The 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 promotion that truly changed wrestling forever. 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 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. WCW was a hotbed for talented veterans who had already had amazing runs in the WWEF, and many of whom had creative control placed into their contract, 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, 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.
It was a long road for Eric Bischoff, creator of the Monday Night Wars and the NWO storyline, despite the loud uproar ECW had originally had. As the company drew more and more inward into its home of Atlanta, Georgia, the young talent left in large numbers, 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 in the ratings, the executives 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 straights with an annual loss of $ 60 million, allowing the WWF to pick it up for less than $ 2.5 million in 2001, a pittance compared to its worth not two years earlier.
But the reality that once was can always be changed, can it not? Let’s head back to the year 2000, and the month of March, when the AOL Time Warner executives were fretting over what to do with Vince Russo’s booking style. More than tempted to sell the franchise to an interested party, the executives and Ted Turner especially would convene and agree after a lengthy argument to sell the promotion, which would remain on TNT and TBS for the near future while the buyer found a new network to hold the promotion. Now with a new handler to run WCW, and the problems of the WCW being slowly ironed out, the WCW hopefully stands to live much longer than 2001. But the question is, how long can this buyer keep the WCW going, with the WWF circling them like sharks in the water?
I guess you’ll just have to read to find out…