Kevin Nash dropped a piece of WCW backstage history on episode 200 of Kliq This that he said he’d never seen reported anywhere: during a brief executive era in 1992, WCW paid wrestlers a 10 percent bonus on their salary if they passed a drug test.
The conversation started with Sean Oliver pitching a documentary idea about wrestling’s drug-testing history, and the question of whether WCW tested at all during Nash’s main run there. Nash said no, but offered the earlier era as the wrinkle.
“There was no piss test,” Nash said about his nWo era WCW run. “But there was a piss test at WCW when I broke in.”
“Really, and then it disappeared?” Oliver asked.
“No, it just was random. And then it became a situation where, I think Kip Frey was in charge, and you got, like, if you pass the piss test, you got, like, a 10 percent bonus or something like that,” Nash said.
Oliver said he’d never heard the bonus story before. Nash worked the math out loud.
“So if you were making, you know, $156,000 a year, you got 15 grand to be clean,” Nash said. “So I didn’t take much.”
The Frey era at WCW ran roughly from January to May 1992, when Turner attorney K. Allen “Kip” Frey served as Executive Vice President. Frey is best remembered for instituting workrate bonuses where wrestlers got cash for the best match on a card. Bill Watts replaced Frey in May 1992.
Nash spent his first WCW run from 1990 to 1993 working under various gimmicks like Oz and Vinnie Vegas before leaving for WWE and becoming Diesel. He returned to WCW in May 1996 alongside Scott Hall, and that is the run he was referring to when he said there was no drug testing in his nWo years.
The conversation pivoted to how WWE handled testing in his Diesel era. Nash described how the company’s testing schedule had a clear pattern: Hershey, Pennsylvania.
“We do Philly in the morning, not morning, but, you know, like one o’clock show,” Nash said about the typical Pennsylvania doubleheader weekend. “Then we do Hershey that night. And during the piss test, Hershey was always like, that was, they always pissed us in Hershey.”
Oliver asked why.
“Because it was a double shot. So if they didn’t get you that day, they figured, you know, they’ll smoke on the way to Hershey,” Nash said. “Like, no, we won’t.”
After the 1991 Dr. George Zahorian steroid trial that pulled Hulk Hogan and Vince McMahon into the spotlight, WWF announced a comprehensive drug-testing program in 1992 and ran random tests over the next four years. McMahon dropped random drug testing in 1996. Nash’s nWo run that started in May 1996 lined up with the end of WWF’s testing program. The Wellness Policy that brought regular drug testing back to WWE was instituted in 2006 following Eddie Guerrero’s death.
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