On July 9, 2000, World Championship Wrestling presented its Bash at the Beach pay-per-view event live from Daytona Beach, Florida. An annual show since 1994, Bash at the Beach 2000 would prove to be the final and most controversial iteration of what had formerly been one of WCW's most important events. In particular, Bash at the Beach held a place of special significance for wrestler Hulk Hogan: he made his in-ring debut for WCW at the 1994 Bash; he made his first heel turn in over a decade at the 1996 Bash (and switched from being Hulk Hogan to Hollywood Hogan); and he would make what would turn out to be his final appearance for WCW at the 2000 Bash.
Like all wrestling PPV events, Bash at the Beach 2000 had a number of matches on its card, but the most significant "match" of the evening was the fight between the reigning champion Jeff Jarrett and the challenger Hollywood Hogan for the WCW World Heavyweight title. This was supposed to be one of the two main events for the night. After the bell rang and before any wrestling could take place, Jarrett gingerly laid himself down in the middle of the ring while Hogan stared in confusion. WCW's head booker (i.e., writer) Vince Russo then came down to the ring and yelled at Hogan to cover Jarrett. Russo threw the championship belt into the ring at Hogan and angrily repeated his instruction. Hogan took a microphone and said "this is why this company is in the damn shape that it's in, because of bullshit like this," before putting one foot on top of the supine Jarrett. The referee counted the cover, the bell was rung, and Hogan was given the belt and declared the winner. Jarrett then quickly stood up and left the ring, while Hogan stormed out of the building shortly thereafter. The live audience began chanting "Russo sucks" while the announcing team tried (and failed) not to seem too irritated by what they had just witnessed. Russo would come back out shortly thereafter to deliver a promo to the crowd.
A Digression
Before I go any further into the story of Bash at the Beach 2000, I should probably explain why I'm writing this in the first place. The popular VICE program Dark Side of the Ring -- which discusses the less savory aspects of the professional wrestling business -- recently aired an episode on Bash at the Beach 2000. It may surprise you to learn that once upon a time, I was a big fan of pro-wrestling, and even though I stopped actively watching it around 2001 or so, I still find the business fascinating.
A loooooong time ago, I started writing something about the collapse of WCW that I intended to post here and I would go back and work on it every so often. Since it's a well-known fact that I tend to write extremely lengthy essays, the size and scope of this thing eventually became utterly unmanageable. After watching the Dark Side of the Ring episode, I decided to focus on this event in particular since it's a perfect microcosm for the insanity that was late-stage WCW and hopefully this will make the article shorter, more focused, and easier to digest.
Dramatis Personae
While basic intuition would suggest that the core conflict involved in this debacle would be between the combatants themselves -- i.e., Hogan and Jarrett -- that's not quite the case. The real conflict was between Hogan and the aforementioned Vince Russo. Or was it? The fact of the matter is that even though this happened over 20 years in a wrestling promotion that no longer exists, there is still a great debate over which parts of it were "real" and which parts were a work (wrestling slang for something that is planned and agreed to by the parties involved; the opposite of a work is a shoot). Either way, we need to become familiar with who some of these people are, so I'll try to be as succinct as possible.
- Hollywood Hogan - aka Hulk Hogan. Possibly the most famous and the most popular professional wrestler who has ever lived. In the 1980s and the early 1990s, he was the heroic superstar who catapulted WCW's main rival, the World Wrestling Federation (now known as World Wrestling Entertainment), to unprecedented mainstream success and recognition. He was lured to WCW in 1994 with promises of creative control over his character and massive amounts of money. In 1996, the heroic Hulk Hogan character was changed to the villainous Hollywood Hogan as a founding member of the New World Order (nWo) faction that would dominate WCW and professional wrestling in general for years to come. Through various twists and turns, though, he was again a face (wrestling-speak for hero) by the time of Bash at the Beach 2000.
- Eric Bischoff - Executive Vice President of WCW from 1993 until 1999; served on the creative team and as an on-air talent in 2000. Started his WCW career as an announcer/interviewer and somehow convinced WCW's parent company, Turner Broadcasting, to give him the reins of power. Bischoff oversaw WCW's greatest period of growth, turning it from what was essentially a Southern regional wrestling company into an international wrestling promotion that challenged (and at one point surpassed) the WWF in terms of television ratings, PPV buy-rates, and name recognition. He was responsible for poaching many of the WWF's top stars, including Hogan, with whom he would develop a close professional and personal relationship. He authored the wildly successful nWo invasion angle (wrestling-speak for storyline) as well as the rise of Goldberg, one of the few WCW stars who had not previously had a WWF career. By 1999, however, the company was in dire financial straits as a result of his lavish spending on talent who shouldn't have been there as well as various deals that never gave WCW a return on their investment; this caused him to be removed from power and sent home until he was brought back in April of 2000 to be the co-head of the booking committee with no financial or executive authority.
- Vince Russo - Head Booker (wrestling-speak for writer, matchmaker, etc.) for WCW at various points between October 1999 and January 2000, co-head of the booking committee with Bischoff from April 2000 to July 2000, unclear role afterward. Russo had allegedly been the head booker of the WWF between some time in 1996 and October 1999. I say "allegedly" because the actual head booker was the company's owner, Vince McMahon, and Russo was part of a booking committee that also included people like Bruce Prichard, Jim Cornette, and others. Russo pushed for the WWF to abandon the cartoonish gimmicks and kid-friendly characters that dominated its programming in the 1980s and the early 1990s and pivot toward more violent and highly sexualized content. He believed that the stories behind the angles were more interesting than the wrestling itself, so there was a major increase in the time given to backstage interactions, pre-recorded segments, in-character vignettes, and so on, at the expense of the time dedicated to in-ring performances. His tenure also saw a marked increase in matches with indeterminate endings (e.g., disqualifications and count-outs as opposed to pinfalls or submissions with clearly noted winners), frequent face and heel turns, and an almost unbelievable number of ref bumps (i.e., the referees being hit and incapacitated by the wrestlers, usually unintentionally). Interestingly, Russo did much to promote the careers of up-and-coming talent while also advocating for title shots and even title runs for established performers who for whatever reason hadn't quite gotten there. He claims that he quit the WWF because McMahon questioned his need to be with his wife and children more, saying that he made enough money to afford a nanny. He was hired shortly after Bischoff was sent home in 1999 on the basis of his claim that he was responsible for the bulk of the WWF's success in recent years. He was sent home about 3 months after he was hired by WCW and then brought back 3 months after that.
- Jeff Jarrett - WCW World Heavyweight Champion at the time of Bash at the Beach 2000. Jarrett had bounced back and forth between the WWF and WCW during the 1990s, with his most frequent gimmick being that of a country music star who wanted to wrestle (and he would frequently smash acoustic guitars over his opponents' heads). Jarrett apparently developed a friendship with Russo during his final WWF run from 1997 until 1999. While Jarrett was always a reasonably talented wrestler from a purely athletic standpoint, he was something of a charisma void who struggled on the microphone and never really connected with fans. He never rose above the mid-card level, although he did hold the Intercontinental Championship (the WWF's mid-card title) on 5 occasions. The high points of his career in the WWF were his tag-team run with the late Owen Hart as well as his final inappropriate-but-hilarious heel run that saw him recapitulate Andy Kaufman's feuds with various women both in and out of the wrestling ring. He joined WCW shortly after Russo, the latter of whom very quickly pushed him into the highly chaotic main event picture. He would win the WCW world title for the first time in April of 2000 before losing it 8 days later. In the month of May, he regained the title from actor David Arquette (yes, you read that right), then lost it to Ric Flair, won it back from Flair, lost it to Flair again, and then won it back from Flair again. Remarkably, he somehow managed to keep the title from the end of May until it was time for Bash at the Beach in July.
- Booker T - Popular WCW wrestler who has the distinction of being the only person involved in this whole thing who came out of it relatively undamaged. Joined the promotion in 1993 without ever having been involved in the WWF and worked his way up to the mid-card and to the tag team title with his real-life brother Stevie Ray. Booker T was an extremely reliable performer who had never won the world title in his 7 years with the company up to that point.
There are some other people who are probably worth mentioning, but these are the main players in what would prove to be one of WCW's strangest dramas.
Works and Shoots: Another Digression
I mentioned earlier the distinction between works and shoots. One of the core tenets of the professional wrestling industry is that great care should be taken to maintain kayfabe. Kayfabe, basically, is the idea that every work presented to the audience in a wrestling show should be treated as real. Even though there is now a broad awareness that the outcomes of professional wrestling matches are pre-determined and that the wrestlers involved are playing characters, this wasn't always the case.
The rise of the internet wrestling community (IWC) in the late 1990s and early 2000s created a new generation of smart marks or smarks. A "mark" in wrestling lingo is a fan, and if someone is "smart," it means that they're aware of the inner workings of the business, specifically its choreographed nature. In some ways, Vince Russo was ahead of his time. He was one of the first major wrestling personalities to really embrace the internet and listen to feedback from smarks. However, as we all know, it's very easy to get caught up in internet discourse, which is often quite different from what the general public thinks and says. It's sometimes hard to remember that over 20 years ago, internet users were an extreme minority. The IWC, in this case, was a minority of a minority.
Russo was aware that the IWC was extremely detail-oriented and had a loathing for predictable angles and outcomes. This outlook meshed well with Russo's own views on the business. Smarks loved shoots, Russo loved shoots. Not only that, some of the most successful angles in both WCW and the WWF in recent years had involved the bending of kayfabe. Pure shoots, however, whether they are strictly verbal or even physical, have a way of quickly getting out of control. Russo should have known this better than anyone.
In the WWF, one of Russo's best-known initiatives was a 1998 shoot tournament called the Brawl for All. The intent was to give undercard or mid-card wrestlers an opportunity to move up in the company via a real, unscripted boxing tournament, with the winner receiving a cash bonus and main event push. The WWF wanted to use the tournament as a springboard to revive the career of Dr. Death Steve Williams, who had been a major star in smaller promotions in the 1980s and who was being primed for a feud with Stone Cold Steve Austin, the industry's biggest star since Hulk Hogan. It didn't hurt that Williams had a boxing background, so it was considered likely that he would win anyway. Even if he didn't, Russo argued, whoever did win would be a new star. Several ambitious WWF wrestlers eagerly signed up and once there were 16 men, the bracket-style tournament began.
The problems with the Brawl for All started almost immediately. In the first place, there is a world of difference between competitive boxing and professional wrestling; the skillsets do not overlap to any significant degree. Several of the entrants were injured and forced to sit out their normal bookings for the simple fact that most of them did not know what they were doing. In a truly embarrassing moment, Dr. Death -- the WWF's anointed winner -- was literally knocked out in the second round of matches by Bart Gunn, killing his WWF career before it could even start. The audience never warmed up to the idea; crowds frequently chanted "we want wrestling" and "booooriiiing" during the Brawl for All matches. Bart Gunn would go on to ultimately win the tournament. If that name doesn't mean anything to you, that's not a surprise: he was an undercard wrestler with virtually no presence. Far from making him a superstar, though, his victory in the tournament would herald the end of his WWF career. He received a spot in Wrestlemania XV, as he had been promised. In a truly shitty move on the part of the company, Gunn's opponent for Wrestlemania in 1999 was the 300-pound professional novelty boxer Butterbean. Butterbean had worked with the WWF before in a scripted capacity, but his fight with Gunn was to be a shoot. In the event, he knocked Gunn out in 35 seconds and Gunn was released from the WWF shortly thereafter.
Even if we ignore all the issues with the execution of this event, however, there is a deeper conceptual problem. If professional wrestling is built around safe-guarding kayfabe, how is that possible when a company goes to great lengths to promote a series of matches as being "real" or "unscripted"? In other words, by emphasizing the reality of a small bit of content, what you're actually doing is admitting that the majority of it is a sham. This, of course, is the very antithesis of kayfabe and detrimental to the credibility of the product.
A possible solution to this problem is avoiding outlandish gimmicks and angles that strain credulity. Because we are talking about Vince Russo, however, this isn't an acceptable way out. One of the hallmarks of Russo's booking is what is called the worked shoot. Generally, the term is used to refer to a promo (one of those monologues that you'll see wrestlers give in the ring in front of the audience) that uses real or backstage information to serve a kayfabe purpose. So it's real...but it's not really real. Or is it? Yes...sort of. Who the fuck knows? And more importantly, will anyone care?
Before the Bash
According to Russo, his hectic booking of the WCW world title was supposed to slow down after Jarrett claimed it for the fourth time in six weeks. He and Bischoff had evidently planned to set up a conflict between a stable of "younger" WCW talent called the New Blood and pit them against a faction of older, more established guys called the Millionaires' Club for control of the promotion. This would have been a case of art imitating life since this was a reflection of the politics inside WCW that had previously seen the world title controlled by Hogan and people who were generally on Hogan's good side (or at the very least, wrestlers he considered worthy of holding the title). It is indicative of the power dynamics within WCW that the young guys who had been held down, denied opportunities, and were starting to fight back were the heels in this angle.
Russo wanted the heel New Blood champion Jeff Jarrett to retain the title against multiple face Millionaires' Club challengers like Ric Flair, Sting, and others, until he was finally defeated by Booker T. When Russo pitched this to Hogan, he balked at the idea. Remember when I said earlier that Hogan had been granted "creative control" in his contract? This meant that he had sole control over whether he would win or lose, to whom, and when. Bischoff naturally took Hogan's side and told Russo to go back to the drawing board.
Russo rewrote the Bash at the Beach match, this time having all of Jarrett's allies run down to the ring to interfere on his behalf, but Hogan would defeat all of them until Jarrett was finally able to get in a cheap shot (unseen by the ref) and win. Hogan and Bischoff again refused, and this time they told Russo that the only acceptable outcome would be a victory by Hogan and his winning of the title. This makes no sense for the angle and obviously has the effect of making it impossible for the face Booker T to win the title later in a way that would make him look good. Russo protested, but Hogan went above his head directly to Turner Broadcasting, who sided with Hogan. Russo then came up with another idea: Jarrett would simply get in the ring, lie down for Hogan, and then Hogan would take the belt. Russo would then come out, cut a promo about Hogan's "creative control" play, and say that the title change is unrecognized. The pay-off would come months later when Hogan would return, announcing that he was still technically the champion, and whoever held the other belt at the time would face Hogan and win the "real" championship. Hogan and Bischoff agreed.
There were multiple problems with this idea, but the biggest one was that it was a combination of two angles that had been tried before and failed. The very first PPV event that Russo booked for WCW was 1999's Halloween Havoc. The main event was supposed to be Hogan vs. Sting for the WCW title. After both men were in the ring, they sized each other up for a second, before Hogan leaned over and whispered something to Sting. Sting got a confused look on his face and Hogan repeated whatever he had said. Hogan then lay down in the middle of the ring and allowed Sting to cover him. He did and Sting retained the championship belt, visibly annoyed. Later in the night, Sting would have what was declared to be a non-title match against Goldberg; Goldberg would win the match and be declared the champion, which set up an angle as to who was the real champion since it was supposed to be a non-title match. The point of the Hogan "match" was to get internet smarks talking about Hogan refusing to do a job for Sting. Naturally, Hogan was off television for months afterward and no reference was made to what had happened, which only added to the confusion. Given Hogan's creative control clause and how the last such attempt at a version of this angle petered out, there was no reason to assume that there would ever be any resolution that would see Hogan losing the title.
The perception among internet smarks at the time (and indeed to the current day) is that Hogan was old, past his prime, and holding up opportunities for other guys to move up the roster. Russo -- who knew and agreed with all of this -- figured that his post-match promo could be a chance for him to do a worked shoot on Hogan to appeal to these fans and generate some buzz for WCW. Even the smarks would be confused as to whether the events were real or scripted, and everyone knows that confounding the cynical IWC is the gold standard for good booking...or so Russo thought.
As I mentioned earlier, internet smarks were a vanishingly small proportion of the fanbase. The whole display would have been frustrating to any member of the audience (live or otherwise) who did not frequent internet wrestling forums or subscribe to the Wrestling Observer newsletter. See, even though most of the audience was aware that they were watching something predetermined, they still wanted to be able to believe that what they were seeing was real. From the beginning of Russo's tenure with WCW, he instructed the commentators to say things like "that's not part of the script" or "we didn't go over that in the production meeting" or (my favorite) waving around a piece of paper and exclaiming "that's not in the format!" Just like the Brawl for All, it never seemed to occur to Russo that emphasizing the "reality" of one particular item (that was not, in fact, real) only served to highlight how unreal everything else was.
Back to the Beach
As if the actual "match" was not bad enough, Russo proceeded to make things worse by returning to the ring to address the audience. The announcers were kind enough to let us know that Russo's appearance at this point was not, in fact, listed on their formats. I am sure that the people who paid good money to either attend the event or watch it on PPV were shivering with anticipation at the thought of the booker for a rapidly dying wrestling company coming out to speak directly to them!
As a brief aside, Russo's constant self-promotion in WCW was truly bizarre behavior for a booker. In the past, bookers were typically behind-the-scenes figures. If they made appearances during events, it was usually because they had some other kayfabe job in the promotion, and no mention was made of the fact that they were bookers. In fact, some bookers were even wrestlers themselves, which is a whole other can of worms. (Kevin Nash, for example, had been the head booker for WCW before Russo's arrival, and he repeatedly booked himself to win the WCW world title.) But Russo was always presented as the booker (or sometimes "the powers that be") and he frequently made appearances and even involved himself in matches. By contrast, Russo appeared only very sporadically on WWF television (specifically on the company's call-in talk show Livewire) under the kayfabe name Vic Venom, as a heel-leaning commentator, emphatically not as a booker.
Russo proceeded to deliver an impassioned if agitated rant, stating:
Let me tell you who doesn’t give a shit about this company—that goddamned politician Hulk Hogan! Because let me tell you people what happened in this ring here tonight. All day long I’m playing politics with Hulk Hogan because Hulk Hogan tonight wants to play his creative control card. And to Hulk Hogan that meant tonight, even though he knows it’s bullshit, he beats Jeff Jarrett. Well, guess what? Hogan got his wish. Hogan got his belt, and he went the hell home, and I promise everybody, or else I’ll go in the goddamned grave, you will never see that piece of shit again! And Hogan, you big bald son of a bitch, kiss my ass!
He then referred to the belt that Hogan had walked out with as the "Hulk Hogan Memorial" championship and stated that Jarrett was still the official WCW champion and that he would be facing Booker T in a real main event later in the evening. This last piece of information was, at the very least, received positively. And in all fairness, the match that Jeff Jarrett and Booker T had was better than a "real" match featuring Jarrett and Hogan would have been. Jarrett would wind up dropping the belt to Booker T, giving him his first world championship after 7 years with WCW and 14 years in the industry overall.
Aftermath
Unfortunately, Booker T's win was overshadowed by the absolute dumb-fuckery of the night's proceedings and the aftermath. It later came out that only Russo, Bischoff, and Hogan were aware that the nature of Hogan's title "win" was a work. Russo had told his best buddy, Jeff Jarrett, that Hogan was refusing to lose and that he should just lie down for him without having a real match because he would face Booker T later; Russo never informed him that all of this had been planned with Hogan and Bischoff and led him to believe that this would be a shoot. Booker T wasn't even scheduled to appear on the PPV and he had no idea he would be wrestling that evening until that very day when Russo told him he would be winning the belt from Jarrett. Tony Schiavone, the much-put-upon commentator who frequently let the audience know that the events they had just seen were not covered in that day's production meeting, had legitimately been given no notice that any of this was going to happen and he would later say that the instant Russo started cutting his promo, he knew the whole thing had been planned.
The smark response was one of confusion. The confusion was not so much as to whether the thing had been a work, a shoot, or some combination of the two, but rather how and why a company that had almost put the WWF out of business just a few years earlier had become so utterly dysfunctional and directionless. The question of the veracity of the incident was secondary if not totally irrelevant; neither possibility made WCW or the people involved look good.
Speaking of the people involved, immediately after grabbing the belt, Hogan did legitimately leave the building with Eric Bischoff. Bischoff claims they got on a private plane, began laughing and celebrating with some drinks, and did not learn about the substance of Russo's promo until after they disembarked. Hogan was incensed and pondered legal action. On what grounds, you might ask? He landed on defamation of character and breach of contract. Hogan's attorneys duly filed a lawsuit on August 1, less than a month after Bash at the Beach 2000.
In Hogan's view, Russo's statements that Hogan was a "bald son of a bitch" and a "piece of shit" constituted defamation and went well beyond what they had agreed to in their pre-match discussions. These statements, combined with the fact that Russo apparently did not intend to have Hogan return to WCW television at any point in the future, also represented a breach of Hogan's contract, specifically the number of shows he was supposed to headline and the creative control clause. The lawsuit was not finally concluded until 2005, 5 years after the incident, and an incredible 4 years after WCW ceased to exist as a corporate entity. I'll spare you the details, but the courts ruled in WCW's favor on the issue of defamation, finding Hogan's arguments unconvincing. Essentially, they stated that wrestling promos cannot be considered defamation because Russo was talking about Hulk Hogan the character, not Terry Bollea the person who portrays Hulk Hogan (interestingly, this distinction would come up again in Hogan's later lawsuit against Gawker media, but for extremely different reasons and with an extremely different outcome). The questions regarding breach of contract were eventually settled out-of-court by AOL-Time Warner for a payment that Bischoff asserts was well into seven figures.
It is worth noting that regardless of the fact that neither Hogan nor Bischoff would ever make another appearance for WCW after Bash at the Beach 2000, they were paid their full salaries. Neither man was an employee of WCW, but rather they both had multi-year contracts directly with Time Warner (and later AOL-Time Warner). Kevin Nash has asserted that Hogan filed the lawsuit in bad faith, and that he simply sought to extort more money from WCW's parent company via a legal settlement than he would have gotten from WCW's declining attendance and PPV buy-rates.
WCW would cease operations after March 26, 2001, in a process that is too long and involved to go into here. The basic summary is that after the AOL-Time Warner merger, WCW was deemed to be a black hole of money that could not be salvaged, its television shows were canceled, and its assets were put up for sale at extremely low prices. Vince McMahon would ultimately purchase all of WCW's assets for somewhere between $2 and $5 million (the exact amount has never been made public), mainly so he could have the rights to WCW's tape library (as of 2023, most -- if not all -- of WCW's television broadcasts and PPVs are available on the WWE Network, which is part of NBC's Peacock streaming service). With WCW out of business, the WWF (later WWE) was left as the sole major wrestling promotion in the United States.
Where Are They Now?
So what wound up happening to our main characters in this farce?
Hulk Hogan would sit out the rest of his contract with AOL-Time Warner, continuing to be paid for simply existing. Hogan returned to the WWE in 2002 and has gone in and out of the company every few years since then, interspersed with runs in independent promotions as well as a 2009-2013 run in Total Nonstop Action wrestling (more on that below). He has been the subject of multiple scandals since that time, with two in particular standing out. The first of his notable scandals related to a leaked sex tape of Hogan and a woman named Heather Clem, the wife of professional radio moron Bubba the Lovesponge. The tape was recorded by Bubba without Hogan's knowledge or consent in 2006 and was then leaked in 2012. Hogan sued and settled with the Clems, but Gawker became the main target of the suit after they defied a court order to remove the video from their website on First Amendment grounds. The suit ran from 2012 until 2016 when a jury found in favor of Hogan and awarded him over $140 million in damages; Gawker filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter.
Roughly contemporaneous to this, Hogan was exiled from the industry in 2015 due to a leaked audio tape (apparently recorded circa 2007) where he repeatedly used anti-black racial slurs. It is assumed that Gawker was responsible for this leak, but they stringently denied the accusation. By 2018, though, this scandal had blown over largely due to the fact that multiple black friends of Hogan both inside and outside of the wrestling industry had come forward to vouch for him as not being a racist, noting that he said these things during a period of his life that he has admitted was plagued with depression and substance abuse. Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions about Hogan's sincerity.
Eric Bischoff hitched his cart to the Hulk Hogan train in 1994 and has never seen fit to unlatch it. He left WCW with Hogan and for many years handled basically all of his business affairs. Thanks to his contacts within Turner Broadcasting and its successor companies, Bischoff would go on to have a lucrative career in producing reality television until 2017. He would also have a WWE run as an on-screen talent from 2002 until 2007 and in 2019, he was brought in as the "executive director" of WWE's Smackdown program (although he was fired approximately 4 months later). When Hogan was signed to Total Nonstop Action, he brought Bischoff with him as both an on-air talent and as a producer. Bischoff left in 2014 and has made occasional appearances in both WWE and All Elite Wrestling (which will almost certainly get its own episode of Dark Side of the Ring one day) over the last couple of years.
Vince Russo continued on as the head booker for WCW after Hogan and Bischoff departed. His later tenure would include booking himself to become the WCW champion, which presumably was done in service of his undying quest to make professional wrestling "realistic." After WCW folded, he would briefly return to the WWF as a booker, but left after two weeks when it became clear that he would be on a very short leash creatively. He would then join a new wrestling promotion founded by his friend Jeff Jarrett (who had been banned from returning to the WWF due to the circumstances in which he left the company in 1999), and he would even give it its name: Total Nonstop Action wrestling. See, it's funny, because the abbreviation is "TNA," which sounds like "T and A," which means "Tits and Ass," which is cool because who doesn't immediately associate wrestling with tits and ass? (He would also create a faction within TNA called Sports Entertainment eXtreme because the abbreviation is...well, you get it.) Russo was both a booker and an on-air talent, and while his time there was similarly insane, it would be impossible to go into much more detail about it without this becoming even longer. If I told you that the former owner of the company, Dixie Carter, was at one point forced to address the extremely loud "FIRE RUSSO" chants that would routinely erupt during live events, that should probably clue you in on how well his work was received by the audience. He now hosts a podcast where he takes great pains to remind his listeners that he hates professional wrestling and virtually everyone involved in it. Whether his purported loathing for the industry that he has spent over 20 years working in is a work, a shoot, or a worked shoot is anyone's guess.