One Moment WWE Wants You To Forget From Every Year (1985 to 2026)
39. 1988 - Ted Turner Makes A Call
By 1988, Vince McMahon's concentrated assault on the territorial set-up of professional wrestling in North America had worked so well that he was in touching distance of the mainstream monopoly he'd long craved. WrestleMania IV had taken a bit of a beating at the hands of the inaugural Clash Of The Champions when, in response to Survivor Series 1987 counter-programming Starrcade on pay-per-view, JCP fought back with a television special, but the writing had been on the wall too long for Jim Crockett to wash it off.
Ted Turner was never going to cancel wrestling on his Network, but after the prior disaster of attempting to work alongside Vince McMahon with the events of "Black Saturday" years earlier, his answer to revive ailing fortunes wasn't going to be to sell out to the opposition. Quite the opposite - he bought all the way in, purchasing the promotion from Crockett ahead of an aggressive rebrand to "World Championship Wrestling". Per every talking head ever, he called Vince to say he was in "the rasslin' business" and the WWE gaffer wasn't bothered at all nope not worried not stressed in the slightest.
Hilariously, even at the televised height of the Monday Night Wars with both McMahon and Eric Bischoff cast as authoritarian television characters on a weekly basis, the Chairman never gave 'Easy E' the oxygen as a power player. This was "Ted Turner's wrestling organisation", and the billionaire's joviality all those years earlier stuck with McMahon until he finally got his way with the WCW purchase in 2001.