I’ve had a lot of people asking what you need to do in order to get a book published, and the first thing is generally “Get an agent”. But once you’ve got that, then what? Well, generally publishers will want to see a proposal for the book you’re pitching, and here’s what one looks like.
For this example, I’m using the proposal for “One Ring Circus”, the WCW book that I tried pitching numerous times but kept getting shot down because everyone wants WWE material. Book proposals are generally divided into standard sections:
1) Overview
2) Chapter Breakdown
3) Comparitive Reading
4) About the Author
5) Sample Chapter
The overview is a summary of what the book is going to be about. The chapter breakdown is a listing of what each section covers (although, for instance, my initial proposal for “Tonight…In This Very Ring” differed greatly from the finished product in terms of layout). Comparitive reading is so the publisher can see what other titles in the genre have been successful or compare to yours. About the author is self-explanatory, and sample chapter is where you write about 3000-5000 words of the finished product in advance so that the publisher can get a handle on what it’s going to look like. For fiction works, you’ll need to submit the entire manuscript in advance.
In the first part, you can read my overview and chapter breakdowns. In the second part, I’ll post the actual sample chapters so you read what the book would have shaped up to be had it been purchased for publication. It might still be, but better you read it and learn from it than simply rotting away on my hard drive.
ONE-RING CIRCUS
The Story of World Championship Wrestling
Scott Keith
OVERVIEW
In the history of sports and entertainment, there are many inspirational stories of the underdog triumphing due to sheer willpower and pure talent. For example: the Bad News Bears, the Miracle Mets, Rocky Balboa the list goes on and on.
This is not one of those stories.
The history of sports and entertainment is also rife with flamboyant geniuses, men who made the troops suffer through minor eccentricities, but always came through in the end with the killer game plan to win the day in the end. For example: James Cameron, Vince Lombardi, Yogi Berra, and Pete Rose. Okay, so maybe Rose is a stretch.
Again, there is absolutely no one in this book who even comes close.
And when you’re talking about the world of professional wrestling, no one dominated the landscape more than Vince McMahon and his brash, national product, featuring the one great xenophobic storyline that speaks to the heart of everyone in America: Us v. The Other Guy.
This is the story about The Other Guy.
Okay, to be fair, we’re talking about pro wrestling here, a worked pseudo-sport that doesn’t tend to be filled with brain surgeons to begin with. But even by that low standard, no wrestling company fills the fans’ minds with more dread than the fallen angel of the wrestling world: World Championship Wrestling.
Perhaps the most unlikely suspects to overtake the superpowered World Wrestling Federation’s #1 spot, WCW saw a parade of bean-counting suits fail miserably, only to be replaced by a former coffee boy-turned-announcer, who then shocked everyone by doing what no one in the promotion had ever attempted before: Doing something right. It began an 82-week reign of terror that nearly bankrupted McMahon’s WWF and necessitated the WWF sacrificing their own homegrown top star in order to stop the WCW juggernaut once and for all.
Scheming billionaires, backdoor dirty politics, incredibly stupid storyline ideas, impossibly sanitized politically correct watchdogs all the elements were there to prevent WCW from ever succeeding no matter who was in charge, and yet somehow it did. And also, (and this one doesn’t have nearly as much mystery behind it), they managed to piss it all away in less than a year.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the whole situation is that WCW was formed from the ashes of the National Wrestling Alliance, an entity so large and powerful that it existed as a virtual monopoly for fifty years before Vince McMahon’s dreams of conquering the wrestling world via television took it down single-handedly. If he could destroy that without breaking a sweat, everyone thought, what chance could these guys possibly have?
Good money said none. Eric Bischoff thought otherwise.
They were both right.
In this book, we’ll examine both the rise to power in the 90s, and the crushing fall in the new century, of World Championship Wrestling. From rather more humble roots on a fledgling cable network with the gumption to call itself “Superstation TBS†in the early 80s, we’ll see how WCW grew from Ted Turner’s personal plaything and tax writeoff into something resembling legitimate competition in the early 90s with the signing of longtime WWF mainstay Hulk Hogan, and then into the legitimate #1 wrestling promotion in the world with the introduction of the New World Order storyline. From that peak, we’ll see how wunderkind Eric Bischoff proceeded to let the inmates run the asylum, in the process making the same mistakes as every other promoter in history, and we’ll discover exactly what those mistakes were and why they made them. This book will uncover all the backstage politics, backstabbing, scheming and real-life good guys and bad guys (mostly bad guys) who used the company as their own personal toilet paper before flushing it down the proverbial crapper once it had served its purpose. We’ll examine the death throes from 1999-2001, and discover the last-ditch efforts to save it, and why Ted Turner was finally forced to abandon his favorite toy in 2001 and leave it in the hands of arch-rival Vince McMahon in April 2001, for good.
Most of all, this book will teach you everything you need to learn not to do if you want to run a successful wrestling promotion.
CHAPTER BREAKDOWN
Prelude: 1904 Ain’t Nothin’ But a Number
In the days of yore, when men were men and promoters were scummier than even today, the most amazing thing happened: Enough of them got scared of antitrust laws at the same time that they actually agreed to stop backstabbing each other long enough to form a legal alliance in 1946. This way they could trade dirty money and backstab others, while not technically breaking the monopoly laws of the United States. But my favorite thing about these guys was they couldn’t let well enough aloneâ€â€they had to concoct a fake “history†of the newly created National Wrestling Alliance, dating back to 1905. They even came up with a story about how their title lineage could be traced all the way back to Abraham Lincoln!
You have to love any sport that takes itself so seriously while putting out main events that feature Dr. X taking on The Masked Mangler. But, hey, give them points for effort, because for nearly thirty years the NWA was the undisputed champion of the wrestling promotional world, promoting only scientific greats as their champion and attempting to lend an air of respectability to things where none existed before. However, by the time the ’80s hit, the NWA was a dinosaur, waiting to become extinct by the asteroid that was the WWF. When Vince McMahon bought out the biggest NWA stronghold, Georgia Championship Wrestling, it was the signal that things were about to get a lot different, and a lot worse, on the wrestling landscape.
Section 1: The Death of the NWA (1986-1991)
The first person to attempt to pick up the pieces of the crumbling Roman-like NWA Empire was Jim Crockett, Jr., promoter for Mid-Atlantic Championship Wrestling. With his dreams of WWF-like national expansion and a new timeslot on Ted Turner’s WTBS, it seemed to be only a matter of time before he started seriously competing with Vince McMahon’s WWF machine. Crockett had everything going for himâ€â€a cushy TV slot, backing of a billionaire, the charismatic Ric Flair as his champion, and the support of most of the southern USA’s wrestling fanbase. But poor financial planning, sabotage by the WWF via the cable companies, jealousy by the other NWA board members, and the worst choice of booker possible led to the rapid self-destruction of Crockett’s baby, until finally Ted Turner was called in to pick up the pieces in 1988. The NWA was dead, and WCW was born.
First in a long future line of corporate yes-men and bean-counters, Jim Herd seemed to get off on the right track, firing egomaniacal-and-untalented head booker Dusty Rhodes and replacing him with egomaniacal-and-wildly-talented head booker Ric Flair, triggering a golden age of in-ring action. However, by the end of the year, Herd and Flair were in the midst of one of the ugliest falling-outs in the history of the promotion, and Flair was jettisoned to the WWF like yesterday’s garbage, taking the belt with him. Desperate to emulate the WWF in any way possible, Herd’s WCW picked at the WWF’s leftovers like a hobo going through a dumpster, taking burned-out has-beens like Paul Orndorff and Junkyard Dog, and pushing them to the top level of the promotion to save money. By the end of a disastrous 1991, highlighted by the consensus choice for the worst PPV of all-time in the form of Great American Bash ’91, Jim Herd had joined those “stars†on the unemployment line.
Section 2: The Dark Ages: 1991-1993
The end of 1991 brought a strange renaissance to WCW, as new Turner suit, K. Allen Frey, armed with common sense and a good head for business, shocked observers of our so-called-sport marveled at how Frey was actually able to motivate the overpaid primadonnas into decent matches by merely offering them more money – whoever has the best match of the night get a bonus. Hey, with this kind of brilliant strategy, how could he lose? Sadly for the wrestling world in general, Kip was sabotaged by a returning Dusty Rhodes and quickly relegated to the pile of ex-WCW Executive Vice-Presidents when a ridiculously overinflated contract negotiation with manager Paul Heyman went beyond everyone’s control. Frey was replaced by ex-football tough guy and Mid-South dictator Bill Watts, who had completely the opposite attitude toward thingsâ€â€less money for more work. His instructions were simple: Keep the losses under $10 million. So he slashed the budget and salaries until they were making $40,000. By the end of the year, you knew people weren’t going to stand for that much longer. And they didn’t.
Section 3: Of Coffee Boys and Hulkamaniacs: 1993-1995
The ultimate slap in the face to the corporate suck-ups came when former Verne-Gagne-coffee-boy-and-gofer Eric Bischoff wormed his way into the Executive VP position after years of toiling in the Junior Announcer position while maintaining his wind-tunnel-proofed hair. While all the usual suspects protested that they had sucked up to higher-ups for much longer than Bischoff had ever done, their protests fell on deaf ears when Bischoff’s pitch to Turnerâ€â€spend more money than any promotion in historyâ€â€was just what the Turner organization (who used WCW mainly as cheap TV programming and a monster tax write off) wanted to hear.
What followed was a horrific year of money losses into the millions as Bischoff desperately tried to compete with the WWF at their own game. In 1994, he took the next step, signing Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage to bolster the star power of the promotion, but Hogan’s ego turned the promotion into a circus by 1995. Finally, with Bischoff’s job seemingly slipping away from his grasp by the day, he made one last plea to Turner Broadcasting, asking for TV time on Monday nights to do the unthinkableâ€â€compete head-to-head with the WWF’s Monday Night RAW juggernaut. And then everything hit the fan.
Section 4: The Monday Night Wars, 1995-1998
With the WWF suddenly reeling from the KO punch of Monday Nitro (as the WCW program on Turner was called), Bischoff kept up the attacks, using every dirty and underhanded trick in the book to demoralize WWF fans and turn Nitro into the cool buzzword among the wrestling fanbase in general. In 1996, he virtually lobbed a hand grenade into Vince McMahon’s lap, as he signed away top stars Kevin Nash and Scott Hall and turned them into the New World Order (nWo), which transcended wrestling and became the badboy slacker image of choice among the disillusioned fourteen-year old set.
With a newly evil Hulk Hogan feuding with top WCW guy Sting over the World title and high-flying action filling up the undercard, WCW was raking in money hand-over-fist and there seemed to be no end in sight. But of course, there always is, as the nWo increasingly filled TV time and Bischoff became complacent and arrogant at the same time. Despite the phenomenon that was Goldberg in 1998, the Hogan Show had apparently worn out its welcome by the middle of 1999, and with ratings plummeting, the inevitable occurred and WCW pulled the plug on former savior Eric Bischoff, firing him in August of 1999. In hindsight, they might as well have kept him around.
Section 5: Down the Drain: 1999-2001
Taking the age-old philosophy of “If the WWF did it, it must be good†to the ultimate extreme, interim WCW President Bill Busch bypassed the chancy business of signing top WWF stars and simply signed away the writersâ€â€in this case, Vince Russo and Ed Ferrera. However, left to their own devices, what was produced was a chaotic mess of a product, devoid of emotion or logic, and Russo’s million-dollar contract only produced a four-month stay before his dismissal early in 2000.
Things were rapidly falling apart for WCW by that point, as top star Chris Benoit bailed for the WWF after a dispute with management, taking much of the midcard with him. Others would follow, until a desperate Turner organization (now owned by Time-Warner) put Bischoff and Russo back in change of the sinking ship. However, Russo was increasingly paranoid and seemingly insane, and his bizarre booking choices alienated fans by the hour. To make matters worse, WCW was desperate to cash in on the failed Power Plant training school (long regarded as a joke by everyone not training there) and started pushing green rookies as a way to get payback on their investment.
With both Russo and Bischoff gone by the end of the year, Time-Warner decided enough was enough and unloaded the Little Promotion That Couldn’t on the WWF in exchange for the business equivalent of three magic beans and a cow. Wrestling fans had been given some hope in 2000 when Eric Bischoff floated a scheme regarded at best as “pie in the sky†whereby startup company Fusient would front him the 50 or 60 million dollars needed to buy it away from Time-Warner and revitalize it, but once former WCW sweetheart network TNT pulled the plug on the Monday Nitro show, there was no deal left to be made. Vince McMahon, who had been making overtures towards buying the company ever since Turner had done the same to him in the early 80s, finally got his wish and bought the flailing corpse of WCW for a little under $4 million. By the end of 2001, the name and heritage of WCW were buried completely and forever, likely never to return.’
Aftermath
Those who screwed up the un-screw-up-able can at least take some solace in knowing that they managed to curse not only their own promotion, but their succeeding one as well. Following the purchase of WCW in 2001, the WWF turned into a complete shambles, with Steve Austin going insane and allegedly beating his wife, Rock leaving to make movies, Undertaker going on a power trip backstage that sunk buyrates for months, top wrestlers going on the injured list by the dozen, and Vince McMahon’s vanity football league becoming one of the biggest jokes in media history. In fact, the WWF even lost their own name – the World Wildlife Fund successfully sued for ownership of the “WWF†initials and they were forced to change to “WWE†as a result.
So maybe WCW does live on in a way, after all.
