[narrator] On July 14th, 1984,
millions of loyal viewers tuned into
cable channel WTBS
to watch its most popular program,
World Championship Wrestling.
Thank you so very, very much.
But instead of a live broadcast featuring the
south's most popular wrestlers...
[Growling]
Fans were shocked by the surprise appearance
of New York promoter...
Vincent McMahon Jr.
Thank you. It is indeed a pleasure
to be associated with WTBS.
And everybody's mouth dropped open.
Did seem like the world of wrestling
stopped at that time.
I was watching the TV. I had no idea it was coming.
Nobody knew why.
You know, the fans of that promotion were furious.
[Phones ringing]
It was a day that would live in infamy,
forever known as 'Black Saturday.'
[Phones ringing]
Vince McMahon's first step toward
his goal of total monopoly.
He had a vision that wrestling should be
national under one person.
Far more than the tale of one man's ambition,
'Black Saturday' is the story of an epic behind the scenes
showdown between titans of the industry.
They kind of hoodoo'd him and snuck it out from
underneath him, more so than him giving it up.
And Ole said, "Well let's do a blood oath."
The first one to break that oath was not us.
So my father, he gets a call,
"They've stolen the company."
A high stakes power play that sets Vince McMahon
on the path toward building
a billion dollar wrestling empire.
It was all the beginning groundwork
of future warfare.
Vince McMahon is a cancer on the wrestling business.
Vince won, he was the best at it,
he was the most vicious shark in the sea.
♪
Welcome to WrestleMania!
-[Cheering] -[Horn Blaring]
For over 40 years the wrestling business has been
dominated by World Wrestling Entertainment,
under the singular control of its owner and mastermind,
Vince McMahon Jr.
But in the early 1980s,
McMahon is just beginning to stake his claim on an
industry divided into regional promotions
known as territories.
♪
In 1983, most wrestling fans
saw Vince McMahon Jr.
as the announcer of the
WWF television program.
Now everybody in the wrestling business
knew that Vince was Vince McMahon Senior's son
and was the guy who had just bought the WWF,
the World Wrestling Federation,
from his father in 1982.
Let's meet Jimmy Cornette and his dynasty of wrestlers.
That's exactly right, let's meet me.
Where did you get that tie, Freddie Miller?
I'm Jim Cornette, and through my 40 year career
in wrestling, I've been an historian, specifically.
I've studied 'Black Saturday' and its effects
on modern day pro wrestling.
When Vince McMahon Junior bought the WWF,
the business in that part of the country
had almost never been stronger.
Since the 1940s,
regional promoters like McMahon Sr.,
did business through a governing body called
the 'National Wrestling Alliance.'
Well, the NWA, they made these bylaws,
and they had territorial boundaries where you
got this territory, and you got this territory.
My name is Dave Meltzer and I'm the editor of the
Wrestling Observer Newsletter and I've been covering
pro wrestling since the early 1970s.
In the NWA, there were always,
always wars and fighting and things like that.
Wrestling has always been kind of like the mafia
without the cement overshoes.
Nobody ends up at the bottom of the river,
just a few black eyes every now and then.
Every year the NWA had a meeting.
All the promoters came.
It was like the Gambino's and the Bonanno's,
and there's the Gotti's.
And it was all the families that came together once a
year and decided the major decisions for wrestling in
the United States for the following year.
The other promoters looked at Vince Jr like an upstart kid.
They didn't realize he wanted to be the
Walt Disney of wrestling.
They didn't understand not only the,
the plans that he had, but the lengths that he was
willing to go to, to have those plans come to fruition.
While some territories showed signs of struggle,
Georgia Championship Wrestling was thriving...
thanks to the shrewd leadership of Jim Barnett.
Barnett was one of the great minds in
wrestling as a promoter.
When he needed to charm people,
he could charm people.
And he had connections outside wrestling.
If you needed to discuss something with a politician,
if you needed to talk to a television executive or a
station manager or a big sponsor,
Barnett was the guy that they called to
make the connection.
Even in today's business, as off the wall as the
characters are, Jim Barnett would still stand out
as a very unique character.
I'm Gerald Brisco, better known as
"Jerry" Briscoe on the wrestling circuit.
Let's go see the world tag team champions
Jack and Jerry Brisco in action.
My brother and I became the only two people ever to
hold both of the eastern championship and
the mid-Atlantic championship.
Right, brother?
Well, they say we're wild and we're mean,
we're creating a scene. We gone crazy.
I got along real well and
learned so much from Jim Barnett.
All the other promoters were ex-wrestlers,
or they were loud and braggadocious.
Jim always wore a beautiful suit with a tie,
and he had the hair slicked back and he had jewelry on.
Does wrestling encourage violence?
I don't think so, no. I never thought so.
He was very different from a wrestling guy.
I mean, he was interested in wrestling,
but he's more interested in fine arts,
which is kinda unique for a, a wrestling promoter.
For a while, they wouldn't let Jim in the NWA until,
geez, like '70.
Because they didn't want somebody gay in their,
in their old boy's club.
Behind the scenes, he was a cutthroat.
He had the ability to cut your balls off and shove 'em
down your throat and you'd thank him for it.
Known as a powerful liaison to TV executives,
Jim Barnett is close to media tycoon Ted Turner,
who airs Georgia Championship Wrestling
nationally on his cable network, WTBS.
Wrestling was the first hit on cable television.
It was Georgia Championship Wrestling.
Turner just took his local Atlanta channel,
17 TV Station, and put up on the satellite,
and everybody thought he was nuts.
Who's gonna wanna watch a local Atlanta television show
in San Francisco, right?
There wasn't so many options for TV,
so it was one of the stations you got.
So you can watch the Atlanta Braves,
and Andy Griffith was big...
but wrestling was the biggest show on the station.
You know, that was like must see.
Coming up next, Georgia Championship Wrestling.
All the stars of the National Wrestling Alliance.
Surprise!
Flew into Atlanta every weekend to appear on
the two hour television program.
[Cheering]
A severe amount of punishment to the heads.
It was the number one TV show on cable TV,
that's how hot it was, I mean...
what made it so hot was a unique combination of
Gordon Solie, the voice of Championship Wrestling.
I'm Gordon Solie, your host.
And the available talent.
There were so many Hall of Famers on that original
list of talent that it's mind boggling that that
kind of group of talent could assemble in
one small territory like Georgia.
Ooh!
I think what made it so special is it was TBS,
first TV station to go all over the country,
and I got to wrestle the best of the best,
I mean the cream of the crop.
My name's Tommy "Wildfire" Rich,
former NWA world heavyweight champion.
-Welcome aboard, Tommy. -Thank you very much, Gordon.
It was crazy.
A lot of times you'd sit back and watch people,
and it would be as big a show watching them as it
would be watching the wrestling, you know.
Oh, Lord, yeah, the Georgia peaches
and the grannies love me, too.
I've seen grannies take their cane and beat Ole Anderson
up with it, 'cause he's beating me up, you know.
I put the TV ring up every Saturday at the TV station.
It was cramped studio, it only held 100 people.
And you packed 'em in like sardines
to get a hundred in there.
Boy Scout groups, Girl Scout troops, church groups...
just fans that loved to come every week.
My name is Bobby Simmons. Started working for ABC
booking when I was 14 years old, running errands,
and then went to work for
Georgia Championship Wrestling.
We had good crowds and we did sell out a lot of arenas.
The day to day operations are handled by
matchmaker Ole Anderson. ..
Ole Anderson!
A veteran wrestler who rules
Georgia Championship Wrestling with an iron fist.
Ole suckered him that time.
Ole was very intelligent.
One of the most intelligent guys,
one of the most well-spoken guys.
He was loud, he was opinionated.
Why don't you be quiet for about two seconds and
let me talk and say something!
But Ole was a great wrestler.
And he had also gotten quite a reputation
as a matchmaker and a booker.
Stop the cameras!
Either you hate him or you love him, or, well...
you don't love him, but either you hate him
or you like him. Let's put it...
[Chuckling] He's kinda hard to love.
[Laughing]
My name is Joe Hamilton Jr. I refereed and
wrestled as "Nick Patrick" throughout my entire career.
I stopped the match myself.
Two! Nick Patrick very slow to make a count right here.
I heard Ricky Morton one time say,
"I don't think Ole Anderson even likes ice cream."
You know, it's like- [Laughing] And I agree,
he probably didn't, you know.
He was just so old school and grouchy but...
a lot of the old timers back then were like that, you know?
They was, being hard ass on the young guys and
making 'em, making 'em learn.
He was what you saw.
My father was very no nonsense.
I think the guy that you saw on the screen was
very much the same guy that ate breakfast with me
the next morning.
And I think that's really part of the reason
he was successful, is because people
could believe what they were seeing.
My name is Bryant Rogowski,
and I'm the oldest son of Ole Anderson.
My father obviously spent years bumping in the ring
and suffered a lot of physical injuries,
and some years ago he was diagnosed with M.S.,
and right now he's just in a state where
he can't really do a lot for himself.
I think he was all about business.
It wasn't long into his wrestling career that
he began to think about being in charge.
Eventually, he bought into the Georgia company.
Ole isn't the only wrestler looking to increase
his fortunes by getting involved in the
financial side of the promotion.
Smart enough!
I started buying my stock in small increments
where it built up to over 10%.
And the same with my brother.
In 1983, the stockholders in Georgia Championship
Wrestling were the original promoter Paul Jones,
a Columbus promoter, Fred Ward,
his son-in-law, Ralph Freed, Jim Barnett's business
partner, Jim Oates, Jack and Jerry Briscoe,
and Ole Anderson.
Although Georgia Championship Wrestling
is turning a profit,
Ole Anderson begins to question whether all the
live show earnings are being accurately reported.
Wrestling had always been a very cash heavy business,
and money had always probably been
siphoned off the top to some degree.
And, you know, "We had to pay off the politician."
Or, "We had to give some money to the commissioner."
Or whatever it was. And I think
surely there was some truth to some of that.
But when my dad started to really pay attention in
Georgia, and realized that it wasn't only him
bringing Barnett a few bucks after this show,
but it was 7 or 8 other guys all doing
the same thing...
he realized that that amount of money,
surely couldn't all be used for those purposes.
I had tremendous concern, you know,
because I wasn't getting a dividend and I'd invested
tens of thousands of dollars.
We finally got Jim to expand into Michigan,
Ohio and West Virginia, part of Pennsylvania,
and we started selling out right and left.
And I was actually doing the settlement
at the shows at the time, so I personally know
the amount of cash that I was taking back to,
to Georgia, and that wasn't getting in
anybody else's pocket but Mr. Barnett's.
♪
Ole was the first one, maybe the only one
at the time, to question Jim Barnett.
The story went around that while Barnett was in
Hong Kong making his annual trip,
because he liked to go to Hong Kong,
get all his new suits made,
Ole either kicks the door in or bust the door in,
whether the accountant was in the office or not,
but Ole got into the books.
It was like Fort Knox trying to get to a,
a box office statement, because he had 'em under
lock and key and the people working in office were
instructed, "Don't let anybody in my office."
It was actually padlocked shut.
Ole, you know, start examining the
books and everything, and he saw, like,
Jim Barnett spending all kinds of
crazy money on phone bills,
$3,000 a month phone bills, and he had a personal chef,
and he had a personal driver.
So, Ole just thought that, you know,
Jim was embezzling money from the company.
They had a meeting of the, the Georgia Championship
owners at a hotel south of Atlanta,
in a conference room.
And Jim handed out the cheques from
the proceeds of the calendar we sold.
Supposedly when Jim left, that's when Ole
came in and addressed the, the owners.
Ole had rallied the troops and gotten the majority of
the other stockholders on his side.
♪
When I get to the office, Jim's door is opened.
The light's on, I thought, "What is this"?
And I heard Ole go, "Bobby, come here."
And Ole handed me all the cheques that I had written
for the proceeds of the calendar, he said,
"Put this back in the bank."
And he told me that day, he said,
"You don't work for Jim Barnett anymore,
you work for me." Ole told me, he says,
"I'm not out to hurt Jim.
I'm not out to put him in jail."
Whatever that meant. He said, "I think I can
run this company and we're gonna do it my way."
He thought everything was black and white,
there were no grey areas, that it was
just business, you acted like businesspeople.
Well...
He found out very quickly that it didn't work that way.
Hell hath no fury like Barnett scorned.
After reviewing the accounts for
Georgia Championship Wrestling,
part owner Ole Anderson tries to convince
his fellow shareholders that manager Jim Barnett
is embezzling funds from the company.
Well Ole would call me and say,
"Well, Jim's stealing all this money."
"Ole, is he stealing"?
"Well yeah, he's using it for his limousine,
he's using it for this, and nobody approved
those expenditures." And, which was true.
Jim would just explain it off,
it's cost of doing business.
We had both sides of the story.
Ole and Jim were not the best of friends.
They were not even good partners most of the time.
They were always at one another's throats..
I'm Louise Cochrane,
formerly known as Louise Bennett,
in Georgia Championship Wrestling.
We were in a lot of debt,
because Jim had promised the buildings
and the TVs so much per week, or per month...
and it didn't matter if we didn't make money.
That was a power play for Ole to move in.
I think it was more than just of a money power thing,
than a Jim is tanking us with his spending thing.
My dad and Ralph,
another stockholder in Georgia Championship,
went downtown to Barnett's penthouse apartment,
and they had a talk with him.
I think my dad probably did most of the talking,
and explained to Barnett, my dad was gonna be
elected president of Georgia Championship.
That's the way it's gonna be, and if you don't like it,
I'm gonna toss you over your railing.
♪
Here you are, 285 pound monster, and you're,
you're bullying this old man.
You did not want to get on the bad side of Jim Barnett
because he could actively
---- with you and your wrestling career.
Now Ole is taking it to a whole new level.
He didn't just no-show Barnett, or stand him up,
or hold him up for more money for
a main event or whatever...
he's run him out of the company.
Barnett knew that he might not be able to
do anything about it then.
You just know that he definitely knew he was
gonna do something about it eventually.
While Ole reorganizes the company under
his own management in early 1983,
Vince McMahon has been quietly strategizing
to expand his own promotion
into other NWA territories.
When Vince bought the company from his father,
at first everything maintained the status quo.
He had plans, but he didn't start
putting them out front of everybody,
where they could tell what he was doing.
But, behind the scenes,
Vince Jr. has these plots in mind before
even the other promoters know that
he's gonna do it.
And the first thing that he's thinking about is television.
♪
Vince McMahon's scheme to steal the airwaves
from other promoters begins by hiring an unlikely ally
as his director of operations, Jim Barnett.
In 1983 they have the annual meeting,
all the promoters are there.
Barnett comes in,
so does Vince McMahon Jr.,
and they both give their resignations.
That couldn't be good.
What the ----'s gonna happen?
Their, they, they, they were all blindsided, for sure.
When they resigned from the NWA,
that would mean they're either gonna get out of
wrestling, or they're going to run opposition.
That's the only two things it can mean.
And that seems to indicate that they're gonna go into
business for themselves, with themselves,
in some other fashion. Ole smelled it.
He said, "Okay, then the gloves are gonna be off."
Well, the problem was you couldn't handle the
wrestling business in 1983 and '84 like
you handled it in 1953 and '54.
And secondly, Vince wasn't gonna play that game.
And he had one of the most powerful wrestling
personalities of the last 30 years in his corner
who knew absolutely everybody.
Barnett hated Ole.
Barnett also was looking at survival.
He was getting up there in age,
but he needed to keep working.
He needed to keep that income coming in,
to maintain the facade that he was a millionaire.
I'm Bob Roop, 13 year amateur wrestler,
15 year professional wrestler,
five-time Hall of Fame member.
Bob Roop ladies and gentlemen, Bob Roop!
Vince Senior, asked Ole to come up and
meet with Junior, and see if they could
make some kind of arrangement.
And Ole said, "No." He said, "Absolutely not."
You know, "He's trying to steal my territories,"
and stuff.
There was this unspoken agreement that people
honoured each other's territory.
I'm sure Barnett was talking to McMahon right away and
starting to sabotage Georgia Championship.
Things started to happen around that time that
had never happened before.
McMahon would go to a station that we were on,
we had a show running,
and offer them 2000 bucks a week
to take his show,
but they had to get rid of Ole's show.
Nothing on paper, there was no contract,
nothing said that they had to honour
Championship Wrestling from Georgia.
So the station would say, "Okay."
Next you'd start losing buildings.
You'd call to check on the building and,
and see how ticket sales are going, they say,
"Well, we stopped selling 'em."
Bunch of police cars roll up outside the TV station,
take somebody away.
They got an anonymous tip that he's dealing drugs.
Or they're searching the guys at the airport.
Things that just had never happened before that were
just a constant thorn in his side and making things
difficult to operate, more so than usual.
I don't think he ever had any proof,
and I don't know how he would.
But like I say, it was stuff that
never happened until then.
Vince was infiltrating everybody's territory.
Vince got the USA Network time slot from
Southwest Championship Wrestling,
another regional promotion out of San Antonio.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the Southwest tag team champions.
They couldn't afford the slot anymore,
Vince jumped in and took it.
And All American Wrestling debuted on the USA Network.
He would call different promoters and say,
"Hey, I've got this cable show now.
If you'll send me tapes, then I'll put your wrestlers on it
and I'll get them over to a whole new audience."
But the people that he was getting the tapes of and
showing, are people that he wanted to sign
for the WWF.
He gets the Junkyard Dog from Mid-South Wrestling,
he gets Steamboat from the Carolinas.
He got Kerry von Erich in Dallas.
He was buying out talent from other areas.
You know, Hulk Hogan was,
was on top in the AWA for Verne,
and all of a sudden he went to New York.
Hulk Hogan shows up
to win the WWF championship
from the Iron Sheik in Madison Square Garden.
Now Vince has the superhero
on the top of his cards that
he wants to put in every arena in the country and
all over television, to lead his national expansion.
He knew that if you controlled television,
you would control the source of distribution for all the
wrestling programs and all the top wrestlers.
Oh! [Laughing]
And that's what he wanted to corner.
Everything had been done a certain way,
and now everything was different.
And Vince was public enemy number one.
Some of the promoters in there talking,
"What if we put a hit on the guy"? You know?
And, you know, it's a wild story. Um...
I don't doubt that it's true at all because, you know,
like, these are, these are bad dudes, just like,
you know, Vince was breaking the rules.
Through Barnett's calculated maneuvering,
Vince has seized TV time from promotions
across the country,
but one remains for the taking...
Georgia Championship Wrestling,
and its nationwide slot on WTBS.
And when Barnett comes to him with a grudge against
Ole Anderson, who has the widest distribution
of any television program in wrestling,
and Barnett says to Vince,
"I think I can get it for you."
And that's all he needed to hear.
If he could take over and control television
across the country, then he could take over
every territory in the country.
While Vince McMahon scoops up talent and
TV spots from territories across the country,
Ole Anderson tries to hold Georgia Championship
Wrestling together by any means necessary.
Maybe Ole thought he could do everything at that point in
time, but Georgia Wrestling, it still had the reputation,
but the product was starting to suffer.
Yeah, I think he was trying to run a business with,
you know, second tier guys,
people that weren't gonna draw.
I mean, he'd employed just about everybody
in the business at one point or another,
and it was those guys who were now working for Vince
in WWF and becoming his superstars,
leaving my father just
scratching around for leftovers.
And that just wasn't gonna sell tickets.
Ole had changed the concept where
we weren't bringing in a lot of outside talent.
Our live events were not drawing the money because
we weren't spending the money on the talent that
we were spending on before.
And the top guys quit wanting to come to our territory.
And we, we were actually getting phone calls from
some of the top talent around the country,
"Hey, what's going on? You better watch Ole."
And not only took their word for it,
but were out there on several big shows and
experienced that payoffs weren't the same.
Frustrated that their investment is no longer
paying dividends, the Briscos decide
Ole isn't cut out to manage the company.
But in order to push out Ole, they will have to get
their fellow shareholders to agree
with a majority vote.
We called a stockholder's meeting,
because we were gonna take over Ole's dictatorship and,
and, and do it ourselves.
And we flew into town early, met with the lawyers,
and the lawyers said, "Guys, you can't do this
stockholders' meeting, it's illegal."
Because we didn't state a purpose.
The meeting got put off, of course,
so we went back to the hotel and wanted to drown
our sorrows, so we were sitting in the hotel bar,
and who all of a sudden showed up in this bar?
Is Ole Anderson.
His purpose, track us down to find out what the hell
we were planning on doing.
And we weren't shy, we laid out,
"We're here to take you out of office."
♪
They want to know how much money there is in the bank.
He tells them, "Well, why can't you pay it out"?
And so I'm sure for the hundredth time he tries to
explain to them how you have got to have some
operating capital to run this business.
You know, "I've got to pay deposits on buildings,
I've got to pay for advertising,
I got to buy plane tickets.
Once we get another 100,000 in the bank,
then I'll write the dividend cheques.
Of course, I want to, I'll get one too."
And we were done drinking as much as we could drink,
and argued as much as we could argue, and, Ole,
"I'll come up to the room with ya I got a deal for yas."
"Okay, we'll listen to one last pitch."
Ole said: "Well, you ever watched The Godfather?"
Yeah. Well, I got this deal with you, if you guys agree.
Let's do a blood oath
so we're all on the same page."
The deal was if anybody was gonna sell stock
they had to offer it to the other shareholders in
Georgia Championship Wrestling first,
before they could sell it to anybody else.
♪
And my dad has a little pocketknife,
sticks it in his head, gigs it down, gets some colour.
♪
And they look at him like, "Oh my God!
What's wrong with you"?
Ole, my word means more than blood.
I mean, you know, to me.
I mean, if I give you my word, I'm gonna live up to it.
I don't need these little gimmicks to, to,
to certify my, my honesty.
Probably took him about 10 minutes to convince
Jack and I to do the same thing.
[Laughing]
So that was the Ole solution to our problem.
You know, let's cut ourselves and
bleed on each other.
My dad was such a man of his word that
if he shook your hand and said he was gonna
do anything, he would do it.
He just, he believed people because,
you know, he, he would never tell a lie.
As part of the blood oath agreement,
the Briscos will focus on increasing ticket sales
in exchange for regular payouts.
But the deal doesn't last for long.
So, first one to break the oath was Ole 'cause
he quit paying us what he agreed to pay us, so...
we felt that we, we had an open waters there
to do what we wanted to do.
That lit a fire under us that if we stick in this situation
too much longer, we're not gonna have anything.
Desperate to cash out,
the Briscos begin shopping their shares
outside of the company,
starting with Jim Barnett, who turns them down.
Knowing the Briscos are looking to sell,
Barnett knows someone who wants to buy...
Vince McMahon.
So Vince flew us up to LaGuardia,
and still to this day I'll rib Vince about
flying us up coach. [Laughing]
We met at LaGuardia Airport. He said,
"Can you guys deliver me 51% of the territory"?
And I looked at him and I said, "Yes, sir, I can."
I had to make a call to Jim Barnett.
Jim Barnett knew everybody that
owned a piece of Georgia.
Jim Barnett knew who they liked, who they didn't like,
what they were mad about, what their weak spots were,
whatever the case. All Jim Barnett had to do
was point Vince McMahon in the right direction,
not only at the Briscos but anybody else.
Or, talked to them himself.
He could make you do something you didn't
want to do, and by the time he was finished,
you'd think it was your idea.
In the end of the negotiations and
all the transactions, Vince ended up owning
67 and a half percent of
Georgia Championship Wrestling.
[Thundering]
Which of course also held the contract for
the television program on TBS.
There was an agreement in the articles of incorporation
that before anybody was to sell, they had to
first offer it to one of the other stockholders.
And he was told repeatedly by the attorneys that
that was going to protect him.
Well, it turned out not to be true.
Behind the back of Ole Anderson,
the Briscos align with Jim Barnett
to give Vince McMahon control of
Georgia Championship Wrestling,
a move that will forever reshape the industry.
In March of 1984,
my grandmother passed away very suddenly.
My father and I go up to Minnesota, Wisconsin
and take care of the arrangements
and family business.
He gets a call from the office,
I think it was Louise who called him.
I was in my office and the door opens and
Vince walks in. "Good morning."
Ah... "I now own the company."
So I called Ole,
and told him that Vince had stole the company.
I thought it was real sneaky.
It's not that they did it, it's just how they did it.
He and I got on a plane right away.
He parked me at a hotel in Atlanta.
He immediately met with the lawyers,
they filed for injunctions, and they fought for three
or four months before it was finally all over,
that he wanted to stop Vince from
taking over Georgia Championship.
With Ole's legal efforts to block the takeover thwarted,
all that's left for him to do is concede.
There was a deal in the bylaws for our corporation
that said, "If a majority of the stockholders decide to
change all the damn rules that are written up here,
they can do that."
And they just changed all the rules that
we'd been going by for years.
So we lost it because Barnett was smart enough
to realize that he could have done it.
And I didn't, didn't know.
I can remember the Saturday morning TV at TBS studios,
Vince McMahon is in the building.
It's the only time that I've ever been in the
same room as Vince McMahon to this day.
But from there, the fight was on.
Vince was still at that point trying to talk to Ole,
because Vince is a guy that's used to getting his own way
and used to being able to talk people into
anything he wants them to do.
I think, you know, Vince would say,
"Ole, Ole, I'll give you a job."
You know, tried to tell him over and over,
"It's just business. It's just business."
Vince says, "Ole, I'd like you to meet my wife, Linda."
Well my dad, in typical fashion, responds,
"You know what"?
"---- you and ---- Linda"!
♪
Despite Ole's fury, few outside the company
are even aware of the change in ownership.
Until Vince McMahon takes to the airwaves.
So I go in there on this particular Saturday,
and there's this guy standing there with
his arms folded, making this face.
♪
As it turns out, the man was Vincent K. McMahon.
None of the, none of the talent knew anything.
That was all interoffice stuff.
Nobody knew who sold the what or who was
on what side or nothing.
The camera guys and all them, they didn't have a clue.
I got a call, was told not to come to TV,
that we weren't going to be taping that day.
I didn't go to TV on Saturday, that Saturday,
because I had just gotten fired.
Vince had a meeting with all the talent that was here,
and he said, "None of you have jobs anymore."
He said, "If we want to use you, we'll contact you."
And that was it. It was over.
♪
The wrestling program on TBS
had been an institution for years.
Every wrestling fan that was able to get cable
at that point in time, is gonna watch
Georgia Wrestling every Saturday.
July 14th, 1984,
they turn on World Championship Wrestling,
and they didn't see Gordon Solie,
they see Freddy Miller.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to
World Championship Wrestling.
Freddy Miller introduced Vince McMahon.
Here's Vince McMahon. Vince.
Thank you very much, Freddy.
When Freddy Miller introduced Vince,
and then, just the silence of
the dead airtime, you know.
No, no, no crowd, not a fan, no nothing.
Let's take you now to Minneapolis and
Jesse 'The Body' Ventura.
They started showing videotapes of matches from
other WWF television programs and
other WWF arenas and TV shoots.
One of the many stars here in the
World Wrestling Federation.
The fans of Georgia Wrestling,
they practically rioted.
[Phones ringing]
They were just bombarding the TBS switchboards.
"We want our wrastlin'."
Tommy Wildfire has just exploded on the...!
Georgia Wrestling was a lot different than
Vince's wrestling.
Vince brought his style down here and I don't think,
I don't think they bought it or didn't, you know,
just didn't like it, 'cause it wasn't homeboys, you know.
So I think, I think, ah...
they just wasn't buying what he was selling.
He didn't want the Georgia Wrestling territory.
All he wanted was that TV.
I'm getting excited because I'm seeing
a new future starting to be made.
I called it 'Green Saturday' because it
changed my, my, my fortune.
But obviously a lot of fans that were fan, true fans,
of Georgia Championship Wrestling didn't see it
the same way I saw it.
Ousted from the promotion he helped build,
Ole makes no secret of his resentment.
If Jack and Jerry had agreed with him
to wait things out a few more months,
and then taken advantage of the time when
he's dealing with his mother's funeral
to sell out behind his back, I think that that would have
really impacted his opinion, strongly,
for quite a while, to the negative.
And I was pissed at The Briscos, and um...
they got whatever money they got.
Ole had supposedly hired an armed guard to
stand there and actually do bodily harm to us
if we tried to get in the office.
Not the promoter, but Paul Jones,
the old wrestler, called and said,
"There's supposedly a hitman
out on you guys for two days.
Be very careful where you go and who you associate with,
because I think it's real."
Ole Anderson is on the hunt for revenge as
rumours circulate about a potential plot to
have the Briscos killed.
We waited the two days, nothing happened to us,
and we threw one of the biggest parties
we ever thrown.
No. First of all, he would have never got rid of the money.
And secondly, he'd 'a done it himself.
[Laughing]
He would have never asked anybody else to
do it, he would have been glad to do it hisself.
The only negative way that I think it affected us
is the loss of friendship and the negative things
that were said about me.
The threats that brother and I got during
this time frame too was phenomenal.
I mean, our families were receiving phone calls,
you know, that we were no good backstabbers.
It was a very rough deal.
Determined to keep the spirit of Georgia Championship
Wrestling alive, Ole sells his shares and
starts his own promotion.
Ole was able to work out a deal.
He called up Vince and said,
"Vince, I'm gonna sell you my piece too."
Which, you know, I guess, thank you, Vince.
Because Vince could very easily have just said,
"Okay, I'm closing up,
your shares aren't worth anything."
Ole went to Ted Turner directly and he said,
"Hey! The people want to see the Georgia Wrestling
and the Georgia wrestlers, and I've got them.
Give me another time slot."
And when I went to Ted Turner later on I said,
"Who do you think's been running this damn thing
for the last eight, nine years? Me!"
So he gave Ole Saturday morning at 7:30.
And a very spirited crowd here today at the
WTBS sports arena, where we're very proud
to bring you once again
Championship Wrestling from Georgia.
While Ole attempts to mount a comeback,
Vince is struggling to connect with Georgia viewers.
They were used to seeing a certain style and
it wasn't something that they'd seen before.
They didn't know who these guys were.
They didn't care.
They were looking for the people they knew.
Vince is getting crowded out of
the Saturday nighttime slot.
Turner's on his ass.
It's not doing him the good that
he thought it was gonna do him.
This is one of the first and only
Vince McMahon complete failures.
Looking to offload his valuable WTBS time slot,
McMahon once again turns to Jim Barnett
to land a deal.
Barnett finds a buyer in one of McMahon's
other major competitors,
Jim Crockett Promotions.
One year. Turner was gonna kick Vince off as soon as
he legally could, and so Barnett
opened the door to Crockett.
You know that TBS time slot, it's...
at the time it probably sounded like a great deal.
Vince will sell the time slot
on Saturday night on TBS to
Jim Crockett Promotions, and Vince McMahon
would get a million dollars,
and everybody becomes happy with that.
So, with Barnett putting all the pieces together,
Vince McMahon temporarily monopolizes cable TV
wrestling in the United States,
but is a failure at that, so he uses that flop to
make money to finance WrestleMania.
♪
Where he then started on the road to put
every other promoter out of business.
The wrestling extravaganza of all time, WrestleMania.
All in that 80s period,
that's where he got the big jump.
WWE became the name brand of pro wrestling,
and he's got Cyndi Lauper, he's building up
WrestleMania, Hulk Hogan's getting big,
and, and he's just shooting way past everybody else.
And they don't, they don't have the outlet
to compete with him.
Black Saturday forever altered the trajectory
of the wrestling business, something no one
understood better than Ole Anderson.
It was almost like he had just cleared his desk off and
scraped everything into it.
Honestly, the state my father is in today,
I don't know that he can hate anybody, sadly enough.
But I think he held a grudge against Vince for a long time.
I'm just trying to see what I got here.
Bill Watts, himself a pioneering promoter in
Mid-South Wrestling, writes a letter to Ole
in 1987, reflecting upon the significance
of Black Saturday.
"Dear Ole. I know actions and words once
said or done cannot be recalled.
You were seeing the beginning of the metamorphosis of
change of the very fibre of our business,
all precipitated by McMahon, in my opinion.
I certainly agree, his legacy will be the destruction
of an industry as we know it, or knew it."
After the Black Saturday incident,
Barnett was Vince's right hand man,
but Barnett was still more old-time wrestling and
Vince wanted to be modern,
and somewhere in '87 they had a
difference of opinion and Vince let Barnett go.
Jim Barnett only worked for WWF for a fraction of
his long career, but his actions during the
company's expansion helped solidify a
new way of doing business in wrestling...
The Vince McMahon way.
Vince McMahon, for 40 years,
he made his business based on
taking TV time slots, or companies,
out from under people.
Doing takeovers,
buying stock, issuing stock,
public offering of the WWE that made him a billionaire,
but his downfall eventually came
through the same way.
You know, there's an old saying,
'what goes around comes around' and/or '---- around
and ---- around pretty soon you won't be around.'
Well... Vince had...
it came out in the Wall Street Journal that he had
allegations of paying certain women off,
you know, non-disclosure agreements for infidelities,
and, you know, even worse.
McMahon paid a former employee
$3 million to keep her quiet.
You take a picture of Vincent McMahon,
and that there is the reason why there is
a human resources now in companies.
[Chuckling] That is the reason why.
As far as revolutionizing our business, yes, he did.
Is there a dark side and a bad side?
Yes, there damn sure is.
It was enough of an embarrassment to
the company that Vince stepped down.
They forced him out of the company because
his son-in-law and his daughter and
all these people that he's worked with and
trusted were saying, "Vince, you got to go.
This is not gonna do the stock price any good,
it's not gonna do our business any good.
You got to step aside."
And the thing he learned from the Georgia takeover,
he still owns 80% of the company.
So, after six months,
then he comes back, in a whirlwind of action.
Let me just say it. I've made mistakes, obviously.
[Chuckling] You know, both personally and
professionally through my 50 year career.
I've owned up to every single one of them
and then moved on.
And then announces, "I'm coming back
because we're gonna sell this son of a bitch."
And the time is right.
Endeavor announcing WWE and UFC will combine to form
a $21 billion global live sports and
entertainment company.
And that's what worries all the wrestling fans.
Say what you want about Vince,
at least it was the family business,
he's done it for 50 years.
Now, Endeavor.
What mental romantic attachment
do they have to the wrestling business?
To its history, to keeping it alive?
We're gonna lose a lot of history and
we're gonna lose the,
you know, the last vestige of what old time
professional wrestling was for 100 years.
I think Black Saturday was kind of a tipping point
in the wrestling business.
That was the moment it started to evolve away from
the wrestling business and into show business.
Black Saturday in and of itself wasn't
a ground-breaking moment.
It was the canary in the coal mine.
Vince McMahon put anywhere from hundreds,
maybe thousands of wrestlers out of work.
Maybe 3% of them.
The other 97% didn't get to work anymore.
That's when all the change is going on and
you can't go back. I mean, that's life.
Just times change, you know.
And I'm just holding on to them 80s.
[Laughing]
I don't think they blame the Briscos,
but they definitely blame Vince.
But it was the move, it was the move to make.
What killed the territories was cable television.
And that would have been with Vince McMahon
or without Vince McMahon.
If it wasn't Vince McMahon going national,
it would have been Verne Gagne or Jim Crockett,
and they wouldn't have done as well as Vince did.
Somebody was gonna be successful.
Wrestling wasn't gonna go away,
but would they have been as successful
as Vince McMahon was? I'm gonna say no.