41 Most Disgusting Promotional Tactics In Wrestling History RANKED
30. 1995 - Gene Okerlund’s 900 Hotline Adverts
Pre-internet, it was a lot easier to monetise scoops.
If you grew up as a millennial, you’ll recall an unrecognisable world. With no 24/7 access to information, and most every publication on the newsstands maintaining kayfabe, pro wrestling was a mysterious and confounding hobby to track. The roster turnover in the WWF was wild in the early-to-mid 1990s. Just as soon as you’d successfully petitioned your parents to buy you a Hasbro figure - probably by being so insufferable that they did it purely to shut your yap - you’d never see that wrestler on Superstars again. Where did they go?
Your naive preteen mind wasn’t aware of drugs, suspensions, monetary disputes. You simply had no idea. This is where the hotline - a pay-by-the-minute service - came in.
Utterly irrelevant now, hotlines were a fairly lucrative money-spinner then. The appeal was thrillingly illicit. You were promised information so top secret and alluring that you had to pay for it - and the obsessive quest for answers, the cruel anticipation, was ramped up because you had to beg your parents to let you do it. These things were not cheap, and funnily enough, the revelations you sought were only provided after several expensive minutes of waffle.
WCW launched their own hotline, and it was a fairly rotten practice in and of itself. You weren’t getting actual scoops here, nothing that would provide real insight into the state of the company. Gene Okerlund was hardly going to tell you that Hogan was an egomaniac narcissist with creative control who was rapidly undermining the promotion from within.
What Okerlund did tease telling you was that Ric Flair had died. On TV, Okerlund informed the audience that a 45 year-old former Heavyweight champion had passed away. Phone the hotline to find out who!
The age of a public figure is often cited when they die, not their identity, so that there’s sufficient time to first notify the family. WCW knew exactly what they were doing here when later announcing the death of former AWA World Tag Team champion Jerry Blackwell.