The 10 Biggest Wastes of Money in Wrestling History

Whether it's splashing out on over-priced contracts for has-been stars on the decline, giving C list celebrities an absurd amount of money to do very little at all, or just sponsoring the inane dreams of family members, one thing is for sure: folks in WCW, TNA and WWE have thrown money down the toilet on too many occasions to count.

With this in mind, here is a list of the 10 most hideous wastes of money in wrestling.

Brooke Hogan's Music Career

In a 2006 radio interview, Hogan confessed that he had spent around $2 million to $3 million of his own money trying to turn his untalented daughter, Brooke, into a singing sensation (Dave Meltzer would later claim on Wrestling Observer Live that the figure was actually closer to $5 million).

Looking at what a disaster her singing career turned out to be (I doubt Brooke would even make it past the first round on Simon Cowell's The X Factor), he probably would have been smarter just spending that money on sending her to college instead.

Plane Tickets

There are numerous stories about the incompetency and dysfunction that plagued WCW, at one time the world’s leading wrestling organization. However, this tidbit from The Death of WCW may take the biscuit for stupidity.

Talking about the financial mess in the WCW in 2000 (due to bad business decisions and a poor on-screen product, the company had lost tens of millions the previous year and was sinking fast), Bryan Alvarez explains that Bill Busch, the guy then in charge of getting the WCW back on track, came up with an idea: they would stop flying in every single wrestler on the roster for shows, and only fly in the wrestlers they intended to use.

Yes, it sounds incredible, but it’s true. Believe it or not, up until that point they were literally buying airline tickets for the entire roster of 160 or so performers, but only using 20 or 30 of them during a show.   

It’s mind-boggling to think of the hundreds of thousands of dollars the WCW threw away over the years flying in over two-thirds of its roster when they simply weren't needed at all.  

Linda McMahon’s Senate Run

Vince McMahon lost so much money on this one, they even had a joke about it on Raw (a comatose Vince was jolted from his coma by the doctor's news about how much Linda had blown on her failing campaign).

Yes, wrestling fans fondly remember the time Mrs. McMahon spent an astounding $50 million of her own money competing for the vacant U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut, only to have her married life with Vince raked over, the business tactics of her company held under a huge and unforgiving microscope and her lack of experience heavily criticized.

And on top of all this, she lost anyway (Connecticut has always been a heavily Democratic state and Linda was running as a Republican candidate, so this was always the likely result).   

To make matters worse, not only did throwing all that cash at the voters not work, there were a few indications it may even have hurt her, as resentment grew among many people who felt she was trying to “buy” the election.

As Linda’s primary opponent, Rob Simmons, pointed out to the CT Post just days after Linda had officially lost to Democrat Dick Blumenthal, "Spending all that money became a negative in and of itself. Then the impression was she's just buying the election. And that gave Dick Blumenthal his one winning issue: `It's an election, not an auction.' "

So, yes, it's likely that Linda could have spent something far more reasonable, like $5 million or $6 million (the average dollar figure for a U.S. Senate run in a small state like Connecticut) and stood a much better chance of winning.  

Has Linda learned her lesson from this debacle? Well, no. All signs indicate that she’s running for the U.S. Senate again next year when Joe Lieberman retires.

Although insiders are saying that Linda "won't have to spend nearly as much money” this time, having already achieved name recognition and laid some groundwork with voters. For Vince’s sanity, we sure hope so.

Master P Gets Paid

In 1999, as he was overseeing the increasingly disastrous WCW, Eric Bischoff had a bright idea to turn the ship around: Rapper Master P.

Indeed, as detailed in The Death of WCW, Eric was so eager to acquire his services that he paid the rapper (who made it clear he had no interest whatsoever in wrestling) over $200,000 per appearance. In one month he managed to make $1 million for not doing very much at all. Think that's crazy?

They also signed his friend, Swoll, a talentless bodybuilder, to a $400,000 a year contract. Swoll ended up having precisely three matches in the WCW the entire time he was there.

In more outrageous spending later that year, famous American rock group KISS received a whopping $500,000 to perform songs on the Aug. 23 Nitro. To make matters worse, this segment bombed in the ratings, scoring only a 2.25 ratings quarter (one the lowest-rated segments on the show).

For the record, Eric Bischoff, defending himself against the accusations that he had thoughtlessly splashed around money in his book, Controversy Creates Cash, claimed he had "only" spent $250,000 on getting KISS to perform. Yes, that's much better, Eric.  

Did WCW learn from this? No. The Death of WCW also mentions that the promoter spent $25,000 in 2000 on bringing in soul singer James Brown for a one-off appearance in a comedy angle with Ernest Miller. That didn’t make one bit of difference in the ratings, either.

Jonny Fairplay

After a brief and extremely unmemorable stint with TNA in 2003, ex-Survivor star Jonny Fairplay, recalling his time in the company, later gloated in an interview with USA Today that he had been paid an astronomical amount of money for his paltry amount of work: "I signed a $150,000 contract with TNA Wrestling for a year. I ended up doing eight appearances for 40 minutes. Then I signed a second contract and they didn't use me, so I'd like to thank (them) for $300,000 for 40 minutes' worth of work."

Yup, $300,000 for 40 minutes' work. Or, to put it another way: $7,500 per minute. Was he worth the money? Considering I’m personally still struggling to remember what he actually did in TNA, I would say no.

Unsurprisingly, Fairplay made inquiries last year about possibly rejoining TNA. Hey, he knows a sucker when he sees one.   

McMahon's Million Dollar Mania

Devised by Vince McMahon in June 2008 as a way to revive Raw's flagging ratings, this game show concept (in which Vince gave away $1 million of what he claimed was his own money every week via a phone-in contest) never delivered.

Indeed, the Raw episode immediately following the first giveaway did a miserable 3.06—roughly in line with what the show had been doing prior to Vince giving away all his cash.

While Vince had initially claimed in press conferences that the idea would go on indefinitely, in reality it only lasted another couple of weeks and was finally buried once and for all after the entire set bizarrely collapsed, crushing poor Vince, who was temporarily written off the show as the Mr. McMahon character dealt with his injuries.

Many fans wondered if this was the start of an angle, in which Triple H, or someone else close to Vince, would set out to find the dastardly person who orchestrated the stage collapse.

However, Vince's injuries were never mentioned again. McMahon's Million Dollar Mania was, thankfully, never mentioned on-screen again, either.

Raw Diva Search

Since its inception in 2004, this contest has churned out some mind-bogglingly abysmal segments (remember when all the divas had to verbally seduce Kamala?). Not only was it a creative dead-end, it was also a colossal waste of money.

A one-year contract for $250,000 (far more than most of the divas were making at the time, as well as most of the mid-carders) would be awarded to the winning model/actress/whatever-these-women-do that counts for a job, at which point the victor was still so green that there were serious limits as to what WWE could do with her (WWE tried rushing the winner of the second Diva Search, Ashley Massaro, into matches and the results were disastrous). 

That said, at least Ashley and Christy Hemme, the first winner of the contest, were featured on Raw and Smackdown on a regular basis. Layla El was barely used after a victory on Raw or Smackdown in 2006.

She was eventually sent to the C show, ECW, to be one third of the dance troupe Extreme Expose with Kelly Kelly and Brooke Adams (somewhat like the Nitro girls, only they weren’t nearly as over. Kelly and Brooke couldn’t dance worth a damn, either).

So essentially, Layla was getting $250,000 a year (by far the highest-paid woman on the roster) to be an extra dancer on WWE’s third brand.

Presumably because fans hadn’t suffered enough, WWE did the Diva Search contest for a fourth time in 2007. Thankfully though, by this time they had gotten smarter and the eventual winner, Eve Torres, was simply given the standard WWE contract (much less than $250,000).

Jersey Shore

For the record, I've never actually seen an episode of MTV's Jersey Shore. Best I can tell, it's a group of drunk orange people yelling ceaseless obscenities at each other. Despite this, or maybe because of it, this show has become massively popular and is regularly doing record ratings for their network. 

Eager to cash in on the Jersey Shore craze, TNA has thrown ludicrous amounts of money at the stars of the show in the last year, hoping that somehow that show’s mainstream success will rub off on them.

How much money? In October, gossip site TMZ reported that Jersey Shore star, JWOWW (real name: Jennifer Farley) was being paid a whopping $15,000 for her short appearance on IMPACT the following week (she showed up to the IMPACT zone with The Beautiful People and had a short catfight with Cookie, a lookalike of Jersey Shore cast-mate Snooki on the show).

Needless to say, this huge price tag didn’t sit well with most of the underpaid roster (this is the same company with featured performers so broke they can qualify for food stamps and has champions working at Sunglass Hut to pay the bills) and Dave Meltzer spoke of unhappiness backstage at the time.

How did TNA attempt to appease their disgruntled wrestlers? They told them the TMZ figure was exaggerated and not a true reflection of how much money she was getting (despite the fact that the $15,000 figure is well-known to be what most of the main Jersey Shore stars currently charge for outside appearances).

A few months later, another Jersey Shore star, Angelina Pivarnick (a minor star on the show who didn’t have anything close to the fame of Snooki, The Situation or JWOWW), was also brought in for two appearances for a reported $7,000 each time.

Per Wade Keller in the PWTorch, management were once again telling wrestlers the figure was wrong, even explaining that Pivarnick had agreed to do the show for free for the publicity (which makes little or no sense; how is anyone going to get publicity from appearing on a lowly show like Impact?).

So did spending large amounts of cash, greatly irritating the whole locker room in the process, pay off for TNA? Not really.

JWOWW’s appearance got them a few write-ups in the mainstream press, but nothing too impressive. There’s also the fact that on her October appearance, TNA inexplicably scheduled her bit directly in conflict with her own show, which was airing on MTV at the exact same time (TNA would have been much smarter placing her appearance in the first hour, instead of shifting it to the second, when Jersey Shore was on).

The result?  JWOWW’s cameo completely bombed in the ratings. It ranked the lowest quarter-hour of the show at just 1.23 (the show averaged a 1.4.). Pivarnick didn't help their ratings either in her two short appearances a few months later. 

Worse still, she even admitted to TMZ that she had been so nervous at her pro wrestling debut that she had boozed and taken a pill beforehand to relax, meaning she went to the ring more than a little tipsy (in fairness to her, though, this is hardly unusual behaviour in TNA).

TNA's Spending Spree

In early 2010, TNA spent a reported $4 million on acquiring the services of a whole bunch of former WCW/WWE stars (Hulk Hogan, Ric Flair, Eric Bischoff, Rob Van Dam, Mr Anderson and Jeff Hardy).

The result? A disastrous Monday Night Raw and a quick retreat back to Thursday nights, where they returned to doing the exact same 1.1s and 1.2s they’d been doing in 2008 and 2009, before the huge payroll.

To make things worse, the PPV buys have sunken far lower than they were before the Hogan/Bischoff invasion (they now track so low, in fact, most in the PPV industry don’t bother paying even scant attention to their monthly numbers any more).

The XFL

Vince McMahon has had an astonishing array of failed side projects: the body-building company, the restaurant, the record company, the movie studio... yes, Vince has tried it all (heck, the only thing he hasn’t dabbled in is the porn industry… yet). And, as everyone knows, he has lost millions in his attempts to prove he can make it in something other than wrestling.

But in the bigger picture, none of these endeavours can even compare to the money-losing catastrophe that was the XFL. Debuting—and finishing—in the spring of 2001, this joint venture by Vince and NBC was an attempt to create competition for the NFL, while cashing in on the success of pro wrestling (there were fewer rules and the players' style was promoted as being far more brutal and vicious than that of the NFL.)

Things started out fantastically for the football league when its debut show did a 9.5 for NBC (far surpassing the 4.5 that had been expected). However, Vince's happiness was short-lived. The show was unable to keep its audience and ratings nosedived shortly thereafter.

One game did an alarmingly low 2.6, which at that point was the second lowest prime-time rating in the network's history. The numbers of UPN and TNN (which also showed the games) were just as bad. By the time the first season was done, the ailing football league had lost an astonishing $120 million. NBC took half of the loss, which means that Vince lost around $60 million on this project.

Even as the first season neared its end and it was obvious what a gigantic flop the entire thing was, Vince still insisted he wanted the league to go on and desperately sought another television partner while also looking into some drastic cost cutting maneuvers.

Needless to say, no other company worth a damn was willing to broadcast the games. Attempts to revive the dilapidated league were soon abandoned, and even Vince was forced to throw in the towel in May of that year.