Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (28 page)

Rather than see Turner get his hands on one of the WWF’s last bankable stars, McMahon offered Hart an unprecedented twenty-year contract. Negotiated in October 1996, it gave Hart a seven-figure salary for three years, during which Hart promised to keep wrestling, and a six-figure paycheck thereafter, when he would ascend to the booking committee and have a key role as a scriptwriter. But now, a year into the deal, Vince regretted his impetuousness. For one thing, Hart hadn’t spiked the ratings as had been hoped. For another, McMahon had begun talks with a Manhattan investment house about taking the WWF public, and he’d been advised to limit any long-term obligations on his balance sheet. So before a show in Madison Square Garden, McMahon told Hart that he could no longer afford the deal they’d struck. He should feel free to pursue his fortune at WCW.

While Hart probably could have gone to court to enforce the contract, he sought out Bischoff. The call Vince received in the barber’s chair was Bret reporting that he had a deal on the table worth $2 million a year. Was Vince sure this was what he wanted? A few halfhearted options were explored but none amounted to much of a counteroffer, so Hart said that he was accepting Turner’s offer.

As he walked through the cool air of a Manhattan fall and into a waiting limousine that was about to whisk him to the movies with Linda, Vince was already thinking about how to make money off Hart’s departure. His next pay-per-view, the
Survivor Series
, was due to air on November 9. He told Hart he wanted him to lose the belt to Shawn Michaels.

Michaels and Hart disliked each other as much as two men could. Hart came from a legendary Canadian wrestling family. Michaels was the son of a military man, born on an air force base in Scottsdale, Arizona, and reared in San Antonio, Texas. He had no patience for the pretentious Harts and their stuffy claim to being the self-appointed guardians of tradition. When Hart took his brief hiatus from the WWF to pursue an acting career, Michaels moved into the company’s top slot. He was understandably piqued, then, when Hart returned to bump him down a notch.

From his vantage point, Hart saw Michaels as a low-class player who was lucky to have gotten as far as he had. “In my absence,” he once wrote in a Calgary newspaper column, “the WWF had been overtaken by a prima donna of unmatched proportions.” For his part, Michaels argued to McMahon that there was no way Hart was worth roughly twice the salary. Michaels was younger and a harder worker. Most important, he claimed, he was on message. So he wanted a raise or he’d walk. When Vince refused to let him out of his one-year contract, Michaels vented his frustrations by showing up at a Mobile, Alabama, taping of
Raw
barely able to stay on his feet and needing directions to the ring. Once inside of it, he let his anger fly by drunkenly quipping that Hart was seeing “a lot of Sunny days lately.” The allusion to an affair that Hart was widely rumored to be having with the buxom Tammy Lynn Sytch, who appeared under the stage name Sunny, was a low blow. If there’s one pact among wrestlers, it’s that what happens on the road stays on the road.

When
Raw
visited the Fleet Center in Boston the next week, Hart let Michaels know just how much trouble he’d caused by following him into a bathroom and starting an argument that escalated into a floor-rolling brawl. After Hart wound up with a fist full of his hair, Michaels stormed out of the building, muttering, “Fuck this shit, Vince, I’ll never work for you again.”

That was in May. Now it was November, and Hart told Vince that he’d never give up his belt to Michaels. For as long as he’d worked in the WWF he’d done as he was told, but this time Hart wanted to call his last shot.
¹
He’d lose to anybody, he said, except Michaels. And he didn’t want to lose in front of his fans in Canada. With the pay-per-view days away, a series of negotiations forced Vince to relent. The Montreal match could end in a disqualification, he agreed, and instead of dropping the strap, Bret could hand it to Vince the next night at the episode of
Raw
that they were taping in Ottawa.

But as his flight landed in Montreal on Saturday, Vince had already decided that the plan was too risky. Word was out on the Internet that Hart was heading to WCW. With the ratings gap finally closing to within a percentage point, he couldn’t stand the idea that Bischoff would show up on
Nitro
crowing that he’d hired the WWF’s reigning heavyweight champ. No. The only way that Hart could leave Montreal on Sunday was without the strap.

Hart arrived in Canada on edge as well. At a house show in Toronto on Saturday night, he approached the referee who was scheduled to work the
Survivor Series
match, a longtime McMahon deputy named Earl Hebner, and asked if anything had changed. No, Hebner replied, the finish was still the same. Michaels would bump Hebner and knock him out, then be placed in Hart’s finishing move, the
sharpshooter
, an updated version of the old
Boston crab
. Because Hebner wouldn’t see Michaels submitting to Hart, Michaels could escape the loss and Hart could save face before his hometown fans. In the confusion, there would be run-ins by Degeneration X and the Hart Foundation, leading to the disqualification. Seeing the worry on Hart’s face, he added, “I swear on my kids, I’ll quit before I double cross you.”
²

Hart was still jittery when he landed in Montreal, but backstage at the Molson Center he started to relax. After going over their spots in an agreeable fashion, he and Michaels dressed quietly, without much drama. Vince changed beside them, seemingly in a good mood now that all the details had been worked out.

When it finally came time for the match to start, Michaels played it straight, just as he said he would in the locker room. In fact, as the men brawled their way into the crowd, Hart thought he was putting on a hell of a show. For the better part of five minutes, they flung each other up and down the aisles. When they brawled their way back to the ring, Michaels gave Hebner the timely bump that knocked him out and set up the series of spots that started with him placing a submission hold on Hart. Because they still had eight minutes to go, Hart let Michaels mount his back and relaxed a bit, grabbing a few deep breaths to conserve his energy. He was still gathering strength when, out of the corner of his eye, he heard a director yell, “It’s time! Get up!”

Hart saw Hebner rise and felt Michaels tighten his grip. Then he heard the words “Ring the
fucking
bell!” And that was when Hart understood what was happening. Later that night, Michaels would insist that he knew nothing about the deception, and the look of surprise on his face lent him the benefit of the doubt. In fact, he seemed disjointed when Vince barked at Hebner, “Give him the belt!” and he had to be told by road agent Jerry Brisco to raise it over his head, thereby letting the crowd know he was accepting the title. Hart had his own way of acknowledging the double cross. Meeting McMahon’s stare, he spat at his boss, streaking his face.

The backstage area was chaos. While Hebner was being whisked to a waiting rental car, Michaels waited in the locker room for Hart. “You weren’t in on that?” he was asked when Hart finally stormed in.

“I had no fucking idea,” Michaels replied. “As God as my fucking witness. My hands are fucking clean on this one. I swear to God.”

Vince had retreated to his own locked office backstage when the WWF’s locker-room leader, Mark “the Undertaker” Callaway, rapped on his door to say that the Boys were angry (many had threatened to boycott the next night’s show in Ottawa) and had decided that Hart was owed an apology. Seeing the politics of the situation, McMahon nodded in agreement and walked into the dressing room area flanked by his son, Shane, and road agents Brisco and Sergeant Slaughter while Hart was toweling himself off. Hart called his ex-boss a liar, warning Vince that if he didn’t leave the area before Hart finished dressing, “I’m going to punch you in the fucking mouth.” But Vince insisted on explaining himself. Yes, he’d lied to Hart, but weren’t they all going to be rich in the end? Wasn’t that all that mattered? Hart answered with his fist, landing a hard blow to Vince’s right temple. Shane jumped on Hart’s back, but by then it was clear the long night was over. “Get this motherfucker out of here, or I’ll hurt him,” Bret said, controlling what was left of his voice. Vince staggered to his feet and left limping down the hall, a dark bruise on his lower lip.

By the next morning, the episode had sparked a furor on the Internet sites and chat rooms, and the WWF was in turmoil. Staffers stayed up half the night quelling a threatened boycott. In a high-stakes meeting with his talent before the taping of
Raw
on Monday evening in Ottawa, McMahon insisted that Hart was jeopardizing the company, that he’d taken the punch for all of them. (The only on-air mention of the match came from Michaels, who won few friends by coming out with the belt and crowing about how he’d run Hart out of town. Vince kept his bloodied face off camera, never once mentioning the events of the night before.)
³
When he finally decided to address the issue for the TV audience the next Monday, he had started believing it himself.

“Some would say I screwed Bret Hart,” he began. “The referee didn’t screw Bret Hart. Shawn Michaels didn’t screw Bret Hart. Bret Hart screwed Bret Hart.” Then he issued this warning: “If we’re going to have problems along those lines in the locker room or anywhere else, okay, we’re going to have them. But no more free shots.”

MCMAHON SEEMED
to take sustenance from the double-dealing image that he flew home with from Montreal. He’d unwittingly given his audience a peek inside his backstage world, and they wanted more. He could feel the crowds urging him on.

At first, he wasn’t sure how to react. After all, he’d spent thirty years believing he was best suited as an announcer. But those around him pushed him to strike while the iron was hot.
Raw
was delivering more twelve- to thirty-four-year-old viewers than the big three networks on Monday nights. And repackaged versions of
Raw
that were appearing on Saturday and Sunday mornings were heating up his licensing sales. “You’re your own best act,” Hammer told him.

So in the days after Montreal, he started to build a faux rendition of himself that played to those expectations. He started appearing in backstage vignettes that drew inspiration from the events of Montreal. In an episode of
Raw
that aired in early December, for example, Vince was seen scheming to screw Steve Austin out of his upcoming title match with Michaels.

The events of Montreal also gave his wrestlers the heady sense that they could keep pushing the envelope. Koplovitz was on her way out at USA, and there was no telling what Diller would or wouldn’t allow. One night Michaels felt giddy enough to perform a scene in which he stripped down to his shorts while playing poker and reached to do something that looked very much like shaking his dick.

The last thing that McMahon needed was to have to defend an action like that. But the
Los Angeles Times
forced his hand. He could remember the problems he had with advertisers the last time that the
Times
devoted a cover story to the WWF during the depths of the steroid scandals. This time around, he wanted to get ahead of the curve. So on December 15, he rushed an interview into production that would come to be known as the “New Direction” speech.

Stepping out of his Montreal mode with a softer, more deliberative tone, Vince appeared on
Raw
to say that he was taking it in a more “contemporary” direction, something akin to the
Jerry Springer Show
, which Diller now owned. “This is a conscious effort on our part to open the creative envelope, so to speak, to entertain you in a more contemporary manner …. We in the WWF think that you, the audience, are quite frankly tired of having your intelligence insulted. We also think you’re tired of the same old simplistic theory of good guys versus bad guys. Surely the era of the superhero that urged you to say your prayers and take your vitamins is passé. Therefore we’ve embarked upon an innovative, contemporary campaign that is more invigorating and extemporaneous than before. Due to the live nature of
Raw
, however, we encourage some degree of parental discretion when it comes to the younger audience allowed to stay up late.” In other words, the TV-14 tag was on and the gloves were off. Later that night, the wrestler Billy Gunn would make his debut as Bad Ass Billy Gunn, soon to be changed to the simpler Mr. Ass.

The reinvention of
Raw
reflected McMahon’s restlessness. As with
Springer
, the shows were becoming increasingly interactive as he shortened the matches and extended the time his acts used to taunt the crowds. In the week before Christmas, drunken fans in Little Rock and Memphis hurled bottles and lit firecrackers at the wrestlers, causing the main events in both cities to be canceled. And yet it was evident that the WWF was filling up seats again. Not only had pay-per-view revenue rebounded and the ratings started to nudge up, the live gate from November was $2.4 million “That’s the best month for business since we started keeping a monthly tab on things in 1992,” wrote Dave Meltzer in his
Wrestling Observer
newsletter.

With the
Royal Rumble
coming up next, and the Austin title turn on the horizon for March, the mood in Titan Tower was electric. To keep the momentum going, all Vince needed was a gimmick to bridge the divide between the
Rumble
and
Wrestlemania
.

Thanks to a spending spree that involved the purchase of ten Beemers, four Rolls-Royces, several Bentleys, and a mansion in Las Vegas, Mike Tyson had awoken to find himself $11 million in debt to the Internal Revenue Service. His promoter, Don King, went to Showtime to get a $5 million advance on Tyson’s next fight. But the network balked, as did WCW when King offered them the champ for the same price. By the time Vince and Shane got involved, the asking price was down to $3.5 million.