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Authors: Shaun Assael
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show. As 1974 began, his new partners were delighted; Ann was on the ropes. But Barnett had to be careful about coming on too strong. As Al Rogowski, who wrestled under the name Ole Anderson, remembers it, “Ann was connected with the mob, or at least she was rumored to know guys in it. One day in ‘74, she had one of them fly into Atlanta. A lot of us saw him, but we weren’t sure, you know? Was this guy for real, or was Ann just being Ann? When he flew back to Chicago we all figured it was bullshit. Then, a few months later, I see a photo in the paper. It’s this guy, and he was found in the trunk of a car parked at O’Hare Airport with something like twenty-two bullet holes in him.”
Instead of testing Ann’s connections further, Barnett approached Turner and asked him to float the idea of accepting a buyout past Ann. To his relief, Turner returned with the news that Ann was willing to make a deal. In the spring of 1974, she accepted $200,000, giving Barnett’s Georgia Championship Wrestling control of the now-united territory, a two-hour block of time on Channel 17 on Saturday night.
By then, Turner had started to follow the progress of an upstart cable station based in New York called Home Box Office, which wanted to use a single, stationary satellite moored high above the earth to blanket the country with movies. Turner was fascinated by the idea and asked his aides how much it would cost for him to get such a satellite. Their answer was a million dollars.
Turner was already in his second year of owning the broadcast rights to the Atlanta Braves baseball team, which had increased his audience for Channel 17 so much that it now covered a forty-mile radius, making it the largest UHF station in the country. He’d also managed to syndicate the games across Georgia, the Carolinas, Alabama, and Florida. But even after Hank Aaron hit his milestone 715th home run in 1974, the Braves were still a tepid franchise. In 1975, when they traded Aaron to Milwaukee, they were in last place in the National League West. Fearing that the team’s management was going to drive away his viewers, Turner decided to buy the club himself. He figured that if he could use some of his canny marketing skills to make the team more successful, he could use the new satellite technology to beam their games from coast to coast. A million dollars would be a small price to pay for a satellite if it gave him a team with a true coast-to-coast following. So Turner paid it, and on December 17, 1976, WTCG went up on a satellite called Satcom 1 while, down below, operators at Channel 17 answered their phones with the catchphrase “The superstation that serves the nation, good morning.” Turner’s Superstation had situation comedies, movies, and a sports lineup that featured the Braves and two hours of Saturday evening wrestling.
It was an arrangement that served everyone well over the next half-dozen years. With the exposure that the Superstation offered, Barnett was able to build a traveling circus that descended once a week on small, culturally starved Georgia towns like Carrolton, Griffin, Athens, and Columbus. Among his stars were Rogowski and Jack Brisco, a curly-haired babyface from Blackwell, Oklahoma, who looked like Joe Namath.
Rogowski and Brisco never liked one another. In fact, Brisco tells the story that one evening in Columbus, Georgia, he wasn’t feeling well and asked Rogowski to go easy on him. “I told him don’t fuck with me, I’m sick as a dog. Right away, he comes at me punching my guts, trying to make me puke. I swear, I wanted to kill him.”
The men were even greater rivals out of the ring than in it. Jack and his brother Gerald owned 25 percent of the Georgia troupe, and Rogowski had just 10 percent. But Barnett relied on Rogowski enough to make him its president. Over time, the Briscos began to feel that by paying himself a handsome six-figure salary, Rogowski was cutting into their share of the partnership profits.
Instead of testing Ann’s connections further, Barnett approached Turner and asked him to float the idea of accepting a buyout past Ann. To his relief, Turner returned with the news that Ann was willing to make a deal. In the spring of 1974, she accepted $200,000, giving Barnett’s Georgia Championship Wrestling control of the now-united territory, a two-hour block of time on Channel 17 on Saturday night.
By then, Turner had started to follow the progress of an upstart cable station based in New York called Home Box Office, which wanted to use a single, stationary satellite moored high above the earth to blanket the country with movies. Turner was fascinated by the idea and asked his aides how much it would cost for him to get such a satellite. Their answer was a million dollars.
Turner was already in his second year of owning the broadcast rights to the Atlanta Braves baseball team, which had increased his audience for Channel 17 so much that it now covered a forty-mile radius, making it the largest UHF station in the country. He’d also managed to syndicate the games across Georgia, the Carolinas, Alabama, and Florida. But even after Hank Aaron hit his milestone 715th home run in 1974, the Braves were still a tepid franchise. In 1975, when they traded Aaron to Milwaukee, they were in last place in the National League West. Fearing that the team’s management was going to drive away his viewers, Turner decided to buy the club himself. He figured that if he could use some of his canny marketing skills to make the team more successful, he could use the new satellite technology to beam their games from coast to coast. A million dollars would be a small price to pay for a satellite if it gave him a team with a true coast-to-coast following. So Turner paid it, and on December 17, 1976, WTCG went up on a satellite called Satcom 1 while, down below, operators at Channel 17 answered their phones with the catchphrase “The superstation that serves the nation, good morning.” Turner’s Superstation had situation comedies, movies, and a sports lineup that featured the Braves and two hours of Saturday evening wrestling.
It was an arrangement that served everyone well over the next half-dozen years. With the exposure that the Superstation offered, Barnett was able to build a traveling circus that descended once a week on small, culturally starved Georgia towns like Carrolton, Griffin, Athens, and Columbus. Among his stars were Rogowski and Jack Brisco, a curly-haired babyface from Blackwell, Oklahoma, who looked like Joe Namath.
Rogowski and Brisco never liked one another. In fact, Brisco tells the story that one evening in Columbus, Georgia, he wasn’t feeling well and asked Rogowski to go easy on him. “I told him don’t fuck with me, I’m sick as a dog. Right away, he comes at me punching my guts, trying to make me puke. I swear, I wanted to kill him.”
The men were even greater rivals out of the ring than in it. Jack and his brother Gerald owned 25 percent of the Georgia troupe, and Rogowski had just 10 percent. But Barnett relied on Rogowski enough to make him its president. Over time, the Briscos began to feel that by paying himself a handsome six-figure salary, Rogowski was cutting into their share of the partnership profits.
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