Looking ahead to big television events of early 1999, I find that many are sports-related. For example, there's a pretty good college football game on January 4th, and the Super Bowl looms ahead. College basketball gets down to conference play, and we'll see more of the women's teams this season. The biggest non-event, however, is the NBA where once again greed has outpaced common sense, a common malady in the world of professional sports. Not having a pro basketball season certainly causes financial distress for the players, but it also hits two of the media giants -- NBC and Time Warner -- in the bank accounts. NBC is suffering a double whammy for it lost its pro football contract to CBS in the obscene bidding war of last spring. Now the two behemoths have announced a joint venture to reclaim some of their lost revenue, and it involves that time-honored quasi-sport, professional wrestling.
Time Warner has already been using its World Championship Wrestling division to provide replacement programming on both its TNT and Superstation TBS cable outlets. The company has the largest stable of wrestlers in the world, although many of them don't perform very often or very well. NBC has toyed with this concept before. 10 years ago, wrestling was a once-a-month replacement for Saturday Night Live for a short while. Recently, Jay Leno has enjoyed modest ratings gains with his involvement in various WCW promotions. But NBC's next move is a bold one. Sunday evening, February 14, the network has scheduled a WCW event. Not only will this be the first time that wrestling has appeared in prime time on broadcast network TV since the demise of the Dumont network in the early 50's, it will be in a critical time period. February is the national ratings period when TV audiences are the largest; Sunday has the biggest prime time audience of the week; and the next day is a holiday, which may mean even more viewers.
Under closer examination, the NBC - Time Warner venture doesn't appear that bizarre. Professional wrestling is perhaps in its glory days with one out of every 11 US TV households tuned in on cable Monday night. Some of this audience comes at the expense of Monday Night Football. To hedge its bet further, NBC has demanded brand-name talent, specifically Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Savage. That's problematic. Hogan and Savage are no longer draws. In fact, the Hulk's last pay-per-view match was so dismal that he announced his retirement with the intention of running for president. Macho Man hasn't wrestled in almost a year. WCW has plenty of younger, better wrestlers with more fan support.
But there's a bigger problem for NBC. That same night, the other major promotion, Vince McMahan's World Wrestling Federation, is putting on its Valentine's Day Massacre pay-per-view event. McMahan is the best promoter in the history of wrestling. Since Time Warner started buying up his talent three years ago, Vince has worked overtime to make chicken salad out of chicken droppings with only two or three legitimate stars. A recent event featured a match in a ring surrounded by fire-belching gas jets. One of the participants ended up fleeing the arena with his arm on fire. I'm not sure who won, but it didn't matter. McMahan, who has now injected himself into the act as the boss of the corporate bad guys, will respond vigorously to the competition. The last time a rival organization tried to derail a WWF pay-per-view spectacular, the challengers went broke, and Ted Turner bought their promotion at pennies on the dollar to start WCW.
Although the NBC show is free and the WWF event will cost $25 or more, the real wrestling fans won't stand for has-been talent and lame scripts. They'll spend the money to see the better show. Without this core audience and with substantial competition from all the other channels, the NBC - Time Warner venture is doomed to failure.