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I was 13 in the summer of 1984.
Michael Jordan was 21.
This wasnt a pop-in visit either.
Jordan spent weeks in Bloomington at the behest of the teams dictatorial coach, Bob Knight.
Jordan was no longer a college kid.
With great ambivalence, he had just renounced his senior year at North Carolina to turn pro.
Marooned in the sleepy midwestern college town, Jordan cut a restless figure, projecting no air of celebrity.
By the end of the summer, Jordan was somewhere else entirely.
This was the season that cable television roared into American homes.
As the book excerpt below illustrates, it was also a perfect distillation of that pivotal season.
Shes in her early 20s, a singer chasing stardom.
Hes in his early 50s and looking for a final act.
Her style of dress might be described as thrift-shop chic.
She wears her heavily teased hair and eyelashes in assorted colors of the rainbow.
He verges on obese.
He speaks in a New York accent as well his a thick baritone.
Neither recognizes the other.
But as they talk, they realize they like each other, that their commonalities outstrip their differences.
They are both extroverts the kind of people who talk to their seatmates on flights.
They are both from the New York area.
Both are in show business.
Both are working in industries buffeted by change.
Together they will help form an unlikely alliance, enter new arenas, and help each others careers.
She is Cyndi Lauper, a singer in search of a big break.
Growing up, she paid a price for her weirdness, her otherness.
He then joined the Army, but aggravated a football injury and was honorably discharged.
When that didnt work, Albano transitioned to professional wrestling.
He did, however, master the performative part of the job.
He looked the part and dressed the part and acted the part.
He also relished playing a heel, a wrestling villain.
The Sicilians appeared onThe Jackie Gleason Showand wrestled for various promotions.
When they broke up, Albano transitioned into becoming a manager.
But by the early 80s, pro wrestling was an industry in transition.
One might liken this to college sports conferences without the NCAA to unify all of them.
Boundaries were inexact, but each promotion had its own roster of stars.
Like wrestlers ricocheting off the turnbuckle, the spandex-clad band would bounce from one testosterone-soaked arena to another.
Each promotion would make its own television deals usually with local stations at strange hours.
Hulk Hogan worked primarily for the AWA, the American Wrestling Association, in Minnesota.
Ric Flair (d.b.a.
Nature Boy) wrestled mostly for the National Wrestling Alliance.
The WWWF was the main promotion for the Northeast.
The head of the organization, Vincent J. McMahon, was not a ruthless businessman.
He was known to share gate receipts with his wrestlers.
He openly told the media that wrestling was fake.
Vinnies vision and his disposition were nothing like his fathers.
Then in his late 30s, Vinnie had ambitions that went beyond the Northeast.
He put forth an acquisition strategy.
He shortened the name of the promotion to World Wrestling Federation, the WWF, making his ambitions clear.
One television deal would knit it all together.
If I hadnt bought out my dad, there would still be 30 of them, fragmented and struggling.
McMahon began to negotiate putting the WWF on nationwide cable.
Suddenly viewers throughout the country were able to watch McMahons product.
And the top wrestlers, predictably, followed.
Promoters disparaged McMahon behind his back.
They hated McMahon for violating a code.
For disrupting their business.
But apart from idle threats, he faced remarkably little resistance.
The second meeting, they couldnt even agree on ordering lunch.
McMahon had already taken over the Sunday-morning time slot on the USA web connection.
McMahon approached Turner with an offer to buy the Saturday-night slot.
McMahon found enough willing sellers, and soon the WWF had a controlling stake in the Georgia promotion.
The loyalists hated it.
They hated that McMahon had made an end-run around Ted Turner and gotten his promotion on cable.
They hated the WWF style of wrestling as well as the cartoonish characters.
They hated McMahon and his preening.
Callers flooded the TBS switchboards to complain.
Ratings ofWorld Championship Wrestlingbegan to tank.
Eventually McMahon would end up selling the slot.
But, at the time, Black Saturday was still a sign of Vince McMahons ambitions.
And like wrestlers in compromised positions, the competition appeared helpless to escape and survive the WWF stranglehold.
If professional wrestling was being buffeted by change and shifts in media, so was pop music.
The industry had been in a slump in the early 1980s.
Music Television, soon shorthanded MTV, was predicated on a new art form: the music video.
A new concept is born, the best of TV combined with the best of radio!
The video delivered another sensory experience that could enhance the listening.
As the Associated Press put it, the video was a capitulation to peach-fuzzy viewers.
Notorious for their bite-sized attention span.
The artists (and their labels) would have to foot the bill to produce the videos.
They would then deliver the video to MTV.
The networks roster of veejays would air these videos, interspersed with commercials.
The artist would receive no revenue.
But what they received in exchange for donating these song-movies had value: marketing and promotion.
It was a clever meta joke; but it was also a bit of prescience.
Why listen to the radio when you couldseethe artist perform the song you were hearing?
Soon, the video became as essential to an artists success as radio play.
Not all artists embraced this new medium.
Some simply provided live concert footage as their video.
Though this, too, could be effective.
Other artists were thrilled by a new opportunity to express their creativity.
Often at great expense, artists would experiment with concept and hire Hollywood directors.
(EvenDancing in the Darkwas directed by Brian DePalma.)
And, then, Cyndi Lauper, too.
By the summer of 1983, Laupers career had gained traction.
She had broken with her band, Blue Angel, and had been forced to file for bankruptcy.
As a solo artist, she had a new manager, David Wolff, who became her boyfriend.
For her album titled, appropriately,Shes So Unusual she hired Annie Leibovitz to shoot the cover image.
Lauper and Wolff storyboarded the video.
Laupers mother, Catrine, would portray herself.
But with the Laupers divorced, who would play Laupers father?
Wolff had an inspired idea.
A fan of professional wrestling, Wolff figured the video could use a cartoonishly over-the-top figure.
One wrestler, in particular, came to mind.
Theres this guy, Lou Albano
Lauper nearly did a spit take.
I know Captain Lou!
she squealed, recalling the nice man shed sat alongside on the flight from Puerto Rico.
We swapped numbers when we were on a plane together.
Albano, too, had fond recollections of that flight from Puerto Rico.
He was happy to appear in the video.
But there was a hitch.
it’s crucial that you ask permission from my boss, Vince McMahon.
Unlike his father, McMahonwantedhis wrestlers branching out into pop culture.
And there was no faster way to do that than to get on television.
You got him, McMahon responded.
(Michael Jacksons Thrillervideo was made around the same time for $800,000.)
Lauper and her team wrangled friends to waive their fees and called in favors.
Wolff appears in the video.
So does Laupers brother, Butch.
Laupers attorney, Elliot Hoffman, did a turn as, well, a dancing lawyer.
Hoffman had another client, Lorne Michaels, then nearly a decade into his run overseeingSaturday Night Live.
Michaels generously agreed to provide state-of-the-art digital editing equipment at no charge.
Scene-stealing Albano, dressed in a white undershirt, his elaborate curls bouncing, scolds Lauper for her insolence.
She accepts his criticism at first.
My father yells what you gonna do with your life
Oh daddy dear you know youre still No.
1
But girls, they wanna have fun
But she then rotates and foreshadowing!
with the skill of a professional wrestler, manipulates his wrist and pins him against the wall.
He surrenders and retreats, a defeated man.
Girls Just Want to Have Fun was released in the fall of 1983.
It received little fanfare.
I hate to tell you this, DiLeo said, but Girls Just Want to Have Funis a stiff.
Were closing this single down, and were going to release the next single.
Dont bail on it yet!
Fine, said DiLeo.
Ill give you and Cyndi two more weeks to figure out how to turn this around.
Were on KIIS-FM, she shrieked.
Epic placed the single in the rotation of KIIS-FM, Los Angeless biggest Top 40 station.
Two weeks later, every pop station in the country was playing Girls Just Want to Have Fun.
In the spring of 1984, it reached No.
2 on the charts topped only by Van Halens Jump.
And the video may have been an even bigger hit, playing on heavy rotation throughout 1984.
Lauper won the MTV Best Female Video Award for 1984.
As Laupers career blossomed, so did her friendship with Albano.
They would speak on the phone and meet socially in Manhattan.
Lauper and Wolff would drive to the suburbs and spend the day with Lou and his wife, Geraldine.
Recognizing opportunity, Wolff wanted to keep the cross-promotion going.
McMahon, happy for any and all crossover promotion, listened intently.
Accounts of what follow vary.
But well stick with Wolffs.
And Lauper, of course, would figure prominently.
When Lauper, for instance, went on Johnny CarsonsThe Tonight Show, she would mention pro wrestling.
I love it, said McMahon.
And MTV would broadcast the event live.
MTV had little to lose.
Hype and promotion are essential components of pro wrestling, as they are of pop music.
They even had a basic plotline that pivoted on feminism womens lib, Lauper insisted on calling it.
This wasnt just a battle for wrestling supremacy; it would be a battle over ideology.
The premise was ridiculous, even by wrestling standards.
But it fed the hype machine before the big show.
This was Vince McMahons vision unfolding in real time.
The mainstream music fans, meanwhile, didnt always know that pro wrestling was scripted theater.
Mary Lillian Ellison (a.k.a.
Her challenger was far younger and more obscure, Wendi Richter from Dallas, managed by Lauper.
Soon, he came to like wrestling more than office work.
Meanwhile, Dave Wolff conflicts of interests be damned worked the television broadcast as well.
The night began as a conventional wrestling card.
Still best known to the mainstream for hisRocky IIIcameo, Hogan emerged to the strains ofEye of the Tiger.
He wore red, white, and blue, not his trademark red and yellow.
Though he was only 30 years old, his hairline was already in a state of retreat.
Curiously, as the ring announcer intoned, Weighing three-hundred-and-two pounds, graphics listed him at 235.
Discerning fans may also have noticed that the wrestlers were nervous.
They knew that this was a new audience and, potentially, a significant cultural moment.
Discerning fans also noticed something else.
The wrestlers were playing for the television cameras.
Television had long been an essential part of wrestling.
Wrestlers barely thought about the cameras.
And why should they have?
Weeks later, a broadcast often edited to conceal any screwups would air on some regional data pipe.
Now, the setup was completely different.
MTV brought an array of cameras to the broadcast.
It was the millions at home.
Video, you might say, killed the wrestling star.
The main event was pro wrestling at its most over-the-top.
Captain Lou emerged saliva spraying and selling the match as only he could.
This woman can never be defeated!
Often imitated, never duplicated …
This woman has had the belt for what is it?
Moolah, who had turned 61 years old the day before, gently corrected him.
Richter then emerged to predictable walkout music: Girls Just Want to Have Fun.
She was trailed by Lauper, wearing sunglasses and dressed outrageously as ever.
Richters face was caked with inexpertly applied makeup.
The match itself was not a technical masterpiece.
Moolah got the action started, executing an arm drag that Richter strenuously sold to the crowd.
Moolah choked Wendi directly in front of Lauper.
Wendi writhed free somehow, head-butted Moolah, and applied a half-nelson.
The crowd urged Lauper to take a few shots at the hated champion.
Lauper smiled, but declined.
Then it was Moolahs turn.
Somehow she managed to apply a full nelson to Richter, all the while pulling her hair.
Captain Lou then climbed onto the ring apron.
Moolah, though, had mounted Wendi and appeared to pin her opponent.
All this hype and the villainous Moolah wins?
And then he quickly declared Wendi the champion.
Moolah kicked the referee to the ground.
yelled Mean Gene Okerlund.
Even given the low standards of professional wrestling, this was a ridiculous sequence.
But it was also undeniably entertaining.
The anecdotal evidence was soon supported by the data.
MTV scored a phenomenal 9.0 rating, making it themost watched program in the history of the web connection.
After the show, Lauper and Wolff repaired to the apartment they were sharing in lower Manhattan.
Still wired and unable to sleep, Wolff arranged a conference call with Albano.
And they spent the next hour replaying the night and sharing their excitement.
Predictably, The Brawl to End It All did nothing of the sort.
The ratings success of The Brawl to End It All caught the eye of more networks.
McMahon had effectively choked off the competition.
He had gained scale by taking his product mainstream.
And was on his way to becoming a billionaire.
The other big winner was Hulk Hogan.
There could be no better example of the WWFs crossover strategy.
Rock n Wrestling is not a dream, Hogan said.
Its the way we live.
This one was titled The War to Settle the Score, and it drew a sell-out crowd of 22,000.
Lauper again played a prominent role, managing two wrestlers this time.
Bob Costas called the action for the main event, which featured Hulk Hogan against Rowdy Roddy Piper.
With Lauper in his corner, Hogan defeated Piper by disqualification.
In the obligatory brawl afterward, Lauper was kicked in the head by Piper.
While Gene Okerlund attempted to broker peace, Andy Warhol walked into the frame.
Warhol, a closet pro-wrestling fan, had been in attendance.
Okerlund grabbed Warhol for an impromptu interview.
A year earlier, Warhol would have required a lengthy introduction to the wrestling fan base.
Now he was just another celebrity in the stands.
Your impressions of the Rock n Wrestling connection?
Its the most exciting thing Ive ever seen in my whole life, Warhol said flatly.
Not everyone was as fond of Rock n Wrestling.
To the pro-wrestling tribalists, this was viewed as the ultimate commercial sellout.
A Los AngelesTimesarticle was headlined, Wrestling Has Gone Hollywood and Its Ruining the Sport.
But that was a minority view.
Professional wrestling was now squarely in the mainstream.
It was regular cable-television fare.
McMahon had, as planned, effectively clotheslined the competition and established a monopoly for the WWF.
This one wouldnt air on MTV but on closed circuit television.
In keeping with McMahons philosophy, mainstream stars figured prominently.
Muhammad Ali was a referee.
Billy Martin, then the New York Yankees manager, was a ring announcer.
Liberace, naturally, was the timekeeper.
Of course, the two unlikely mascots of this era were there too.
Captain Lou Albano managed the tag team, the U.S. Express.
(Richter was paid $5,000, while comparable male wrestlers allegedly made up to $100,000.
She protested and was essentially drummed out of wrestling.)
In the main event, Hulk Hogan and Mr. T defeated Paul Orndorff and Roddy Piper.
WrestleMania,they would call it.
The Roman numerals would come later.
Jon Wertheim is anauthor, a correspondent for60 Minutes, and a senior writer forSports Illustrated.
