Bryan Alvarez on The Death of WCW at 10, TNA’s TV Crisis and the WWE Network

Fred: My next guest is the founder of Figure Four Online, part of WrestlingObserver.com, and the co-author of “The Death of WCW.” Bryan Alvarez, thank you so much for the time, sir. How are you?

Bryan Alvarez: Thanks for having me on the show today. I should have worn a suit.

Fred: It’s all good, man. You’re looking dapper as usual. “The Death of WCW” is celebrating its 10th anniversary with the re-release of the bestselling book from 2004, and some people are reading it for the very first time. Why is this the right time to re-release it, and what’s changed from the last version?

Bryan Alvarez: The main reason is that it’s been 10 years since the first book. When we wrote it, we had a very specific word count. If you’ve been a wrestling fan for a long time, you might remember that it was very difficult for Mick Foley to get his book published. As crazy as it sounds now, with all the wrestling books out there, there was a belief in the publishing industry that wrestling fans couldn’t read. When Foley’s book became a No. 1 bestseller, people started to realize that maybe wrestling fans can read. But they still gave us something like 120,000 words. For Observer subscribers, Dave writes a 45,000-word Observer once a month, so they were essentially giving us three jumbo Observers to tell the story of the rise and fall of WCW. Especially on my part, because I was writing about 30,000 words a week at the time, I wrote way too much, so they trimmed the book greatly. It was still a good book, and it was still in print 10 years later, so apparently everybody else loved it as well. But people would always come up and ask why there was nothing in the book about the nWo red and black. I had Lance Storm on my show every other week, and he’s not even mentioned in the book, even though he had that run where he held three titles at once in WCW. A lot of stuff had to be trimmed.

So for the 10th anniversary, we thought it would be a great time to put everything back in and expand it. I’ve had ex-WCW guys on my show for years, all on the record, so there are a lot of quotes and new questions we could ask people. We could also write a little about TNA, because TNA is kind of like the ashes of WCW. When you look at TNA over the last 12 years, there were a lot of things where, if you read “The Death of WCW,” you’d ask yourself: Why did they hire Vince Russo? Why did Eric Bischoff come back in 2010, try to run head-to-head with Raw and bring in Hulk Hogan? Nobody in their right mind would do these things, but they did, so I figured that chapter would write itself. The book is 40 percent bigger, with tons of new stories and new interviews. For those who love the original, it’s the same book, but in a lot of ways, it’s also a brand-new book.

Fred: There’s a funny note about the re-release. Previously, the book wasn’t released in hardcover, but one guy did get a hardcover book over you. Can you mention who?

Bryan Alvarez: When I was a little kid, I wanted to be an author. When I was 5 years old, I wrote a book about the universe and sent it to a publisher, and it was rejected. But I knew I was going to write a book someday, and before the days of Kindle and iPad, I had books everywhere. I loved hardcover books, and all I wanted when I wrote my book was a hardcover. Because of how the wrestling book publishing industry was in 2003 and 2004, we didn’t get one. A few years later, Vince Russo wrote a book, “Forgiven.” I don’t want to toot my own horn, but “The Death of WCW” never went out of print. It was in print for over a decade. I think I saw Vince Russo’s book at a bookstore one time, and I’d bet good money it isn’t in print 10 years later, and they gave him a hardcover. When I thought about the success of our book and what this man had done to WCW, and what he went on to do to TNA, I thought, “Can you believe this guy got a hardcover and you didn’t?” I’m not a jealous person, but I was annoyed. So when the discussion started for the re-release, I swear to God, that was the one thing I asked for: There’s got to be a hardcover. In 2014, there are very few bookstores left and everybody reads on a Kindle, a Nook or an iPad, but when I look at the copies sold through my Amazon affiliate account, the vast majority are hardcovers. The funny thing is I make the least money on the hardcovers. I make four times as much if you buy the Kindle edition. But I don’t care. I’m just so happy everybody bought the hardcover. It’s a dream come true for me, and I’ll take the pay cut.

Fred: There you go. Take that, Vince Russo. And I did buy the hardcover, so thank you. You mentioned Vince Russo and TNA, which is a complete mess. You and your partner in crime, Dave Meltzer, talked about the Bound for Glory card, or lack thereof.

Bryan Alvarez: A lot of what’s going on with Bound for Glory is TNA’s fault. But right now, TNA has no television deal. They are WCW in March 2001, when it was announced that TBS and TNT were no longer going to carry WCW. That’s a life-or-death emergency. When the television got canceled, the first thing Eric Bischoff did was not figure out his main event for Spring Stampede. That’s the last thing on anybody’s mind. The only thing that matters for TNA right now is getting a TV deal. If they don’t, there won’t be a Bound for Glory next year. There won’t be an Impact. There won’t be anything, and everybody will be unemployed. I believe this was the week the Spike TV contract expired, and had Spike not been nice enough to let them continue on for a few more months, the company would be dead this week. That’s the kind of emergency they’re facing. Their big concern should be getting good matches on television and drawing ratings, so they’ve got numbers to show any network that might pick them up. A network doesn’t care how Bound for Glory does or how a taped pay-per-view from Japan does, because it has no stake in it. All it cares about is how many viewers you can provide and in what demographics. If they signed a TV deal tomorrow, I’d be doing everything I could to remedy the Bound for Glory situation. Until then, they don’t need to worry about it.

Every single interview I’ve done about “The Death of WCW,” somebody has asked me about Bound for Glory, and it amazes me, because I didn’t think anybody really cared. I could talk about it for an hour, but the whole thing was a disaster from day one. In an effort to cut costs, they decided to co-promote with Wrestle-1. That’s where all of these problems started. Because the show is in Japan, where they view wrestling a little differently than we do in the U.S., it’s been one disaster after another. In a cheap plug, when the day comes that I inevitably have to write “The Death of TNA,” this Bound for Glory situation will very likely be an entire chapter. There’s so much crazy stuff involved, and it’s their biggest and maybe their final pay-per-view of all time.

Fred: You famously wrote in “The Death of WCW” that WCW was not meant to die. With TNA, it feels like the opposite from the beginning, with the weekly pay-per-views and a business model that’s always been questionable. No matter what happens to TNA, can you ever see the wrestling business getting back to the level it was at before the deaths of WCW and ECW, or at least remotely close?

Bryan Alvarez: I’m not going to say it could never happen. If all the pieces fell into place, it could work. But “The Death of WCW” and TNA’s current problems both illustrate something very simple about the pro wrestling business, as does all of us suffering through three hours of Raw every Monday night: The history of wrestling is often written in a television boardroom. Let’s say Fox is the most-watched network in the country, and for whatever reason it hires somebody who grew up a huge NWA fan, and he has enough power to say, “We’re going to build a wrestling company. We’re going to give it Monday night at 9, bid big money for guys like CM Punk and some WWE guys whose deals are coming due, and maybe bring in Steve Austin as the face of the company.” You’d have to use a lot of new stars too. Remember how Nitro exploded out of the gate: They used a bunch of guys everybody thought were has-beens. That works at the beginning, but you’ve got to build a bunch of new guys underneath, which WCW never did. If the cards fall into place, with the right place, right time, right guy, right money and right network, sure, it could happen again. But in the current landscape, with the deal Ring of Honor has and the deal TNA doesn’t have, WWE is so far ahead that it’s going to be very difficult for anybody to catch up. That said, WWE is in a holding pattern that’s similar, though not the same, to where it was in the early ’90s. If the right guy came along with the right ideas and the right talent, somebody could build something. I don’t expect it anytime soon, but it’s not impossible.

Fred: A fan question from Steven Miller about the network: Could WWE ever pull the plug on the network’s current business model in North America, given how tough it is to become profitable?

Bryan Alvarez: The one thing people need to consider is that the network is supposed to be profitable right now. The whole idea behind the last WWE quarterly call was massive cost cutting so the network could break even at a lower number of subscribers. When you take into account lost pay-per-view revenue and how many subscribers they’d need to make that up and get back to where they were, they’ve got a long way to go. But I don’t think the network is going away anytime soon, and it probably shouldn’t, because WWE is on really bad terms with the cable companies. If they canceled the network tomorrow after all that rigmarole, they’d have a rough time getting anything close to the split they had before. They’d be crawling back to the cable companies for the same deal they had before they screwed them, and I don’t think that’s going to happen. Maybe, with the success of the network as a TV channel in Canada, and I’d presume they’ll try to do a TV version in the U.K. as opposed to an internet one, they could set it up in a similar manner here. Remember, that’s how they wanted to do it in the first place. This was never supposed to be an internet network. At first it was going to be a basic cable channel like Animal Planet, and I remember thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding me. That’s impossible.” But maybe you could do something like Showtime, which is kind of what they’re doing in Canada. I can see it evolving in that direction, but I can’t see them getting rid of the network.

Fred: Scott Anderson asks: Is the Fingerpoke of Doom overrated, considering all the other mistakes WCW made?

Bryan Alvarez: No, it’s not overrated. There were a million mistakes, and I don’t know if there was any one straw that broke the camel’s back, but the Fingerpoke of Doom was a big, big mistake. When I was rewriting the book, there was nothing we originally wrote about as a mistake that, with 10 years of hindsight, looked like no big deal. Nothing. In fact, a lot of things looked worse, like the year 2000. There was a period when TNA was exceptionally horrible, and Dave and I would argue on the air about whether TNA was worse than WCW. Dave, who is a genius, would always say, “No, Bryan, you don’t get it. Nothing was worse than WCW.” I’d say, “Hold on, Dave. At least WCW had a rise. TNA has been in a constant rate of decline since day one, so clearly TNA is worse.” And he’d say, “If you watched those Thunders and Nitros in 2000, you’d understand. Nothing will compare.” So I went back to rewrite the 2000 chapter, and I could not believe my own book. Everybody goes online on Tuesdays and rants about what they didn’t like on Raw, or cries about the Bellas or the Rosa Mendes matches, and you can go back to barbed-wire Christmas trees and other stupid stuff on Impact. But I promise you, with every ounce of my being, nothing will ever be close to as bad as WCW in 2000. It’s impossible. Usually when we looked back, things were actually worse than we thought at the time, including the Fingerpoke of Doom.

Fred: Chris Dixon has an interesting question. He heard Kevin Sullivan say on MLW Radio that Ted Turner thought about getting back into wrestling after WCW folded and consulted Jim Barnett, who told him no, Vince has it now. Do you have any information on that alleged meeting?

Bryan Alvarez: That’s a story I’ve never heard before. It may be true. I talked to Jim Barnett a lot in the final years of his life. I met him around 2000, when I was doing independent wrestling. He came out to Seattle as a WCW talent scout, and Dave put him in touch with me. We’ve had some good guys come out of Washington, like Daniel Bryan and Davey Richards, but it wasn’t the best place to scout, and suffice to say, he didn’t find anybody. I talked to him all the time after that. After WCW went down, he was a consultant for WWE, and the funny thing is he wouldn’t always watch the shows. He’d call me and ask for a review, which he would then write up as his own review and send to WWE. But I never heard him talk about anything like that. Dave might know more. Ted was close with Jim Barnett, and maybe they had casual conversations, but I’d be surprised if it was serious in any way.

Fred: J. George asks: Did being a professional wrestler hurt or help you get scoops during the Monday Night War?

Bryan Alvarez: I can’t say it hurt, and I’m sure it helped a little bit. I was good friends with DDP and Kanyon. Kanyon in particular would ask me to send him videotapes, and he’d send back critiques. He was trying to help me with my independent wrestling career. I think some guys had a certain level of respect for me because I was in there bumping and doing matches, and it may have helped some people take me seriously, but I would have been fine if I weren’t a wrestler. It wasn’t a dealbreaker.

Fred: Are you surprised the Nitros are still holding up today on the WWE Network?

Bryan Alvarez: The early Nitros are holding up. Remember, the Monday Night War started because Nitro was good. It was very revolutionary. We’re going through all the Nitros from episode one on “The Bryan and Vinny Show” on the website, and we’re on episode five right now. Episode five had a Lex Luger-Randy Savage match that Dave gave one star when he originally watched it, and maybe it’s because I’ve watched a bunch of Rosa Mendes matches, but in comparison, it was a great match. It’s a one-hour show, which is so easy to watch, so I’m really enjoying them. But it was a long time before the show started to collapse, and luckily it’ll be five years before I’m watching the 2000 Nitros and Thunders. Get back to me then. I’ve also gone back and watched the Warrior-Hulk Hogan matches from 1998. Some of them were absolutely horrible at the time, but after years of Rosa Mendes, the Jenna Morasca-Sharmell match and a lot of terrible matches from the last decade, a match that may have been minus-five stars at the time is a solid minus-two today. And it’s pretty amazing, at least to me, that Mongo McMichael is pretty tolerable these days compared to some of the announcing we get now with Tom Phillips and Byron Saxton, the most generic announcers on earth.

Fred: Those guys are generic, but Mongo was just so horrible.

Bryan Alvarez: The only good thing I can say about Mongo is that he was very excited about his job. Aside from that, I have no good things to say. Eric Bischoff, though, didn’t know the names of every move, but God bless Michael Cole and JBL, when I listen to them, I feel like they’re reciting lines. You listen to Eric Bischoff, and he’s genuinely excited: “You’re watching Nitro. If you’re not watching this, you’re missing out.” You can say whatever you want about how he ran the company later, but he was so excited as a commentator on Nitro. At the end of Nitro No. 5, they run down the card for next week, and as it fades to black, you can hear all the announcers in the background going, “Yeah, Nitro!” I thought, “This show is great. These people love this show, and it makes me love the show.”

Fred: A couple more fan questions. Scott asks: Could Dean Ambrose surpass Roman Reigns as the next guy?

Bryan Alvarez: It’s possible, but WWE is a company where, if they have a guy they think has the total package, they aren’t going to give up on him unless something goes really, really wrong. And if they have a guy who’s connecting greatly with the audience, like Daniel Bryan, but doesn’t fit their criteria, they’ll find all sorts of ways to explain why he shouldn’t be the main guy. I think Dean Ambrose is awesome, but the reality is he’s probably getting this big push the last couple of weeks because Roman Reigns and Daniel Bryan are gone, and they have to make a top babyface for the road fast. That’s not to say he’s doomed. But I still think, in their minds, Roman Reigns has everything they want in a top guy, more so than Ambrose. Even if the fans demand Ambrose in the main event at WrestleMania, they may do that, just like they did with Daniel Bryan. But look at what they did with Bryan leading up to Mania and after it. WrestleMania was throwing the fans a bone, and then they went right back to who they thought the big-time stars were. Barring a terrible injury or some wacky scandal, I don’t think they’ll give up on Roman Reigns until they make him the next John Cena.

Fred: Is there even a Hell in a Cell card right now? You’d think they’d have booked Rusev against Big Show and done something with Rollins and Ambrose. You’d think it would be Brock Lesnar versus John Cena, given the finish at Night of Champions.

Bryan Alvarez: What’s funny is I’d completely forgotten until later, but back in July, somebody contacted me with the dates they were expecting Brock Lesnar to work, and they pretty much said not to count on him being at Hell in a Cell. I didn’t think anything of it, because plans change. Then the next day there was no Brock, and I was reminded, “You were told in July Brock wasn’t going to be at Hell in a Cell. This shouldn’t surprise you.” What I was told was that he’s so expensive that they’re probably not adding any dates, so I don’t think you’ll see him again until the Royal Rumble. The finish seemed to build a rematch at Hell in a Cell, but unless something drastically changes, that’s not going to happen. It looks like they’ll do Cena versus Ambrose, with the winner getting Rollins and the loser apparently getting Randy Orton, also in a cage. They still have three weeks to build the card, so I’m not shocked there isn’t one yet.

Fred: That’s a long time to put the title on ice, but the longer it’s on Brock Lesnar, the better, compared to what we’re getting now.

Bryan Alvarez: I’m all for Brock Lesnar holding that title for a hundred years. He’s great.

Fred: Last fan question, from Michael Roberts: Do you think the UFC will throw stacks of money at Brock when his contract expires in April?

Bryan Alvarez: That’s a good question, and I don’t know the answer. Part of me thinks Brock would love to try one more time, because in his mind he wasn’t 100 percent during his entire run, and he’s close to 100 percent now. Knowing how much money he drew on pay-per-view, I think they’ll probably make him an offer. But he’s obviously going to be offered a lot of money by WWE to stay, and he has to work very few dates for it. He doesn’t have to be training all the time. I can see him wanting to try one more time and then, win, lose or draw, coming back to WWE afterward. I don’t have any inside news, and from what I’ve heard from people in the past, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were interested. But he’s going to be in his late 30s, so I don’t know if he’ll realistically want to do that when the time comes to make a decision.

Fred: I forgot one more, from Edward Laredo, aka Ed from San Antonio.

Bryan Alvarez: If this has to do with my wife …

Fred: No, no. He wants to know when Ed gets his free hardcover book.

Bryan Alvarez: Ed gets his hardcover book when he goes to Amazon.com and orders it. Maybe he’ll get free shipping. That’s about all I can promise.

Fred: Perfect comeback. Bryan, I really do appreciate the time. Big fan of your work. Where can fans find you online?

Bryan Alvarez: WrestlingObserver.com is obviously the place to go. New Observers are up every week, and there are hundreds of issues in the archive, along with my newsletter, Figure Four Weekly. I usually do two radio shows every day, sometimes three on Sunday, and subscribers get full access to all of them, plus every show we’ve ever done in the archive: 6,000 shows dating back to 2005. We’ve interviewed pretty much every major name in wrestling who’s not under a 10-year WWE contract. And the book is available on Amazon in hardcover, softcover and Kindle editions. They’re shipping right now, two weeks early. The official release date is Oct. 14, and as of then, if you’ve got a real-life bookstore near you, you’ll be able to pick it up there. It’s a really great book, if I do say so myself.

Fred: Awesome. Thanks so much for your time, Bryan.

Bryan Alvarez: Thanks so much.