The Death of WCW

by R.D. Reynolds

To be fair, it should be noted that too much emphasis was placed (and still is at times) on the chronological age of the wrestlers. The real problem was not their actual age, but their “TV age,” or how many times they’d been in a prominent spot on television over the course of a year. For example, in early 2000, with only a few exceptions, all the top stars in the WWF were under thirty-five. Just three years later, though, the newly dubbed WWE was experiencing the same problems WCW had in 1999: the top stars had become stale. It wasn’t as if the top stars went from age twenty-nine to forty-nine in the span of three years, though. They were only three years older, but because WWE was putting on four hours of television every single week, the main-eventers had appeared in approximately 300 main events, and in “TV years” they had become just as old and stale as the forty-five-year-olds who were killing WCW’s business in 1999. Not only that, but in 1997, WCW’s top stars were in their forties, and the company was killing the WWF business-wise. If it was all about age, that shouldn’t have happened since the main WWF stars were years, and sometimes decades, younger. Instead of arguing about “old guys versus young guys” or the need to “elevate young wrestlers,” the argument should be about “fresh versus stale” and the need to elevate new faces—regardless of their actual age—to the top of the cards.

USA? Barry Diller, head of the network that hosted WWF programming for eighteen years, said of the WWF’s tenure, “[An] audience of twelve-to-nineteen-year-old pimply faced, mean-spirited males came, watched, and went on to whatever God-awful other pursuits.”