Still in the stunned silence over the passing of Steve Jobs, I read a tidbit on the Wrestling Observer site: Yesterday marked 14 years since the passing of pro wrestler “Flyin'” Brian Pillman.
I guess it’s fitting that his death will be overshadowed by someone else as that’s something Brian had to deal with his whole life. He was a small guy, under six foot and 200 pounds in a profession dominated by giants and cursed with a raspy voice from a childhood bout with cancer, Brian had the odds stacked against him ever breaking out as the world’s next Hulk Hogan from an early age.
He was a natural athlete and it lead him to brief stints in the CFL and NFL before starting a career in pro wrestling. I remember first seeing him in the late 1980s when World Championship Wrestling (owned by the Turner Organization) brought him in, threw a pair of cheetah print speedos on him and labeled him “Flyin’ Brian.”
He didn’t set the world on fire. Seriously, how could he? He had the moves but in the time where the gimmick was everything, totally white bread Brian Pillman wasn’t going to “fly” with fans because as talented as he was, they gave him nothing to work with storyline wise to make the crossover from generic guy to wrestling superstar. I remember his first breakout into success came with his tag teaming with Tom Zenk. They were paired as good guy goodie goodies but more often than not they cheated to win their matches. There was an edge there that later helped when he formed a bad guy tag team with “Stunning” Steve Austin (later superstar “Stone Cold” Steve Austin), that didn’t quite set the world on fire but filled his mind with ideas about what he could be in the industry. He got a taste of success, but, as every story goes, he wanted more.
In 1993 I was a college student trying the internet for the first time. I remember trying Prodigy, AOL and CompuServe at the same time and reviving my “Ring Report TV Update” wrestling recap newsletter on the internet. I was the first one to really make the jump to the internet and by the summer of 1993 I had over a thousand weekly subscribers to my online newsletter (which was staggering at the time). A friend of mine had been the volunteer in charge of AOL’s Pro Wrestling area for part of the year and decided to step down. I still remember the e-mail, “Hey Mad Dog, You want to run this thing?” and by replying “Uh, sure?” I started a career online that I’ll probably never recover from.
By 1994, wrestling had exploded with the media again. It was suddenly hot, with tons of new promotions popping up and everyone fighting to integrate online into their business strategies. The online world was filled with a lot of “smarts,” people who knew it was fake and had some understanding of the ins and outs of wrestling, but who could also be exploited by the business to sell tickets. At that time, I wasn’t an official employee of AOL. I was a volunteer who had suddenly been put in charge of one of the fastest growing sports in the old Grandstand Sports Area on AOL. I was responsible for a team of about a dozen volunteers and we were responsible for message boards, chats and a growing file library of images and sound clips.
As wrestlers traveled they discovered that the internet and the then hourly fees sucked. While they could get a free account by just showing up to Prodigy’s Wrestling Area (AOL’s biggest competitor at the time), Prodigy was a DOS based interface and wasn’t easy to set up nor did it have the marketing power AOL did. AOL was Windows and cool back then and when it exploded with the mass-marketing of free AOL discs everywhere and the implementation of the monthly fee to replace the dreaded hourly charges, there was no looking back.
Brian was one of the first wrestlers who contacted me looking for a way to get free AOL. I still remember the phone call, I had gotten an e-mail with someone claiming to be him. I gave the person my telephone number and told them to call me and verify over the phone. When Brian called three minutes later, I knew it was him from “hello” as his childhood bout with cancer had left him with a raspy voice that was impossible to mimic and after about 20 minutes, I knew I had a problem on my hands.
I wasn’t an employee at the time. I had a lot of power as a volunteer manager but not to the level of being able to set policy. While Prodigy could give out free accounts right and left, the Grandstand Sports was not yet a part of AOL and we didn’t have the power to comp without getting something back. My bosses really didn’t care about pro wrestling at the time and didn’t see the name value in bringing talent on board as columnists or regular guests at the weekly chats so the agreement that I hammered out was that I could give accounts to pro wrestlers in exchange for them hosting their own message boards in our area. They wouldn’t be given the powers of a normal volunteer, would have no tools to pull posts, and would only get free AOL for as long as they were active on their boards.
This was a staggering deal for us. Suddenly our message area exploded with a lot of talent from World Championship Wrestling and a surge of new users. Our users loved the fact that you could come to this tiny sports area on AOL and hang out with guys you’d see on TV. While we never had any success with talent chat sessions, the boards did great numbers and really set the pace for establishing our Wrestling area as one of the standouts in all of Sports that year.
Brian saw the success as an opportunity. He wanted more from the business and he realized he could use the internet to try out a new character. At the time he had reverted back to good guy on TV and he really didn’t like the role. He wanted to showcase a character that was in-between good an evil; a “loose cannon” that no one could predict and he wanted to see if it would work before advancing it elsewhere.
The idea was that we’d do the classic “good guy commissioner” and “bad guy talent” angle. I’d be the unflappable authority figure on his message boards while he’d be able to try out his new character by rallying against me in every way he could, without violating AOL’s terms of service.
The message board launched and it took off with his fans. Let’s face it, the internet is filled with people who want to rally against any authority and could identify with “the real” Brian Pillman and things went as expected from the first week on. Brian would post a diatribe about life and how “the man” was keeping him back and even censoring him on AOL and I’d come in as the goofball authority figure who would respond to his messages with the standard canned form letters, eventually losing my cool and giving him and his fans a rallying point against me. It was exactly as we had planned for the first couple of months and was one of the hottest message boards in all of Grandstand Sports.
In hindsight we should have come up with an ending for it because we weren’t prepared for what came next.
I think the letter I got from my boss read something like “what the hell are you doing?” and pretty much made it clear that I was to knock it off or resign. As much of an asset as I was to the area, I hadn’t run any of this past my boss before launching it and he wasn’t happy. I also had not counted on anyone believing it was real. Apparently the complaints had started the first week and it took a while for anyone to catch up with what we were doing. Users wanted to know why I was treating Brian so badly and were using it as a rallying cry against our terms of service and wanted my head on a stake for not giving in to Brian’s demands. Wow. Was not prepared for that. What I had assumed everyone would see as two goofballs having fun with each other turned into a real movement and no one was happy about it.
Brian and I didn’t really get to discuss having one more blow out before the board was ordered to be taken from us. To his fans, waking up to find that it was gone was one more proof that “the man” had tried to shut him down. We had pissed off users and it took a while to calm them down; it also took me a year to get back in the good graces of my boss, but Brian got what he needed. He used the experience to work out the kinks in the character before having it take over his life.
Brian went on to use the character to become one of the hottest acts in the wrestling world over the next couple of years. He appealed to the “smart marks” on the internet and used the power of the character to make his mark on the internet. Before he died in 1997, he became the first and only person in pro wrestling history to get himself fired as part of an on-air storyline, convince the company that he really needed to be fired in real life to put over the angle, then went and signed a contract with the World Wrestling Federation, their biggest competitor, for more money and TV time all the while assuring his former bosses that one day he’d be back and it was all just a goof.
He was always one step ahead of “the man.”
As for me, I learned the power of social media (back before we even knew what it was) that summer. Brian had showed me that people love to rally against authority and when given a chance and a figure to rally around, they’ll do anything for the cause. I learned how to prepare for real life versions of Brian and what to do to handle the situation calmly and without losing users. I also learned to check in with management before you do anything bone headed that may lead to upset users. While I’ve drifted away from wrestling fandom, I’ve learned from those times and have put the experiences to good use in my career in community moderation.
I miss him, I miss those times, and I’ll always remember him setting the wrestling world on fire with his wild ideas and never-ending determination to make his mark on the world.
Rest in Peace, Brian, I hope the years have been good to you.
“Mad Dog” Jim Finch