue into the toilet.
    After a few months, the gravity of the situation got through to Ted Turner, who wasn’t too happy with how Vince had circumvented his authority. In an effort to calm the situation, Ted approached Ole about coming back on the air at TBS immediately with new and original NWA wrestling programming. Ole was back in business and went right to work developing a new company and show, Championship Wrestling from Georgia , which aired Saturday mornings.
    Turner wanted Bill Watts in on the action as well and gave him a Sunday morning time slot for his Mid-South Wrestling program. Ole and Watts quickly gained huge followings for their respective shows, and when Vince found out he was no longer the exclusive professional wrestling company on TBS, he decided to call it a day. In early 1985, Vince sold the 6:05 p.m. time slot to Jim Crockett Promotions for one million dollars and got out of Dodge. World Championship Wrestling returned to TV under the control of Jim Crockett and MCW territory based in North Carolina. Seizing the opportunity to finally go national with TBS, Crockett picked up and moved the operation down to Atlanta.
    For a while, everything returned to normal, but the message had been loud and clear: Vince McMahon was going to do whatever it took to become the only game in town. Promoters everywhere started taking precautions, even banding together. Jim Crockett, Ole, and a few other NWA promoters joined AWA owner Verne Gagne and Jerry Jarrett, whose Memphis-based CWA was an AWA-affiliated territory, forming a new company to compete nationally with Vince. The result was Pro Wrestling USA, a new banner under which the NWA and AWA could copromote super cards featuring each company’s top wrestlers all across the country. The key element behind the merger was the national ESPN deal that Verne and Crockett had been negotiating, with Hawk and me, among others, as bargaining chips on the table.
    While all of this buyout and merger craziness was going on, Paul, Hawk, and I couldn’t have cared less. We were on our way out with golden parachutes in the AWA. About a week before Black Saturday on the Fourth of July, we had dropped the National titles in Columbus, Georgia, to Ronnie Garvin and Jerry Oates. We’d always liked Garvin and Oates and were happy for them, especially Ronnie. He was always cracking me up backstage, and when it was showtime he’d become this wolverine and go toe-to-toe with me with the stiffest of punches and chops you could imagine.
    With a fresh opportunity before us, Hawk and I were really focused on the impact we wanted to make for our new company. Verne was excited for our arrival, too, and decided to up the ante. He called to say he wanted us to “hit the ground running” by jumping right into some shows he’d already booked in Green Bay, Chicago, Indianapolis, and St. Paul.
    That’s right. St. Paul, Minnesota . We were floored with the news. Hawk and I would finally have our long-anticipated homecoming. Ever since we’d started out together, we’d talked about what it would be like wrestling in front of a home crowd in Minnesota. Now we’d find out.
    To prepare for the big occasion, we took a look in the mirror and decided to make some adjustments. Since day one, Hawk and I were always modifying our paint jobs. The look I was using with the devil horn lines was cool, but it needed something more. I started connecting the devil horn lines on each side of my forehead to the lines on the far sides of my face and under my eyes. With everything drawn together, it created an outline I started filling in with black, red, green, and yellow. The result was a solid, evil-looking mask, a perfect translation of how I felt in