Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (24 page)

“The Outsiders are the men I want as my friends,” he scowled, pointing at his new allies. “They are the new blood of professional wrestling. And not only are we going to take over the whole wrestling business with Hulk Hogan and the new blood, we will destroy everything in our path … “Given that preamble, only a sweeping name for their coalition would do: Hogan called it the New World Order, or nWo.

As fans started pelting Hogan with ice, paper cups, and garbage, Bischoff took off the headset he’d been listening on backstage and heaved a sigh of relief. “Congratulations,” one of the show’s producers told him at the postshow party. “Everybody’s going to remember you as the guy who turned Hulk Hogan.”

But the brotherly scene of Hogan, Hall, and Nash joining hands masked the paranoia, mistrust, and jealousies that would inevitably erupt. Hogan would come to despise the fans who booed him and the wrestlers who criticized him. Nash would get tired of Hogan’s incessant meddling and power plays. And Hall would find that his wife was right, that success would be a curse.

For the moment, though, all that mattered was the picture of the three stars together and the weekly ratings victory that it provided.

1.
McMahon’s anger came spilling out backstage, and he confronted Michaels about it. But Michaels was one of his biggest attractions, so McMahon couldn’t punish him. And there was nothing more he could do to Hall and Nash. The only person he could punish was Helmsley. In a fateful move, he told the wrestler that he would not be making an appearance in the finals of the upcoming
King of the Ring
pay-per-view. Instead, that spot would go to Steve Austin. Had Helmsley not been punished, and had Austin not been put in his place, Austin might never have met Jake Roberts in the finals and come up with the “Austin 3:16” monologue that launched the company’s comeback.

TWELVE

AS ERIC BISCHOFF’S SUCCESS
with the nWo proved, family wrestling, at least as a marketable concept, was a bust. While the nWo was turning into a licensing juggernaut, the WWF couldn’t land a major toy company contract for its action figures. One licenser put a fine point on the problem when he told a WWF pitchman, “Forget it. You guys are a dead brand.”

What Vince needed was a new cast of characters, and to assemble one he turned to his talent director, the oval-faced Oklahoman Jim Ross. Having risen through the ranks as Bill Watts’s right-hand man in Tulsa, and later the vice president for broadcasting at WCW, Ross knew everyone there was to know. Just as important, he had the same hard-on for Bischoff as Vince did. Bischoff had just forced him out of WCW in a management purge. By offering Ross a soft landing in the WWF, McMahon got a pipeline to all the disaffected WCW players and one of the shrewdest judges of talent in the business. Ross proved it by making Steve Williams, the Texas backwoodsman whom Bischoff had also just fired, one of his first hires.

When he shaved his head and put on a bad-boy attitude, Williams could have been any truck driver drinking bad Scotch before dawn. But that never quite came through when he wrestled in WCW as half of a tag team called the Hollywood Blonds. And McMahon didn’t do much better when he initially introduced him as the Ringmaster, a bland, costumeless character. (Vince had so little faith in Williams’s interview skills that he gave him Ted “Million-Dollar Man” DiBiase as a manager and had DiBiase do all the talking.) But Ross knew the wrestler had more to offer and gave him the latitude to shape his own persona. First, Williams designed the Stone Cold Steve Austin character out of the shards of his own dyspeptic past. Then, in June 1996, while he was getting his lip stitched from a gash he’d suffered in one of the early matches at the
King of the Ring
pay-per-view, he began to think of the final bout he was scheduled to have with Jake “the Snake” Roberts, a recovering crack addict who was making a comeback under the guise of having given his life over to Christ. Roberts had been invoking
John 3:16
during his ring entrances, and Austin decided to play on the verse by coining his own phrase, “Austin 3:16.” After he’d pinned Roberts in less than five minutes that evening, Austin announced that he didn’t want to hear any more biblical bullshit because “Austin 3:16 says I just whipped your ass.”

“Austin 3:16” was one of those catchphrases that hit the zeitgeist at a perfect moment, and McMahon threw his hungry marketing machinery behind it, churning out T-shirts, posters, and Styrofoam middle fingers like the one that Austin gave crowds. Austin was exactly what Vince needed to build his new cast around. All that remained was finding a foil. Austin had far too much visceral intensity to be paired with just anyone. McMahon needed someone who looked at the world just as diffidently, a partner who could radiate the same blue-jeans cynicism.

One of Ross’s favorite acts was Brian Pillman, a Cincinnati street fighter with a vicious temper whose twisting corkscrew jumps off the ropes earned him the nickname “Flying Brian.” Well before Hall and Nash coalesced in the nWo or Austin coined the phrase “Austin 3:16,” Pillman was using a novel titled
The Big Con
as a blueprint for the canniest confidence games to ever be pulled off in a business that was built on them.

In February 1996, Pillman had been penciled in to lose on a
Super-Brawl
pay-per-view bout with Kevin Sullivan, the old ring hand who was pulling double duty behind the scenes as Bischoff’s chief booker. Sullivan had written a script that called for Pillman to lose a leather-strap match in which the loser had to surrender by shouting, “I respect you.” Sullivan was at least ten years past his prime while Pillman was lithe and tanned, and the crowd had every reason to expect youth to prevail. As expected, Pillman came roaring out to dominate Sullivan. But suddenly he dropped his arms, dropped his strap, and in a wrestling version of
no mas
, spat the phrase, “I respect you,
booker man”
The last two words were more than an improvisation; they were an attack on sixty years of dogma. Maintaining the illusion of wrestling meant denying that bookers or any of the business’s other puppeteers even existed. By outing Sullivan, Pillman was taking it on himself to tear down the industry’s wall of silence. Sullivan stood dumbstruck in the ring while Pillman stomped backstage, entering into a furious shouting match with Bischoff.

“What the hell’s wrong with Pillman?” Hulk Hogan asked. And before anyone could think of an answer, Pillman blew past him and through the arena doors, where he got into his car and burned rubber out of the parking lot, clipping a parked Caddy on the way.

Pillman’s behavior in the weeks that followed made him the most talked about wrestler in the business. He arrived at an independent show produced by Philadelphia’s Extreme Championship Wrestling and had to be restrained from taking out his penis and pissing in the ring. He did a guest stint on a right-wing Cincinnati radio show and hung up on callers. At strip clubs, he cursed fans who stopped by to say hello. Wrestler Terry Funk didn’t know what to think when Pillman mused about chaining himself to the goalposts during the Super Bowl. That the whole thing was an act—privately blessed by Bischoff—occurred to almost no one. Wrestlers always conned the fans. But what was the point of conning each other? There wasn’t any. Which, in its own way, made the self-promotional lunatic charade even shrewder. Act or no act, Brian’s friends assumed that he was headed for a breakdown.

THOUGH HE
seemed to walk lightly through life, the boy from the working-class side of Cincinnati spent most of his childhood in and out of hospitals, battling throat cancer through thirty-one operations. His mother, a waitress, hit up everyone she knew to pay for them. Most children would have withdrawn after that kind of ordeal, conditioned to baby their bodies. But Pillman went the opposite way: to the streets, where he carried the vain but well-earned belief that he could win any fight he found thanks to his ability to withstand pain. That reputation caught the eye of a coach in suburban Norwood and led to a high school football career.

Still, he was small for college ball—just five-foot-ten—and had to walk on at Ohio’s University of Miami to land a spot on the starting squad. There, he made as much of an impression off the field as on, once astounding his roommates by having sex with a woman who was hanging upside down from a chin-up bar while wearing gravity boots. After his graduation, the irrepressible athlete tried out for the Cincinnati Bengals and—impressively, considering his size—won a spot as a linebacker. But his pro career was short lived. He was traded to the Buffalo Bills the next year and cut when steroids were discovered in his locker. It was a quick hop from there to wrestling, where no one cared what he was using to pack 210 pounds of muscle onto his slight frame.

With deceptively sweet looks, Pillman was cast as a babyface at WCW, hitting the road as a dependable player with a weak spot for seducing the mothers who brought their kids backstage for autographs. (Whenever possible, he pawned the kids off on stagehands while he took their moms to hotels that charged by the hour.) Of the bevies of women he bedded, however, none was more complex than Shawn Rochelle Floyd, a heart-stopping blonde he met in a one-gas-station town called California, Kentucky. After a whirlwind romance, Floyd became pregnant and the couple moved in together. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for their relationship to sour. Rochelle, as she was commonly known, was a heavy cocaine user and disappeared for long stretches at a time. One day, Pillman had to drive through the crack ghettos of Cincinnati with her picture, asking every street peddler with a Raiders jacket whether he’d seen her. The local cops wound up busting him, figuring
he
was the one trying to buy drugs. Rochelle turned up in Florida, partying in a car with strangers.

When he’d had enough, Pillman took their daughter, Brittany, and began a new relationship with a Penthouse Pet who’d just ended a stormy relationship with Jim “Ultimate Warrrior” Hellwig. A soft woman with two children from a past relationship, the future Mrs. Melanie Pillman kept her distance from Rochelle. But that became impossible when the newlyweds sued for custody of Brittany. On the day that a family court judge approved their petition and said there would be no change until Rochelle went into rehab, Rochelle called the Pillman home, threatening to kill herself. Melanie tried calming her, but soon the two women began fighting over the best interests of the child. At a particularly pitched point, the line went dead and Melanie tried dialing the number displayed on her caller ID box, only to get a busy signal. Rochelle had called her mother and shot herself in the head while crying about her failures.

Wracked by the guilt of having played a role in the suicide of his daughter’s mother, Brian doubled up on the pills he was taking to keep up his work schedule. He’d started taking so many Vicodins and Percocets that he had to rotate among forty pharmacists in Cincinnati just to keep any one of them from getting suspicious. One evening at the dinner table, his wife noticed that he was trying to bring the fork to his mouth and was missing it completely. He didn’t do it once, but several times. “Brian, what are you doing?” she asked. He slurred his words, then nearly fell over trying to get up. At a hospital later that night, the examining doctor told her that Brian had ten times the recommended dosage of pain medication in his stomach. “You wouldn’t have any idea why he’d be taking so much, would you?” he asked. Melanie just shrugged.

By March 1996, Brian had created the loose cannon act from the fraying threads of his personal and work lives. By skirting the edges of what was fact and fantasy, he’d built a cult of personality around himself, though not the kind most wrestlers encouraged. It was a morbid cult filled with rubberneckers just waiting for him to take the final lunge into complete madness.

Vince didn’t know Brian and wasn’t sure what to make of the whole thing when Ross convinced him that they’d found the perfect foil for Austin, but he offered him a deal that more than doubled Pillman’s WCW salary. Bischoff, not eager to lose a homegrown star, sweetened his own offer until it got up to $400,000. Over forty-eight hours in early April, Pillman stayed up trying to figure out which one to accept until, finally, he grabbed his car keys and took his Humvee on a deserted road to clear his mind. As he rounded a sharp bend, he felt his eyelids get heavy and his hands slip from the wheel. In that second, the truck drove straight off the road and over a tree trunk, shooting him like a missile out the front window while it sailed into a field, flipping four times before coming to a rest.

There would be considerable debate about what exactly had happened, and Pillman’s crazy/not crazy act didn’t help matters. After the accident, he confided to a friend that at the very moment his eyes closed he’d seen Rochelle’s face in his rearview mirror. It was just as possible that the excitement over signing a new contract triggered a recurrence of the manic depression he’d battled since childhood. Whatever the cause, he woke up from the crash with a face broken in so many places that it needed four steel plates to be reconstructed and a right ankle crushed to the consistency of eggshells.

It was the ultimate con. The man who’d fooled his fans and friends into believing he had a death wish had nearly gone ahead and done it. He’d nearly killed himself for real. And now, despite being on crutches, his loose cannon bit was hotter than ever.

After he had his face repaired and a rod inserted into his ankle, Pillman left the hospital and signed a deal to become Austin’s foil at the WWF, creating a rivalry between two antiheroes that McMahon hoped could be his answer to the nWo.

IN NOVEMBER
1996, USA decided to move Raw’s time slot up an hour, to eight o’clock, so it could air head-to-head with
Nitro
. For the debut show, one of Vince’s writers suggested a script based loosely on a film he’d just seen,
Cape Fear
, which involved an ex-con terrorizing a public defender. Vince liked the idea of doing a remote shot from Pillman’s Cincinnati home and flew there to discuss its details. The shoot would have to be done live. That was certain. What they needed was a backstory to set up the action. They came up with the idea of telling the show’s viewers that Pillman was going to be interviewed live on
Raw
and that Austin was in the neighborhood, rumored to be eager to settle old scores. The Pillmans loved the idea, and Melanie went so far as to fix the guestroom so their old friend Austin could spend the night after the filming ended. The only thing they had to worry about, Vince joked, was some Kentucky hayseed interrupting the show because he thought the whole thing was real.