A Lion's Tale_ Around the World in Spandex - Chris Jericho [139]
I came in at $165,000 and that’s where I would stay. I hardly ever worked with someone who made, let’s say, $750,000, because they were worth more than me and worked with the guys in their tax bracket. On the odd occasion that I did work with one of the big-money guys, it was usually in a quick squash. In WCW, a $750,000 salary had to be justified with a $750,000 push.
There was also a cavalcade of guys who were getting paid huge amounts of money and never worked at all. Horace Boulder, Hogan’s nephew, was on the payroll for almost two years before he ever started working steadily. Randy Savage’s brother, Lanny Poffo, was on the payroll for the whole three years I was with the company and I only saw him work ONE match. I’ll bet you a free copy of this fine publication that he was making in the same ballpark as I was and I was wrestling twenty-two matches a month.
Sure I was making a decent wage, but ATM Eric was paying a lot of guys way more money to do less work. But it didn’t matter to him, and he was fond of saying, “I don’t care, it’s not my money. It’s Ted Turner’s.”
Because it wasn’t his money, he seemed to have a real lackadaisical attitude and wore sweat pants, a leather jacket, and a baseball cap turned backward at most of the shows. He was running a multimillion-dollar company and looked like a change vendor at an arcade.
As smart as Eric was, he conceded so much power to Hogan, Hall, and Nash that they pretty much ran the show. The booking team would hammer out a Nitro episode and an hour before the show the nWo would rewrite it. Some nights we still didn’t know the lineup ten minutes before the show aired live to millions of people.
Their attitude toward their work was piss-poor as well. I overheard Scott Hall asking Bret Hart one night in Huntsville, Alabama, “Why do you care so much about this match? It’s just a house show.”
That attitude was shared by head booker Sullivan, who asked me once, “Why do you care so much about your match? Nobody else does. Just go in the ring and get it over with. This company is the Titanic heading toward the iceberg anyways.” It was great to hear such positive words from the man who was technically in charge of my on screen career.
Ric Flair overheard Sullivan’s words and though he had jobbed me out three years earlier, he was one of the few vets in the WCW locker room who gave a shit about the young guys.
“Don’t ever stop caring about your work,” he said with dead seriousness. “Around here a good match is all you have. It’s the only thing that makes you rise above the bullshit.”
Flair was right, because as a plain, dry piece of babyface toast, a good match WAS all I had. The nWo were supposed to be the bad guys, the evil empire tearing the company apart, yet they booked themselves to be the most entertaining, coolest act on the show. They had crowd-pleasing catchphrases, cool merchandise, a great sense of humor, and nobody in the company ever stood up to them. The fans started to treat them as the babyfaces, which emasculated other babyfaces (like me) who had no angles, no balls, and no chance to show any personality. The era of the Cool Heel had arrived.
As WCW continued its domination over the WWF, Eric became increasingly drunk with power. To capitalize on the company’s growing popularity, TBS had started another two-hour weekly show called Thursday Thunder. Bischoff was looking to give the show a boost and decided at the last minute to re-form the Four Horsemen, who had broken up a few months earlier.
Flair had received permission weeks earlier to miss the show so he could attend his son’s wrestling tournament, and when Eric found out, he fired him on the spot. Then he called a meeting with every WCW employee in the Target Center in Minneapolis.
“I’m going to starve that piece of shit Flair and his family. I’m going to make sure that they end up living on the street.”
Eric also guaranteed that the WWF would be