World Championship Wrestling will always be remembered as the promotion that managed to humble the McMahon juggernaut and rule for two years straight over professional wrestling. The revolution started back in July 7, 1996, when ‘The Outsiders” Kevin Nash and Scott Hall teamed up with the legendary Hulk Hogan to defeat Randy Savage, Sting and Lex Luger. The creation of the New World Order had set the wrestling fandom ablaze. Why had Hulk Hogan, one of the greatest wrestlers of the generation turned heel? The answers to that would be found on Monday Night Nitro, in what would later be called the beginning of the Monday Night Wars.
For the next four years, World Championship Wrestling was the greatest promotion in the United States, beating out both the World Wide Wrestling Federation and Extreme Championship Wrestling (both of the “Big Three”
, and rapidly grew from a second-rate promotion to one with a large cult-like following. However, with a growing and aspiring fandom, came the defeats that would help end the promotion. WCW was a hotbed for talented veterans who had already had amazing runs in the WWF, and many of whom had creative control placed into their contract as an incentive, people like Hulk Hogan, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall and many, many more. This caused a top-heavy tier of heavyweights who refused to put over new wrestlers from the mid-card, and begin to grow stale as the WCW increasingly relied on the NWO to counter the WWF’s numerous angles and storylines based around new wrestlers such as Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, Eddy Guerrero, and Chris Jericho, were swept away from WCW due to serious frustration with the booking committee and their tendency to promote veteran wrestlers. Equally frustrating were the various creative control contracts held by those same veteran wrestlers, preventing younger promising wrestlers from rising through the ranks.
It was a long road for Eric Bischoff, instigator of the Monday Night Wars and the creator of NWO storyline, more so with the still climbing Attitude Era and the success of the ECW as the third big promotion. As the company drew more and more inward into its home of Atlanta, Georgia, the young talent left in large numbers due to the top talent refusing to put them over, and money became thin, very thin. In desperation, the executives of AOL Time Warner brought in Vince Russo, the self-proclaimed genius behind the Attitude Era that was shaming the WCW in the ratings.
What followed were nonsensical storylines, wasted title shots and often rapid face heel and heel face turns. Rapidly falling even further in the ratings, the executives ultimately added on Eric Bischoff in order to create a balance of the ideas the two men had in the hopes that the combined team could turn things around. They were wrong, and the WCW fell into such dire straits with an annual loss of $ 60 million in its final full year, allowing the WWF to pick it up for less than $ 2.5 million in 2001, a pittance compared to its worth not three years earlier.
But the reality that once was can always be changed; can’t it? Let’s head back to the year 2000, and the month of January, when AOL Time Warner executives and Ted Turner especially would convene and agree after a lengthy series of arguments that due to the expenses incurred by the the Vince Russo regime, the various issues caused by Kevin Sullivan, that they would hire an outside investor who would reform the show and rebuild the franchise. There was no question of closing down their wrestling shows, simply because they remained among the highest rated shows AOL Time Warner had. Despite an offer made from Bischoff to return to the promotion and promises made by Kevin Sullivan, the promotion was given to an outsider, someone who was untainted by the backstage political bullshit that had been existent since Bischoff brought on so many WWF wrestlers. While they found few people of that caliber willing to turn around a failing promotion, they did in the end find one person interested in becoming the new man in charge of the promotion, receiving control of the entire company a few days after Souled Out, when predecessor Bill Busch released Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, Perry Saturn and Eddy Guerrero. So when the new President arrived, he immediately released Kevin Sullivan for his part in the removal of the four promising midcard wrestlers. Now with a new handler to run WCW, and the problems of the WCW being slowly ironed out despite the loss of several mid-card draws, the WCW hopefully stands to live much longer than March 2001. But the question is, how long can this new ownership keep the WCW going, with the WWF circling them like sharks in the water, loss of several main event wrestlers and wide-spread dissatisfaction in the locker room?
I guess you’ll just have to read to find out…
