The Monday Night Wars era was certainly an exciting time to be a wrestling fan as WWE and WCW gave fans plenty to talk about. Flipping back and forth between Nitro and Raw kept fans busy, but eventually WWE won the war and purchased World Championship Wrestling.
Booker T was one of the top stars in WCW at the time the company was purchased, and it sounds like he was set to make a good amount of money from his deal with the company. During a recent episode of his Hall of Fame podcast Booker T talked about his contract status with WCW and he explained that he was set to make $1.3 million from his deal.
“I had an agent in WCW. In the beginning, he handled all of my contracts until I went singles. I handled my biggest contract, I negotiated my biggest contract. it was well above all the money that my agent had ever negotiated for me, sometimes twice as much, maybe three times. The way I did it was, I remember being asked how much was it going to take to keep me in WCW. I go, ‘How much am I worth?’ They came back with a number well above what I was thinking of. ‘You’re kidding me, right?’ I was like, Wow, they think of me that much. I can tell it, it was $750,000. My next contract, it was $1.3 million. If the company wouldn’t have folded, my next contract was $1.3 million. It was a great time back then, Eric Bischoff was making us all rich. He said he was going to do that. He said, ‘Book, I’m going to make you rich.’ His goal was to make all wrestlers to be paid like NFL players. I give him a lot of credit for that.”
Things obviously didn’t work out for Booker T’s deal with WCW, but he did go on to become a top star in WWE as well, and he still works for the company to this very day, so it’s safe to say that things turned out alright for the former WCW World Champion.
H/T Fightful
