THE VADER-PAUL ORNDORFF BACKSTAGE FIGHT
ON A seasonally warm late August afternoon at Centre Stage in the heart of midtown Atlanta, an incident with Paul Orndorff caused White’s WCW career to come to an abrupt end. White was asleep in his hotel room the morning of a WCW television taping when he received a stern phone call from Eric Bischoff, who was frustrated that White had missed a number of scheduled photo shoots recently. The VP told him in no uncertain terms that he was to attend a rescheduled shoot that afternoon at the CNN Center, warning he would be fined a few thousand dollars if he failed to show up. White was not even aware he had missed any of the other shoots, but duly complied with Bischoff’s demand and fulfilled the obligation. His ensuing three-mile journey back to the site of the evening’s taping came during heavy rush hour traffic, meaning he did not arrive at the building until ninety minutes after he was scheduled to be there. The event was the catalyst that changed the course of his career.
White was not worried about his tardiness, because Bischoff had sent him on the assignment and knew why he was late. He had also promised to pass on the information to the agents and executives working at the tapings. Unbeknownst to White, informing others of his whereabouts had slipped Bischoff’s mind due to myriad other issues coming up - as was always the case during a television shoot. When White finally arrived at the building he was greeted by his friend Tonga ‘Meng’ Fifita, who expressed surprised at his lateness because it was so out of character for him. “Where you been? You’re never late! They’ve been looking for you...” Fifita warned him. White wondered exactly who “they” were, but did not concern himself with it. Once again, he felt assured in the knowledge that he was following direct orders from his boss.
When road agent Terry Taylor wandered into the room and began questioning him about why he was late, White started to become irritated. “Terry, Eric told me I had to do some photos,” he stated flatly. Taylor understood once the situation had been explained, but informed White that he needed to change quickly into his ring attire so he could head down the hall and film some promos. Already behind schedule, the team were about to wrap up. If WCW didn’t get the final shots filmed straight away then they would have to pay double to have the crew stay on longer.
White agreed and was about to get changed, when another agent - former wrestler, Paul Orndorff - burst into the room. Orndorff had been on top of the business in the mid-eighties. One of the key players in the WWF’s glory years, he had wrestled in the main event at the inaugural WrestleMania and headlined across North America with Hulk Hogan, where the pair had routinely drew monster sell-out houses. During the run with Hogan, Orndorff damaged his neck when he was kicked in the chin during a match in Canada. He had needed surgery, but put it off because he knew that the time it would take to heal would spell the end of his run as a main eventer. By the time the run was over it was too late to fix the problem, which left him with permanent damage on the right side of his body. He once justified his decision to work through the pain during a conversation with Kevin Nash, telling him, “I was on top with the man, I was printing money.” However, by 1995 Orndorff was reduced to the role of occasional wrestler and backstage agent. What remained was a jacked-up bipolar veteran with an atrophied right arm, who was angry at the world as a result.
Orndorff had been sent to find White that fateful August afternoon by Bob Armstrong, a grizzled fifty-seven-year-old veteran who had been in the business for three decades and had trained all four of his sons to be wrestlers. His current employment with WCW was also as a road agent; he was the man in charge of getting the day’s promos completed on time. Armstrong was annoyed the filming was behind schedule, so he was deeply irritated with White not showing up. To hurry things along, he sent Orndorff to tell him to get a move on.
“Where the hell you been? You’re late!” Orndorff demanded tersely, and White sighed, fed up with having to explain himself yet again. He didn’t get the chance; Orndorff had no time for excuses, he only wanted to make sure the promos were shot. White was less than impressed with Orndorff’s curtness and told him he would have to wait until he was changed. The notoriously intense Orndorff saw red and started yelling at White, who already irritated, growled back that he was late because he was on a Bischoff-ordered photo session, and that Orndorff was not his boss so should change his tone.
Both men had always been cordial to each other prior to the blow-up, even teaming up a couple of times a few years earlier, though Orndorff felt White could be a bully in the ring. Any remaining semblance of friendship and professionalism disappeared at that point. “Goddamn you, you fat-ass fucking prima donna,” yelled Orndorff, who by now had worked himself up into a frenzy. White refused to be talked down to in front of the boys and other agents, so shouted back, “Hey Paul, go fuck yourself. If you’re gonna talk to me like that, then get the fuck out of the room.”
Though he was still seething, Orndorff walked away. White on the other hand remained livid about the way he had been treated, growing angrier and angrier as he stewed over it. He decided to confront Orndorff again and demand an apology, feeling he had done nothing wrong to justify the torrent of foul-mouthed abuse. He left the locker room and immediately spotted Orndorff in the hallway, deliberately shouldering into him, igniting the powder keg. The pair quickly squared up, going nose-to-nose and barking expletives at one another. “Make your move fat-ass, go ahead, take your best fucking shot, ‘cos I’m gonna kick your fat fucking ass,” screamed Orndorff.
Given the circumstances and setting there was little chance of either man backing down. It hardly even mattered that both felt they were in the right; predominantly neither man dared risk losing face with the growing crowd of intrigued locker room members. White struck first, smacking Orndorff hard in the chest with his bear-sized palm and knocking him clean off his feet. Orndorff’s head cracked off the floor with a thud, immediately causing White to worry that he might have gone too far and accidentally killed him.
“Paul, are you alright?” he asked tentatively, but was shoved away. For White the near miss diffused the situation somewhat. He backed off, but Orndorff was still enraged and wanted to continue the fight. When he made it back to his feet, he pounced with three quick punches to the face, as members of the locker room half-heartedly tried to pull the pair apart. Orndorff then caught White in the side of the head with a powerful left hook that would have floored a rhino, sending him tumbling to the ground. Orndorff, who was wearing flip-flops, proceeded to kick White repeatedly until the skirmish was finally broken up, and Orndorff was led away into the agent’s room. Observer Brian Pillman would later note that if Orndorff had been wearing a real pair of shoes, then he might well have killed White before he was pulled away from him. As Bob Armstrong remembers it, “Paul just beat his big fat… I mean he beat him ‘til he was bleeding. It was a mess.”
As a company official, Orndorff should have known better than to engage in a fistfight with a member of the talent roster. However, he was not a corporate suit - he was a wrestler foremost - and wrestlers handled business in different ways than real world executives. He recounted the tale to the gaggle of impressed announcers, linkmen and other agents who had quickly surrounded him. Orndorff justified his actions, explaining that he was merely defending himself because White had sucker punched him first.
Meanwhile, White was on the floor for several minutes recovering from the impact of the blows and trying to regain his bearings. Orndorff’s assault had left him bruised, bloodied, and embarrassed. He wanted to save face. At any rate, he had a tough guy reputation to protect, one that would be irreparably damaged if word leaked out that he had been humbled by an older man half his size who had the use of only one arm.
He stormed into the agent’s office and called out Orndorff for another round, telling him that he had not wanted to fight before, but had since changed his mind. He goaded him, yelling how he was yet to throw a single punch, whereas Orndorff had to hit him four times in the face before he went down. Gene Okerlund stepped in and cautioned White that he could not fight in the executive’s room, so the two spilled outside and brawled again, this time in a more even ruckus. When Orndorff looked to be getting the upper hand again, Tonga Fifita intervened and pulled him off before he could do any more damage. The result was a black eye for Orndorff, with White suffering further damage to his eyes and lip. Orndorff would later state that if not for his inability to use the right side of his body, then he might well have ended up in jail for having killed White.
When Eric Bischoff finally learned what had transpired, he immediately sent White home. He understood his position and sympathised that the situation had become so out of hand because of his own failure to communicate White’s whereabouts to his staff, but matters had escalated far beyond that being an acceptable reason. The way Bischoff saw it, White had thrown the first punch and then reignited the situation when he came looking for Orndorff. He had no choice but to suspend him. Orndorff on the other hand wrestled on that evening’s tapings, with his fresh black eye clearly visible as he defeated enhancement performer Barry Houston in a routine squash bout.
The altercation meant Bischoff had to act and punish White, because he could not be seen as tolerant of such miscreant behaviour, no matter what the original justification behind it was. He told White to go home and cool off, then offered him a six month unpaid suspension with the caveat that he could work as many dates in Japan as he wanted during that period. To White that was the equivalent of a $250,000 fine, which he felt was excessively harsh considering the circumstances. On the advice of his lawyer, White rejected the offer. He later admitted he had felt pressured to do so, and confessed that it was a mistake. Bischoff even tried to caution him as such, warning, “Leon, we’ve got a whole floor filled with attorneys. Do you really want to do this?” White did not, but his attorneys did and he listened to them. “It was bad advice,” he later conceded.
As White sat at home brooding, the sharks were circling in Atlanta. Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair were both in Bischoff’s ear, self-servingly advising him that WCW didn’t need Vader, and that he should be released from his contract for his actions. It was a political play from both. With Vader out of the way, it would free up space in the crowded main event scene. Bischoff was au fait with Hogan and Flair’s respective camps pulling him from both sides, though rarely did they share the same opinion. He relented to the pressure - in part so he could free funds to make a statement of intent by signing the WWF’s Lex Luger - and released White from his four-year contract. Due to the manner of his dismissal, cited on the grounds of disorderly conduct, WCW were not required to pay him a penny in severance money.
When White wound up sat in Vince McMahon’s office in early January 1996, he made sure to be on his best behaviour. The WWF was the only alternative to WCW if he wanted to remain in North America. He had no interest in embarrassing himself by working for low budget independent operations or going somewhere small-time like ECW. Even though he had options in Japan where he was already a star and would be given a much lighter schedule, White wanted the WWF job. He needed shoulder surgery, and a contract with Titan meant the costs of the operation would be covered. In addition, like Mick Foley, he was a closet ‘mark’ for the WWF name at heart, feeling that for his career to be judged as a success he needed to “make it” in New York.
From the start White was upfront with McMahon, informing him that he was injured and would need surgery. He outlined two realistic options regarding a deal; he could come in and work through the injury for as long as possible then get surgery, or he could appear at the Royal Rumble, then take time off immediately and return months later. McMahon contemplated the two options and suggested a third; that White worked the Rumble show and the following evening’s Raw tapings, on which they would run an angle that caused him to be suspended, allowing him to get the surgery.
White agreed to the compromise and the deal was struck, then Vince moved on to another issue: his ring name. McMahon had always looked to repackage performers who came in to the WWF with reputations built elsewhere. He felt that his marketing machine could not fully get behind something dated and pre-existing; they were better equipped to push and promote something original and vibrant. As he had with Mick Foley, Vince suggested an alternative alias.
“Vince wanted to change his name to ‘The Mastodon’!” remembers an incredulous Jim Cornette, “I said, ‘It’s fucking Vader! He’s a former WCW Champion; everyone in the world knows who he is!’” White did not want to change either and argued his case. Vince eventually relented and agreed that White could remain as Vader, a decision that the performer ultimately regretted. “Vince wanted to create a whole new character, and you know what? I should have done it,” he rued. “The WWF would have owned it, but Vince would have marketed [the character properly] if it was his. That was a mistake, and that was stupid on my part. I should have said yes.”
White was not worried about his tardiness, because Bischoff had sent him on the assignment and knew why he was late. He had also promised to pass on the information to the agents and executives working at the tapings. Unbeknownst to White, informing others of his whereabouts had slipped Bischoff’s mind due to myriad other issues coming up - as was always the case during a television shoot. When White finally arrived at the building he was greeted by his friend Tonga ‘Meng’ Fifita, who expressed surprised at his lateness because it was so out of character for him. “Where you been? You’re never late! They’ve been looking for you...” Fifita warned him. White wondered exactly who “they” were, but did not concern himself with it. Once again, he felt assured in the knowledge that he was following direct orders from his boss.
When road agent Terry Taylor wandered into the room and began questioning him about why he was late, White started to become irritated. “Terry, Eric told me I had to do some photos,” he stated flatly. Taylor understood once the situation had been explained, but informed White that he needed to change quickly into his ring attire so he could head down the hall and film some promos. Already behind schedule, the team were about to wrap up. If WCW didn’t get the final shots filmed straight away then they would have to pay double to have the crew stay on longer.
White agreed and was about to get changed, when another agent - former wrestler, Paul Orndorff - burst into the room. Orndorff had been on top of the business in the mid-eighties. One of the key players in the WWF’s glory years, he had wrestled in the main event at the inaugural WrestleMania and headlined across North America with Hulk Hogan, where the pair had routinely drew monster sell-out houses. During the run with Hogan, Orndorff damaged his neck when he was kicked in the chin during a match in Canada. He had needed surgery, but put it off because he knew that the time it would take to heal would spell the end of his run as a main eventer. By the time the run was over it was too late to fix the problem, which left him with permanent damage on the right side of his body. He once justified his decision to work through the pain during a conversation with Kevin Nash, telling him, “I was on top with the man, I was printing money.” However, by 1995 Orndorff was reduced to the role of occasional wrestler and backstage agent. What remained was a jacked-up bipolar veteran with an atrophied right arm, who was angry at the world as a result.
Orndorff had been sent to find White that fateful August afternoon by Bob Armstrong, a grizzled fifty-seven-year-old veteran who had been in the business for three decades and had trained all four of his sons to be wrestlers. His current employment with WCW was also as a road agent; he was the man in charge of getting the day’s promos completed on time. Armstrong was annoyed the filming was behind schedule, so he was deeply irritated with White not showing up. To hurry things along, he sent Orndorff to tell him to get a move on.
“Where the hell you been? You’re late!” Orndorff demanded tersely, and White sighed, fed up with having to explain himself yet again. He didn’t get the chance; Orndorff had no time for excuses, he only wanted to make sure the promos were shot. White was less than impressed with Orndorff’s curtness and told him he would have to wait until he was changed. The notoriously intense Orndorff saw red and started yelling at White, who already irritated, growled back that he was late because he was on a Bischoff-ordered photo session, and that Orndorff was not his boss so should change his tone.
Both men had always been cordial to each other prior to the blow-up, even teaming up a couple of times a few years earlier, though Orndorff felt White could be a bully in the ring. Any remaining semblance of friendship and professionalism disappeared at that point. “Goddamn you, you fat-ass fucking prima donna,” yelled Orndorff, who by now had worked himself up into a frenzy. White refused to be talked down to in front of the boys and other agents, so shouted back, “Hey Paul, go fuck yourself. If you’re gonna talk to me like that, then get the fuck out of the room.”
Though he was still seething, Orndorff walked away. White on the other hand remained livid about the way he had been treated, growing angrier and angrier as he stewed over it. He decided to confront Orndorff again and demand an apology, feeling he had done nothing wrong to justify the torrent of foul-mouthed abuse. He left the locker room and immediately spotted Orndorff in the hallway, deliberately shouldering into him, igniting the powder keg. The pair quickly squared up, going nose-to-nose and barking expletives at one another. “Make your move fat-ass, go ahead, take your best fucking shot, ‘cos I’m gonna kick your fat fucking ass,” screamed Orndorff.
Given the circumstances and setting there was little chance of either man backing down. It hardly even mattered that both felt they were in the right; predominantly neither man dared risk losing face with the growing crowd of intrigued locker room members. White struck first, smacking Orndorff hard in the chest with his bear-sized palm and knocking him clean off his feet. Orndorff’s head cracked off the floor with a thud, immediately causing White to worry that he might have gone too far and accidentally killed him.
“Paul, are you alright?” he asked tentatively, but was shoved away. For White the near miss diffused the situation somewhat. He backed off, but Orndorff was still enraged and wanted to continue the fight. When he made it back to his feet, he pounced with three quick punches to the face, as members of the locker room half-heartedly tried to pull the pair apart. Orndorff then caught White in the side of the head with a powerful left hook that would have floored a rhino, sending him tumbling to the ground. Orndorff, who was wearing flip-flops, proceeded to kick White repeatedly until the skirmish was finally broken up, and Orndorff was led away into the agent’s room. Observer Brian Pillman would later note that if Orndorff had been wearing a real pair of shoes, then he might well have killed White before he was pulled away from him. As Bob Armstrong remembers it, “Paul just beat his big fat… I mean he beat him ‘til he was bleeding. It was a mess.”
As a company official, Orndorff should have known better than to engage in a fistfight with a member of the talent roster. However, he was not a corporate suit - he was a wrestler foremost - and wrestlers handled business in different ways than real world executives. He recounted the tale to the gaggle of impressed announcers, linkmen and other agents who had quickly surrounded him. Orndorff justified his actions, explaining that he was merely defending himself because White had sucker punched him first.
Meanwhile, White was on the floor for several minutes recovering from the impact of the blows and trying to regain his bearings. Orndorff’s assault had left him bruised, bloodied, and embarrassed. He wanted to save face. At any rate, he had a tough guy reputation to protect, one that would be irreparably damaged if word leaked out that he had been humbled by an older man half his size who had the use of only one arm.
He stormed into the agent’s office and called out Orndorff for another round, telling him that he had not wanted to fight before, but had since changed his mind. He goaded him, yelling how he was yet to throw a single punch, whereas Orndorff had to hit him four times in the face before he went down. Gene Okerlund stepped in and cautioned White that he could not fight in the executive’s room, so the two spilled outside and brawled again, this time in a more even ruckus. When Orndorff looked to be getting the upper hand again, Tonga Fifita intervened and pulled him off before he could do any more damage. The result was a black eye for Orndorff, with White suffering further damage to his eyes and lip. Orndorff would later state that if not for his inability to use the right side of his body, then he might well have ended up in jail for having killed White.
When Eric Bischoff finally learned what had transpired, he immediately sent White home. He understood his position and sympathised that the situation had become so out of hand because of his own failure to communicate White’s whereabouts to his staff, but matters had escalated far beyond that being an acceptable reason. The way Bischoff saw it, White had thrown the first punch and then reignited the situation when he came looking for Orndorff. He had no choice but to suspend him. Orndorff on the other hand wrestled on that evening’s tapings, with his fresh black eye clearly visible as he defeated enhancement performer Barry Houston in a routine squash bout.
The altercation meant Bischoff had to act and punish White, because he could not be seen as tolerant of such miscreant behaviour, no matter what the original justification behind it was. He told White to go home and cool off, then offered him a six month unpaid suspension with the caveat that he could work as many dates in Japan as he wanted during that period. To White that was the equivalent of a $250,000 fine, which he felt was excessively harsh considering the circumstances. On the advice of his lawyer, White rejected the offer. He later admitted he had felt pressured to do so, and confessed that it was a mistake. Bischoff even tried to caution him as such, warning, “Leon, we’ve got a whole floor filled with attorneys. Do you really want to do this?” White did not, but his attorneys did and he listened to them. “It was bad advice,” he later conceded.
As White sat at home brooding, the sharks were circling in Atlanta. Hulk Hogan and Ric Flair were both in Bischoff’s ear, self-servingly advising him that WCW didn’t need Vader, and that he should be released from his contract for his actions. It was a political play from both. With Vader out of the way, it would free up space in the crowded main event scene. Bischoff was au fait with Hogan and Flair’s respective camps pulling him from both sides, though rarely did they share the same opinion. He relented to the pressure - in part so he could free funds to make a statement of intent by signing the WWF’s Lex Luger - and released White from his four-year contract. Due to the manner of his dismissal, cited on the grounds of disorderly conduct, WCW were not required to pay him a penny in severance money.
When White wound up sat in Vince McMahon’s office in early January 1996, he made sure to be on his best behaviour. The WWF was the only alternative to WCW if he wanted to remain in North America. He had no interest in embarrassing himself by working for low budget independent operations or going somewhere small-time like ECW. Even though he had options in Japan where he was already a star and would be given a much lighter schedule, White wanted the WWF job. He needed shoulder surgery, and a contract with Titan meant the costs of the operation would be covered. In addition, like Mick Foley, he was a closet ‘mark’ for the WWF name at heart, feeling that for his career to be judged as a success he needed to “make it” in New York.
From the start White was upfront with McMahon, informing him that he was injured and would need surgery. He outlined two realistic options regarding a deal; he could come in and work through the injury for as long as possible then get surgery, or he could appear at the Royal Rumble, then take time off immediately and return months later. McMahon contemplated the two options and suggested a third; that White worked the Rumble show and the following evening’s Raw tapings, on which they would run an angle that caused him to be suspended, allowing him to get the surgery.
White agreed to the compromise and the deal was struck, then Vince moved on to another issue: his ring name. McMahon had always looked to repackage performers who came in to the WWF with reputations built elsewhere. He felt that his marketing machine could not fully get behind something dated and pre-existing; they were better equipped to push and promote something original and vibrant. As he had with Mick Foley, Vince suggested an alternative alias.
“Vince wanted to change his name to ‘The Mastodon’!” remembers an incredulous Jim Cornette, “I said, ‘It’s fucking Vader! He’s a former WCW Champion; everyone in the world knows who he is!’” White did not want to change either and argued his case. Vince eventually relented and agreed that White could remain as Vader, a decision that the performer ultimately regretted. “Vince wanted to create a whole new character, and you know what? I should have done it,” he rued. “The WWF would have owned it, but Vince would have marketed [the character properly] if it was his. That was a mistake, and that was stupid on my part. I should have said yes.”
THE LESSONS LEARNED FROM SAVAGE VS. LAWLER
CROCKETT WOULD have done well to learn from the lessons set by Jerry Jarrett and Jerry Lawler in Tennessee and Kentucky some three years earlier. At the time, the Jarrett and Lawler-led Continental Wrestling Association was the undisputed king of the south-eastern United States, during a period when promotional boundaries were still strictly adhered to. At various points they also boasted links with both the National Wrestling Alliance conglomerate of territories, and Verne Gagne’s American Wrestling Association out of Minneapolis.
In contrast to the CWA was the somewhat rebellious International Championship Wrestling group, helmed by Angelo Poffo and his two sons, ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage and ‘Leaping’ Lanny Poffo. The ICW promotion had been founded in 1978 after a nasty split from Ron Fuller’s Knoxville, TN and Dothan, AL based Southeastern Championship Wrestling. It was immediately considered an ‘outlaw’ promotion, one filled with wrestlers blackballed from the established monopoly that was America’s promotional patchwork.
Without any support, the Poffo clan felt their best option was to go on the offensive, and did so by having Savage - their principal star - routinely appear on ICW television to cut disparaging promos against the CWA’s top names. He threw out grandstand challenges left and right to Memphis bookers Jerry Lawler, Bill Dundee, and Jerry Jarrett, going so far as to blast Jarrett, Dundee, and Tojo Yamamoto as “cowards” for not accepting a challenge to fight him three-on-one for a $100,000 payoff.
Savage of course knew that there was no way anyone would take him up on his outlandish offers. The threats soon turned nasty. Savage declared that Lawler’s late father would be “turning over in his grave” if he knew how scared his son was of him, decried him for having not yet retired (though Lawler was still only in his early thirties), even going so far as to knock on Lawler’s front door with a camera crew in tow to demand a fight, safe in the knowledge that ‘The King’ was out of town that day. As Lawler recounted, “They’d go on their show and challenge all the guys on our show. They wouldn’t talk about their own matches, Savage would just rip into me; ‘I went to Jerry Lawler’s house in Memphis and I threw a rock through the window and he was too scared to come out.’ Stuff like that.”
Most wondered whether Savage’s words were hollow, and the question came close to getting answered in January 1980. Savage arrived at a CWA event in ICW’s home base of Lexington, Kentucky and told Lawler’s on-screen manager Jimmy Hart that he was there to take Lawler out. That night, the threat was real. As fate would have it Lawler was not in the building, having broken both bones in his lower left leg during a touch football game. Savage was fuming; suspecting the boys would be convinced he’d intentionally picked his moment to strike and would label him a blowhard.
Figuring he needed to save face, Savage turned his attention to Dundee, the number two babyface in the promotion. He purchased tickets at the box office for the entire ICW roster, with the intention of causing a disturbance during Dundee’s main event match that night. Incredibly, fate would play another wildcard to prevent that, as a CWA fan, entirely unaware of the tensions around him, legitimately attacked Hart during the penultimate match of the evening and caused a riot unrelated to the ICW wrestlers. With the police quickly arriving to calm the situation, nobody from Savage’s crew dared make a move, and Dundee’s bout eventually passed without incident.
Despite that narrow escape, Dundee was not about to get off scot-free. His number came up after he unexpectedly crossed paths with Savage, Angelo Poffo, Pez Whatley and Thunderbolt Patterson outside of a local diner. Following a verbal exchange Dundee reportedly produced a gun, which Savage soon wrestled control of before pistol-whipping Dundee, leaving him with a broken jaw. Savage bragged about the attack relentlessly on the ICW television show, and with Dundee out of action for six weeks it was tough for the CWA to deny it. Dundee later claimed to have been sucker-punched, maintaining that Savage fled when he produced his Smith & Wesson.
THE LANDSCAPE had changed by 1982 and the Poffo family were struggling. ICW limped along under the spectre of dwindling fan attendance, brought about in part due to a raft of star names vacating the promotion over a short period of time. The argument could also be made that ICW were not helped by Savage and co’s obsession with wasting so much of their valuable TV time slandering performers from a rival organisation instead of pushing their own matches. Even so, the bitterness that festered between the two leagues still was not enough to dissuade Jarrett from doing what he felt was right for business. He and Lawler soon purchased the assets of ICW, bringing their noisy neighbours into the CWA fold.
“Four years, eight months, thirteen days!” bellowed Savage as he strode onto the set of the CWA’s live Saturday morning television broadcast of Championship Wrestling, flanked by his father Angelo to interrupt a match featuring the masked A-Team. “Do you know who you’re talking to right now?! Where’s Lawler?! Don’t call me nothing, man! I’m the World Heavyweight champion! Get ‘The King’ out here!” Savage followed his words with actions, smashing a framed photograph over his head, tearing up a picture of Lawler and obliterating enhancement workers Henry Rutledge and the Pink Panther with piledrivers and flying elbow drops. He was soon dragged out of the studio by police under orders from CWA booker Eddie Marlin, though not before Savage could throw out a challenge for Lawler to meet him in a steel cage match.
Although not strictly an inter-promotional battle in the truest sense, with Savage, Angelo, and later Lanny becoming part of the established CWA roster, the initial rivalry was certainly grounded in that implication, much as Bischoff intended to achieve with Hall and Nash. The first meeting of Savage and Lawler was actually something of a test run, only advertised locally to fans in Lexington without any TV hype or on-screen angle to support it. Despite that, it still pulled a remarkably strong house of 8,000 fans to what would have otherwise been a routine Rupp Arena spot show. That was followed with their first properly advertised bout on December 5, 1983, a match which doubled the CWA’s average attendance at the Mid-South Coliseum that year and drew 8,000 fans, making it the fourth-highest attended card of the year. The only cards that beat it were two gimmick celebrity appearances from renowned performance artist Andy Kaufman in handicap matches with Lawler, and Lawler’s challenge of AWA World Heavyweight Champion Nick Bockwinkel.
If Bischoff knew the ghosts of wrestling past, and could learn from the triumphs of New Japan and the CWA, in addition to the mistakes of his predecessor’s handling of the truncated UWF invasion, there was no way he could fail. If booked correctly, two diametrically opposed organisations presented on equal footing but espousing conflicting ideologies, could be box office gold for years, if not decades to come. Of that there was no doubt. WCW vs. nWo was going to be the biggest angle in wrestling history, and best of all, as the puppeteer pulling the strings of both factions, Bischoff knew he was guaranteed to end up on the winning side regardless of the storyline outcome.
The introductions of Nash and Hall on television had been a strong starting point for Bischoff’s adventurous storyline, but he knew that he needed to align them with someone even bigger to fully capture the public’s imagination. Any potential targets over in New York were now tied up in long-term contracts, and there was not anyone on the independent scene with the level of mainstream appeal that he coveted. He needed to look closer to home, and it so happened there was someone on his roster who ticked all the right boxes: Hulk Hogan.
In contrast to the CWA was the somewhat rebellious International Championship Wrestling group, helmed by Angelo Poffo and his two sons, ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage and ‘Leaping’ Lanny Poffo. The ICW promotion had been founded in 1978 after a nasty split from Ron Fuller’s Knoxville, TN and Dothan, AL based Southeastern Championship Wrestling. It was immediately considered an ‘outlaw’ promotion, one filled with wrestlers blackballed from the established monopoly that was America’s promotional patchwork.
Without any support, the Poffo clan felt their best option was to go on the offensive, and did so by having Savage - their principal star - routinely appear on ICW television to cut disparaging promos against the CWA’s top names. He threw out grandstand challenges left and right to Memphis bookers Jerry Lawler, Bill Dundee, and Jerry Jarrett, going so far as to blast Jarrett, Dundee, and Tojo Yamamoto as “cowards” for not accepting a challenge to fight him three-on-one for a $100,000 payoff.
Savage of course knew that there was no way anyone would take him up on his outlandish offers. The threats soon turned nasty. Savage declared that Lawler’s late father would be “turning over in his grave” if he knew how scared his son was of him, decried him for having not yet retired (though Lawler was still only in his early thirties), even going so far as to knock on Lawler’s front door with a camera crew in tow to demand a fight, safe in the knowledge that ‘The King’ was out of town that day. As Lawler recounted, “They’d go on their show and challenge all the guys on our show. They wouldn’t talk about their own matches, Savage would just rip into me; ‘I went to Jerry Lawler’s house in Memphis and I threw a rock through the window and he was too scared to come out.’ Stuff like that.”
Most wondered whether Savage’s words were hollow, and the question came close to getting answered in January 1980. Savage arrived at a CWA event in ICW’s home base of Lexington, Kentucky and told Lawler’s on-screen manager Jimmy Hart that he was there to take Lawler out. That night, the threat was real. As fate would have it Lawler was not in the building, having broken both bones in his lower left leg during a touch football game. Savage was fuming; suspecting the boys would be convinced he’d intentionally picked his moment to strike and would label him a blowhard.
Figuring he needed to save face, Savage turned his attention to Dundee, the number two babyface in the promotion. He purchased tickets at the box office for the entire ICW roster, with the intention of causing a disturbance during Dundee’s main event match that night. Incredibly, fate would play another wildcard to prevent that, as a CWA fan, entirely unaware of the tensions around him, legitimately attacked Hart during the penultimate match of the evening and caused a riot unrelated to the ICW wrestlers. With the police quickly arriving to calm the situation, nobody from Savage’s crew dared make a move, and Dundee’s bout eventually passed without incident.
Despite that narrow escape, Dundee was not about to get off scot-free. His number came up after he unexpectedly crossed paths with Savage, Angelo Poffo, Pez Whatley and Thunderbolt Patterson outside of a local diner. Following a verbal exchange Dundee reportedly produced a gun, which Savage soon wrestled control of before pistol-whipping Dundee, leaving him with a broken jaw. Savage bragged about the attack relentlessly on the ICW television show, and with Dundee out of action for six weeks it was tough for the CWA to deny it. Dundee later claimed to have been sucker-punched, maintaining that Savage fled when he produced his Smith & Wesson.
THE LANDSCAPE had changed by 1982 and the Poffo family were struggling. ICW limped along under the spectre of dwindling fan attendance, brought about in part due to a raft of star names vacating the promotion over a short period of time. The argument could also be made that ICW were not helped by Savage and co’s obsession with wasting so much of their valuable TV time slandering performers from a rival organisation instead of pushing their own matches. Even so, the bitterness that festered between the two leagues still was not enough to dissuade Jarrett from doing what he felt was right for business. He and Lawler soon purchased the assets of ICW, bringing their noisy neighbours into the CWA fold.
“Four years, eight months, thirteen days!” bellowed Savage as he strode onto the set of the CWA’s live Saturday morning television broadcast of Championship Wrestling, flanked by his father Angelo to interrupt a match featuring the masked A-Team. “Do you know who you’re talking to right now?! Where’s Lawler?! Don’t call me nothing, man! I’m the World Heavyweight champion! Get ‘The King’ out here!” Savage followed his words with actions, smashing a framed photograph over his head, tearing up a picture of Lawler and obliterating enhancement workers Henry Rutledge and the Pink Panther with piledrivers and flying elbow drops. He was soon dragged out of the studio by police under orders from CWA booker Eddie Marlin, though not before Savage could throw out a challenge for Lawler to meet him in a steel cage match.
Although not strictly an inter-promotional battle in the truest sense, with Savage, Angelo, and later Lanny becoming part of the established CWA roster, the initial rivalry was certainly grounded in that implication, much as Bischoff intended to achieve with Hall and Nash. The first meeting of Savage and Lawler was actually something of a test run, only advertised locally to fans in Lexington without any TV hype or on-screen angle to support it. Despite that, it still pulled a remarkably strong house of 8,000 fans to what would have otherwise been a routine Rupp Arena spot show. That was followed with their first properly advertised bout on December 5, 1983, a match which doubled the CWA’s average attendance at the Mid-South Coliseum that year and drew 8,000 fans, making it the fourth-highest attended card of the year. The only cards that beat it were two gimmick celebrity appearances from renowned performance artist Andy Kaufman in handicap matches with Lawler, and Lawler’s challenge of AWA World Heavyweight Champion Nick Bockwinkel.
If Bischoff knew the ghosts of wrestling past, and could learn from the triumphs of New Japan and the CWA, in addition to the mistakes of his predecessor’s handling of the truncated UWF invasion, there was no way he could fail. If booked correctly, two diametrically opposed organisations presented on equal footing but espousing conflicting ideologies, could be box office gold for years, if not decades to come. Of that there was no doubt. WCW vs. nWo was going to be the biggest angle in wrestling history, and best of all, as the puppeteer pulling the strings of both factions, Bischoff knew he was guaranteed to end up on the winning side regardless of the storyline outcome.
The introductions of Nash and Hall on television had been a strong starting point for Bischoff’s adventurous storyline, but he knew that he needed to align them with someone even bigger to fully capture the public’s imagination. Any potential targets over in New York were now tied up in long-term contracts, and there was not anyone on the independent scene with the level of mainstream appeal that he coveted. He needed to look closer to home, and it so happened there was someone on his roster who ticked all the right boxes: Hulk Hogan.