Agree with all of the above and I'll elaborate on those, but the fourth one happened once WCW was more or less dead. Nothing was going to save it once it reached that point, nothing whatsoever.
1. A-FREAKING-MEN. WCW came to a screeching halt the second Hogan came through the curtain. For a year and a half Hogan had been scared to death of Sting. He was the one man that Hogan had never faced and he was the one man that Hogan knew could take the title from him at the drop of a hat. If it were up to me, Hogan should have been dragged to the ring like a man being led to the gallows, maybe even having a WCW mob carry him to the ring on their shoulders as he is desperately trying to escape. Instead what happens? Hogan struts down to the ring, using the damn title as a guitar like he's about to face Lash Leroux. Sting's aura was dead in the water.
Now let's get to the match itself. This crowd was so hot it was about to burst into flames. The buildup for this had never been approached before: for a year and a half we had built to this one moment. The final battle between good versus evil, the war to end all wars, and the chance for Sting to finally take the WCW title back where it belongs. The bell rings. The crowd's breath goes in. This is gonna be good.
*five seconds pass*
Hogan is dominating. I was 9 years old and my image of pro wrestling innocence was shattered. Even I knew this was absolutely wrong. What was I watching? Hogan is running through Sting like he's not even there. OH WAIT, HERE COMES STING!!! He's gonna kill Hogan now. He's using..........a headlock? Within two minutes Hogan's style has killed the crowd dead, period. They took a crowd that would have gone apeshit over Hugh Morris vs. Alex Wright and had them begging for a PBS special on the history of Q-tips to end their boredom.
Now let's move onto the finish. Hogan kicks Sting in the head, drops the big leg, and pins him clean. For those of you that haven't heard the history, here was the new plan that for some reason that I'm not sure God himself understands. Nick Patrick, the referee, had been very biased towards the NWO in the recent months. He was supposed to make a fast count, leading to Bret Hart running down and saying he wouldn't let this become Montreal all over again (not in those words but that was the idea). Two things caused this clusterfuck of a plan to fall apart: Patrick counts a relatively normal count, and Hart is there before the bell rings. With Patrick counting normal speed, it looks like Sting just got pinned in a normal match. The announcers don't bring up Patrick's heel tactics, and they touch on it being a fast count. They don't have time because instead of Hart running down to the ring like he was supposed to, he was already there, so he stops the bell from ringing about two seconds after the pin. He says it won't happen again, which makes no sense to non-WWF fans, or to wrestling fans in general. Since he was a referee earlier in the night, he is apparently has refereeing powers all night, so he jumps in as referee. Sting hits the splash, the scorpion, and he gets the title to end the show. Two weeks later, the title is held up vacant, and Sting FINALLY pins Hogan clean in LATE FEBRUARY (this was three days after Christmas) at Superbrawl.
The whole thing just made no sense and everyone saw that it was nothing but a way to get the buyrate for Superbrawl up. Hogan and the NWO should have died then and there. Hogan should have disappeared until about June before coming back in the red and yellow, begging for the fans' forgiveness while Sting slowly accepts the fans again and becomes the surfer or at least a normal looking wrestler. Instead, it's the same things over and over again. All the fans, myself included, had their intelligence insulted. I and many other fans I knew at the time started watching Raw and loved what we were seeing, because it wasn't WCW. I never left.
2. I'm going to go with a tangent of this but say instead the NWO angle as a whole. It was one of if not the greatest ideas of all time: turn Hulk Hogan heel. That's what the initial idea was and it blew anything else at the time away. The ratings and the buyrates are proof taht this was a gold mine. However, WCW never figured out when to say enough was enough. The NWO went on nearly four years, when it should have been lucky to make it to two.
The WCW/NWO name was just stupid, the old school WCW stuff was insulted, and the NWO collapsed under its own weight. Trying to make guys like Stevie Ray and Virgil big time heels was just a terrible idea. There was almost nothing else going on but WCW vs. NWO and it got old. In WWF, while there were mega stories going in the main event, they were seperate from the rest of the show. If you didn't like Austin vs. VInce, there were all kinds of other things to get into. That's what made the Attitude Era so fun for me: you had to see the whole show because you didn't know what little thing you were going to miss.
Also, Norcal is right: there was no need for the factions inside the factions. Hall, Nash and X-Pac were the wolfpack. That's all well and good, but eventually you had people jumping from team to team left and right to the point where you needed a fucking scorecard to tell who was on which side. The heel turns and face turns were just stupid as the roster was way too big. No one cared about half the people on these teams as no one could keep up with them, so we threw up our hands and changed the channel.
3. Better use of the roster. This was a huge one as so many huge names were on WCW at varying times and most of them were gone within a year. The following people worked for WCW at one time or another: Steve Austin, HHH, Undertaker, Mick Foley, AJ Styles, Raven, Edge, Benoit, Jericho, Mysterio, Kane and an army of cruiserweights and midcarders. I know I'm missing a lot, but look at those names. that's eleven world champions. Now I know the main argument here is that Stunning Steve Austin wrestled for WCW and not Stone Cold. Ok, that's very true indeed. However, are you really going to argue that WCW simply couldn't make something out of all those guys? No way I'll ever believe that.
WCW's pecking order was so absurd that no one would ever get a break. In the entire time of WCW's mega run, two guys, DDP and Goldberg, went from midcard to main event, with Goldberg being based off literally the same angle the entire time. I went to a WCW house show one night where Hogan was scheduled to defend the world title against an unadvertised opponent. Apparently, that opponent was to be Chris Benoit, but Hogan backed out at the last minute with an "unspecified" injury. Instead, Randy Savage wrestled Benoit in what was at least a thirty minute classic. Why not that match on Nitro or headlining a PPV? Those two tore the fucking house down and got a standing ovation from the crowd.
Monday night rolled around and Benoit wasn't on the show, while Savage wrestled a two minute match with the NWO running in for a group beatdown. Why not let those young guys break through? There were so many fresh matches in there that I can't count them all. Listen to some of these possibilities and tell me you're not intrigued: Savage vs. Raven, Benoit vs. Nash, Jericho vs. Hogan. Any of those seem interesting to you? They certainly do to me. Instead we got such showdowns as Sting vs. Hogan 9, Nash vs. Giant 3, and Hogan vs. Sting 10. You could literally watch a Nitro from three different years and see the same main event without knowing any time had passed. Just a waste.
4. The Fingerpoke of Doom. This seemed like nothing, but it had so many reprecussions to go along with it. For those of you that don't know the story, Goldberg's world title reign had been ended at Starrcade (WCW's Wrestlemania) by Kevin Nash with the help of Scott Hall. The rematch was scheduled for Nitro. Goldberg, earlier in the night, was arrested for stalking Elizabeth. Instead, we get Hogan vs. Nash for the title, which I don't think had ever happened. The main event starts, they circle each other, and Hogan literally taps Nash in the chest, Nash goes down, Hogan wins the title, again turning heel and reforming the NWO.
Number One: it killed the WCW Title's credibility. Nash now looks like someone that is willing to lay down the title as it's apparently not important enough to fight for. He doesn't want to actually have to face Hogan, so he sides with him instead.
Number Two: it reforms the NWO, which should have been dead for a year at this point. No one wanted to see this come back, yet it did anyway. Goldberg was supposed to do what Sting was supposed to do and go through the NWO one by one and destroy them, but that never happened. Goldberg ran in after the match and got beaten down like so many others had been. Over the next few months, the NWO kept defecting and having all kinds of civil wars that was again, the same thing over and over again.
Number Three: Face loses again. Goldberg's assault at the end of the show was another in the line of faces getting destroyed by the NWO. In wrestling, the face wins in the end. Good triumphs over evil, and the heel retreats to fight another battle while the face stands alone on top of the mountain until he has to face another opponent. In WCW, that time never came, and the few times it tried to come, it never lasted. Goldberg, Luger, Sting etc., all were the face that the fans were begging for but in the end, it was the NWO and the heels winning out. People flat out got sick of it. When you watch any form of entertainment, the good guy is supposed to win in the end. That's just how it works, especially in wrestling. The trials and pain that the face goes through on his way to the victory is what makes it all the sweeter in the end. If the heels never lose, there's no triumphant and defining victory for the faces, and therefore no great warm and fuzzy moment. Goldberg, a mega face, was viewed as just another guy that couldn't save the day, and therefore, the year spent building him up and all the emotional investment the fans had put into him was viewed as a waste of time and efford.
Number Four: False Advertising. All night long the build up had been the main event rematch and blah blah blah. On that same night, Mankind was winning the WWF Title from the Rock on a taped show. WCW, for some reason that God alone knows, mentions this on the air. According to Mick Foley,, when that was mentioned 300,000 homes switched to Raw. That is bad, but the worse part is that after Foley wins the title, a bunch of those people flipped back, meaning they wanted to see WCW's main event as well. So, after they see a great moment and an exciting finish to Raw, they wanted to give WCW a chance to match it. That tells me that the fans cared about WCW still, and wanted to see them succeed or at least have a chance to do so. Had the fans not known what was coming on Raw, the failure of Nitro would have nothing to be compared to, and the Fingerpoke looks far less bad by comparison.
While there are other reasons that I'll save for later, I think the main insult of WCW's deciline was simple: It could have worked. It was a miserable failure, but it could ahve been made to work. the things holding it back are so small but they had such long reaching aftermaths that the whole thing just collapsed. WCW could have been saved so many times but at the end of the day it keeps coming back to one simple problem: they wouldn't change. Time after time things were always the same and people just got sick of seeing it. It's that simple. People got tired of watching the same thing and they wanted something different. Saving WCW was easy: all WCW had to do was listen to the people and use their heads for once and I would be headed to Nitro in 12 days, or at least making sure I taped it.
I'm a big Kidman fan, but even I knew he had no place in Pay per view matches against Hulk Hogan.. even as some "normal old man".
