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In later years, this would be something commonly brought up by those who watched WCW’s collapse; that there was no main boss. There was no “Vince McMahon” who was the final voice, who had veto power, who was the overall leader of the company.
the August 24 Clash of the Champions, headlined by the first-ever free Ric Flair versus Hulk Hogan match on television (they never did a singles TV match in WWF during the early ’90s), did a 6.7 rating and 4.126 million households for the main event, the all-time cable TV viewership record for a professional wrestling match in any company in U.S. history.
Turner, who was already pissed off at McMahon since Vince had been sending him letters for the past year telling him his promotion was an embarrassment to him and he should shut it down, immediately told a supervisor to give Eric one hour of live programming every Monday night on TNT.
Four days after the first-ever head-to-head meeting, WCW fired one of their performers who had been on the DL with a torn triceps. The Hogan clique hadn’t been a big fan of this guy, because he had a high-paying deal that they felt was unjustified; he was a good worker but didn’t have any particular special charisma. His name was Steve Austin.
this was a personal battle between himself and Ted Turner, a billionaire with significantly more assets, which stemmed from the fact that Turner had tried to buy the WWF ten years earlier and had been turned down. While McMahon overstated the issue between the two, largely because by making Turner out to be an evil billionaire trying to take out the mom-and-pop WWF business he painted himself as a sympathetic babyface to his talent, there were some personal issues there, but they more than likely stemmed from a letter McMahon wrote to Turner a few years earlier telling him that his wrestling
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Over the next fifteen years, as Raw became the flagship show in professional wrestling, they never aired a full-length replay out of fear that it would erode the audience.
because you’re invariably going to get a bump due to people tuning in to see whatever show is scheduled to air next, you can inflate your rating with an overrun.
longtime Hogan lackey Ed Leslie, the man of a thousand horrible gimmicks. Fans had last seen him as The Bootyman, a character who shook his ass at the camera to the delight of no one and used the high knee (get it, as in “hiney”?) as his finisher.
During the Giant’s official induction into the group, Scott Hall, acting on a goofball impulse, asked if Andre the Giant was really this Giant’s dad, referring to a pathetic angle a year earlier in which WCW had claimed that as fact. Visibly upset at Hall’s sudden ad-lib, Giant shot Hall a deadly glare and replied, “Don’t go there.”
it was the beginning of a tremendous angle that would set the stage for the most successful PPV in WCW history. Ironically, though, the very first angle they shot in this storyline was such a turn-off for fans that approximately 700,000 people immediately switched channels. The angle began on the September 9, 1996, Nitro.
Arn was so upset he nearly quit the company, not so much because of the content of the skit, but because of the fact that his family watching at home was devastated by it (the skit touched on Arn’s alleged alcoholism, and his reaction to this was made worse by the fact that his mother had died of the disease when he was very young).
Although Bischoff had amassed the greatest array of talent the wrestling world had ever seen, there was one guy he’d been after for years and had been unable to get: Bret Hart. Bischoff had badly wanted to bring Hart in during the summer of 1996; he knew that if he could somehow grab not only Hall and Nash but also Hart, it would truly appear that every top star from the WWF was coming to WCW.
McMahon claimed he could not afford to pay the promised monies to Hart. In fact, Vince had told Bret that the company was in “financial peril.” In Eric’s mind, this translated to “Bret Hart is once again a free agent, and the WWF is dead.”
For months, a very real rivalry had developed between Bret and one of McMahon’s other favorite performers, Shawn Michaels. Michaels, who also had a great deal of power backstage, seemed to take delight in pissing Bret off at every turn. One time, he even went so far as to allege—on air, no less—that Bret was in the midst of an extramarital affair with popular WWF diva Sunny. This infuriated Hart (not to mention his wife), and it led to an infamous backstage fight between the two men that ended with Shawn temporarily quitting after a huge chunk of hair was pulled out of his scalp.
At first, Bret exercised his creative control and refused, stating that he’d rather “blow his brains out” than lose to Shawn. One of his main gripes was that, several weeks earlier, Shawn had told both him and McMahon that he wasn’t going to do any more jobs to anyone else in the promotion, and that included Bret.
Much of Hart’s difficulty had to do with career politicians like Hogan and Nash, who played Bischoff like a fiddle, getting out of doing jobs to protect their spots high atop the card.
There has always been a theory that the wrestling business is cyclical. A superstar or an act takes off and gets incredibly hot for a period of time, then things cool off, and eventually things get really hot again. It seems that no one ever has bothered to stop and ask why;
To the amusement of some hardcore fans, Uncensored at least lived up to its reputation of being the worst PPV WCW presented each year. But the issue that was becoming clear to anyone but those running the company was that, in spite of the sold-out crowds, record-breaking ratings, and amazing buy rates, they were putting on bad show after bad show.
Unfortunately, advance notice was useless in WCW because the shows were often booked literally at the last minute (the term “literally” is not being used facetiously—there were times when the shows were still being written while they were on the air live).
Despite having a full-blown writing staff headed by no less than Stephanie McMahon-Levesque, there have been times recently where Raw was also being written as the show was on the air. Actually, “written” is not correct; the show is generally written several days in advance and then given to Vince McMahon to give it final approval. Often, approval is not given, and rewrites are ordered. And then rewrites of the rewrites are ordered. And then rewrites of those rewrites are ordered. Is it any wonder the average tenure of a new WWE writer is about six weeks?
