Who Really Killed WCW?

SUSPECT 1: TED TURNER

In a 2019 interview with WrestlingInc, Eric Bischoff said that Ted Turner believed you needed three things to get eyeballs on a fledgling network: Professional wrestling, baseball, and Andy Griffith.

He already owned a baseball team in the Atlanta Braves, so buying a wrestling promotion just seemed like the next logical step. And in 1988, Turner bought out Jim Crockett Promotions and renamed it World Championship Wrestling, taking the name from the original GCW television show that aired on TBS

You see, Ted Turner liked professional wrestling well enough, but do you know what he liked more than professional wrestling? Making money from it.

By owning and creating content via WCW and the Atlanta Braves, Turner Broadcasting Systems was able to create original material for their stations instead of buying syndicated programming.

This was a cost-effective way to fill up their time slots and, most importantly, their ad slots. One of the primary revenue sources for television channels such as TBS is advertising sales during its broadcasts. It didn’t matter if WCW was running at a loss, TBS was still profiting from its existence.

Turner, understandably, lacked the time to run WCW himself and so he turned to the most sensible of places to find a guy to run it: Pizza Hut.

Look, I know Jim Herd was also a former television executive, but for the joke to work you need to focus on the fact that he was also a manager of a Pizza Hut. It’s how The New York Times wrote about him in 1989, so it’s not just me!

Herd may have known how to manage greasy teenagers and slice up greasier pizzas, but he knew nothing about wrestling. And that’s not just my assumption, those are the words of Ric Flair who once said Herd, “knew nothing about wrestling.”

Herd clashed with all the wrestlers, but especially Flair, and in 1991 fired him while he was still champion and didn’t strip him of the belt; leading to the bizarre situation where Flair walked into the WWF with the WCW ‘big gold belt’ calling himself “the real world’s champion”. 

You’ll never guess who was upset about this: Ted Turner! And the NWA as well, but that’s another story for another day.

Here’s the short version: all NWA champions had to put down a $25,000 deposit to keep the world title, and Flair didn’t get his deposit back so he just kept the belt and went to WWF with it. Wrestling is silly.

That might just seem like a history dump without much in the way of ‘who killed WCW’, but Turner will be a recurring name in our story.

For starters, he is the man to bring in our next suspect. Because in January of 1992, he fired Jim Herd and replaced him with Eric Bischoff.

Click the next page button below for more

• eric bischoff
• WCW
• Vince Russo
• Hulk Hogan

Share this article with friends