Sex, Lies, and Headlocks (7 page)

At first he looked sluggish, but he managed to hold his own as the two men hammered one another with forearm smacks that left them with blood blisters. Ray was keeping up until Baker leveled an anvil of a blow to Ray’s chest called the
heart punch
. It sent him to the mat, but Ray got up in a hurry, fighting back so hard that he broke Ox’s wrist en route to pinning him for the win.

Ray was pale by the time he got to the dressing room, so he took a long, cold shower, hoping it would make him feel better. It didn’t. He was toweling himself dry when his body heaved. He fell to the floor, jerked twice, and was gone. Doctors would later conclude that Ox’s blow damaged a valve in Ray’s heart. As Baker remembers it, “I was in the dressing room trying to soak my wrist when a policeman came in with a sawed-off shotgun. He said, ‘Better get your ass out of here. Ray just dropped dead in the dressing room.’ ”

Gunkel had barely been lowered into the ground when a full-scale war over his territory broke out. Though Ann always seemed more concerned with fine clothes than how one fine-tuned a clothesline move, she decided she was going to run the company herself—something that didn’t sit well with Ray’s partners. “They figured she’d be happy to go home and continue collecting her percent,” says Joe Hamilton, one-half of the masked tag team known as the Assassins, who worked with the Gunkels. “But Ann was a ballsy woman. She once told me, ‘If I want something from a man, I just go in his office, rip my bra off, and come out yelling and hollering. I always get it.’ So when Ray’s partners told her to go home, she said, ‘Fuck you, I’m taking over.’ ”

To just about everyone’s surprise, Ann booked the Atlanta City Auditorium for Tuesday evenings, rivaling her late husband’s partners, who put their shows on there on Friday nights. Then she lured away wrestlers who were loyal to Ray, such as Hamilton and Thunderbolt Patterson, and created a new show called
All South Wrestling
that Turner agreed to air at the five o’clock hour—just before
Ceorgia
Championship Wrestling
. (Making matters even more uncomfortable, both shows were taped on Saturday morning in the same studio.) She also locked up the rights to perform in towns like Augusta and Savannah, where the live shows that she staged on Sunday and Monday nights became instant hits, bringing viewers to her Channel 17 show. By 1973, Ray’s ex-partners were so worried that they turned to an erudite southerner named Jim Barnett to help blunt Ann’s advances.

Barnett was an odd mix of high and low culture, a modestly built man whose passion for fine art, Mozart, and penthouse living would lead a fellow Georgian, Jimmy Carter, to appoint him to the National Council for the Arts. The timber of his voice was gravelly, and he lingered over vowels as he began thoughts, which usually started with the phrase,
“My booooy.”
One of the original scriptwriters for the DuMont Network’s
Live from the Marigold Theater
show, Barnett had been promoting wrestling in Australia but was homesick and only too happy to hear about his friends’ troubles when they buttonholed him at the 1973 NWA convention. He’d known the Gunkels for twenty years, ever since DuMont folded and he’d moved to Atlanta to start filming matches for television there. In fact, he was the one who introduced Ray to Ann. Still, Barnett had no problem working the other side of the street. He quickly agreed to take over the running of
Georgia Championship Wrestling
.

Within a few months, he’d wrested Augusta and Savannah back out of Ann’s control by cutting exclusive deals with the cities’ arena managers and helped revitalize the TV show. As 1974 began, his new partners were delighted; Ann was on the ropes. But Barnett had to be careful about coming on too strong. As Al Rogowski, who wrestled under the name Ole Anderson, remembers it, “Ann was connected with the mob, or at least she was rumored to know guys in it. One day in ‘74, she had one of them fly into Atlanta. A lot of us saw him, but we weren’t sure, you know? Was this guy for real, or was Ann just being Ann? When he flew back to Chicago we all figured it was bullshit. Then, a few months later, I see a photo in the paper. It’s this guy, and he was found in the trunk of a car parked at O’Hare Airport with something like twenty-two bullet holes in him.”

Instead of testing Ann’s connections further, Barnett approached Turner and asked him to float the idea of accepting a buyout past Ann. To his relief, Turner returned with the news that Ann was willing to make a deal. In the spring of 1974, she accepted $200,000, giving Barnett’s
Georgia Championship Wrestling
control of the now-united territory, a two-hour block of time on Channel 17 on Saturday night.

By then, Turner had started to follow the progress of an upstart cable station based in New York called Home Box Office, which wanted to use a single, stationary satellite moored high above the earth to blanket the country with movies. Turner was fascinated by the idea and asked his aides how much it would cost for him to get such a satellite. Their answer was a million dollars.

Turner was already in his second year of owning the broadcast rights to the Atlanta Braves baseball team, which had increased his audience for Channel 17 so much that it now covered a forty-mile radius, making it the largest UHF station in the country. He’d also managed to syndicate the games across Georgia, the Carolinas, Alabama, and Florida. But even after Hank Aaron hit his milestone 715th home run in 1974, the Braves were still a tepid franchise. In 1975, when they traded Aaron to Milwaukee, they were in last place in the National League West. Fearing that the team’s management was going to drive away his viewers, Turner decided to buy the club himself. He figured that if he could use some of his canny marketing skills to make the team more successful, he could use the new satellite technology to beam their games from coast to coast. A million dollars would be a small price to pay for a satellite if it gave him a team with a true coast-to-coast following. So Turner paid it, and on December 17, 1976, WTCG went up on a satellite called
Satcom 1
while, down below, operators at Channel 17 answered their phones with the catchphrase “The superstation that serves the nation, good morning.” Turner’s Superstation had situation comedies, movies, and a sports lineup that featured the Braves and two hours of Saturday evening wrestling.

It was an arrangement that served everyone well over the next half-dozen years. With the exposure that the Superstation offered, Barnett was able to build a traveling circus that descended once a week on small, culturally starved Georgia towns like Carrolton, Griffin, Athens, and Columbus. Among his stars were Rogowski and Jack Brisco, a curly-haired babyface from Blackwell, Oklahoma, who looked like Joe Namath.

Rogowski and Brisco never liked one another. In fact, Brisco tells the story that one evening in Columbus, Georgia, he wasn’t feeling well and asked Rogowski to go easy on him. “I told him don’t fuck with me, I’m sick as a dog. Right away, he comes at me punching my guts, trying to make me puke. I swear, I wanted to kill him.”

The men were even greater rivals out of the ring than in it. Jack and his brother Gerald owned 25 percent of the Georgia troupe, and Rogowski had just 10 percent. But Barnett relied on Rogowski enough to make him its president. Over time, the Briscos began to feel that by paying himself a handsome six-figure salary, Rogowski was cutting into their share of the partnership profits. So in late 1983, the brothers convinced Barnett to give them control of his shares—a coup that gave them majority control and the right to strip Rogowski of his title.

In the course of fifteen years as a shit kicker, Rogowski had built up a fairly thick skin. In the days before wrestlers took painkillers, he’d lost most of the tendons in his left hand from seven different stabbings and earned a scar on his chest from the time a seventy-eight-year-old fan attacked him in Greenville, South Carolina. (One fan distracted him with a chair while the other gutted him from his neck to his ribs with a hawk-bill knife, leaving him for dead outside his dressing room.)
¹
He’d also been sued three dozen times and claimed he’d never once lost. So when he got wind that the Brisco brothers were planning to depose him with their newly won voting control, he confronted them in the bar of the Atlanta Ramada Inn after a show in January 1984.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Jack?” he said bluntly. “You can’t run a fucking thing.”

The three started arguing. But as they got drunker, the Briscos softened their stance. As long as he agreed to start mailing them better profit-sharing checks every week, they agreed to let Rogowski keep running things. Rogowski had watched
The Godfather
the evening before and drunkenly decided he wanted to seal the pact “like those mob guys do.”

What happened next is the subject of some dispute. Jack Brisco says Rogowski grabbed him and dragged him to the hotel bar’s bathroom. Rogowski insists it happened after the brothers invited him to their hotel room—an invitation that he suspected was made so they could get him alone and jump him. Either way, this much is certain: Gerald Brisco had a short-bladed knife, which Rogowski took and used to slice open a healed scar on his forehead with an old-time blading move. The brothers were dumbstruck as he gushed blood and handed Jack Brisco the knife, expecting him to do the same.

“Fuck you, you dumb Polack,” Jack replied. “I ain’t cutting my head. I ain’t gonna be no blood brother with a dumb fucking Polack.”

NOT LONG
after that, Vince was sitting in an office he’d rented in Greenwich when he got a call from Jack Brisco, who was checking up on the health of a mutual friend in Vince’s employ. It was a few weeks after Vince had made his unavailing pitch to Turner and because he didn’t think he’d sealed the deal, he needed another way to get on TBS. He knew Brisco was a stockholder in
Georgia Championship Wrestling
company, so he quickly asked, “Can you talk?”

Brisco was in a room full of other wrestlers at the time, but looking around he said, “Uh, kinda.”

Vince got to the point quickly. “Would you and your brother consider selling your stock to me?”

When Brisco replied that he would if the price was right, all three agreed to meet the next day at LaGuardia Airport in Queens, New York. “I’ll have a prepaid ticket waiting for you,” McMahon said.

Early in the afternoon of the next day, the Briscos found McMahon waiting for them behind a cocktail table in the Ionosphere Lounge, alone. He was just as direct in person as he was on the phone. “Where does the stock lie?” he asked. “Who do you have on your side?”

Jack answered that he and Jerry were only too happy to sell out and were sure they could deliver the shares of Barnett and a fourth partner, comprising a total of 90 percent of the stock. The only person they couldn’t deliver was Rogowski, who had 10 percent. Vince told them they should all reassemble as quickly as possible—like next week in Atlanta.

On April 9, 1984, the group that convened in a downtown Atlanta law office included the McMahons and their New York attorneys, and the Brisco brothers. Al Rogowski wasn’t there. He was in Wisconsin, caring for his ill mother. One by one, the partners signed away their shares for a total of $900,000 and then walked to their office nearby to inform their employees. Rogowski’s secretary was crying when she called him in Wisconsin. “Vince bought the company,” she sobbed. “He
bought
it.”

Rogowski rushed back the next morning, just in time to see Vince walk into the TBS studio with the four-hundred-pound Gorilla Monsoon at his side.

“Get the fuck out of here, Vince,” Rogowski told him.

McMahon was the picture of reconciliation as he held out his hand. “Come work with me, Ole,” he said, using Rogowski’s stage name. “I’ll make you more money than you’ll ever think possible.” Later, Rogowski would wish that for once in his life he’d just shut up.

Instead he replied, “Fuck you …
and your wife.”

1.
Rogowski had competition as a tough man from his wrestling “brother,” Gene Anderson, the only real Anderson of the group. Once in a match with Wahoo McDaniel, Gene got all of his front teeth knocked back. As Rogowski remembers it, “his mouth was swollen and bleeding all over the place. He asked me how it looked. It was gross. But he refused to stop. He kept on wrestling. He didn’t want to stop anywhere that night, so we went back to the motel and went to bed. The next morning I went to his room to get his ass up and go to the dentist. His mouth was all covered with blood from sleeping that way. He had them all pulled and never said a word.”

FOUR

SINCE HIS EARLY DAYS
imitating Howard Cosell under his father’s watchful eyes in Washington, Vinnie had developed an easy manner on television. On one level, his job was simply to feed his wrestlers straight lines and let them react, thereby setting up the plot and foreshadowing the action. But that’s like saying all Johnny Carson had to do was talk. Vinnie had to sell their answers, and he did it better than anyone. The man who’d wanted to be a wrestler since he was twelve had an obvious affection for his muscle-bound performers, and it came through on the screen. He dug trenches in the studio so his six-foot-three frame wouldn’t tower over his shorter entertainers, and he always played the straight man so as never to steal their laughs. Imitating his father’s decorum, he dressed in suits with vests and 1920s-style collars, always keeping an ironed hankie in the breast pocket. With his deep voice, cleft chin, and wide, stocky frame, he almost looked like a comic book character himself—the twenties banker or the vaudeville emcee.

And there was a lot of this Vinnie on television. Every three weeks, the company filmed a day’s worth of wrestling matches at an old agricultural hall at the fairgrounds in Allentown, Pennsylvania, creating three hour-long installments of
Championship Wrestling
, the flagship show that he sold in syndication. Then the troupe would pack up and drive to a small arena thirty miles away in Hamburg, where more matches were shot, creating a second syndicated show called
All-Star Wrestling
. For a third show for markets with an insatiable appetite, he’d take scraps from the Allentown and Hamburg sessions, reedit them with new voice-overs, and sell them as
Superstars of Wrestling
.