9 Things I Learned From Watching WCW Greed
1. World Championship Wrestling Was Dead
Okay, so this is obvious in hindsight, but watching Greed back it is difficult to truly believe that anyone felt World Championship Wrestling was going to survive. The company was in absolute financial purgatory, and the show that it put on here mirrored the atmosphere in WCW it would seem.
Creatively the company was spent, and Greed was a procession of disinterested guys putting on matches in front of an energetic but largely soulless crowd, reacting to everything as opposed to reacting to that which warranted a reaction. You had talented performers stuck in a rut, and stories that had long stopped making sense.
The show ended with what was portrayed as three main events, but in actual fact were three wastes of time. Booker T defeated Rick Steiner for the US Championship, despite Rick doing everything he could to make the match unwatchable by not selling a damn thing. Dusty and Dustin Rhodes beat Jeff Jarrett and Ric Flair in some kind of 'Kiss My Butt' match, a match where Dusty was the highlight. In 2001, that simply should not have been the case. To give you an idea of how good this was, Flair wrestled in a Hawaiian shirt.
The main event proper saw Scott Steiner retain his WCW World Heavyweight Championship against Diamond Dallas Page, the last acceptable babyface in front of him. Steiner had been built well, but this was still a mess. Two men who had been with the company, headlining a PPV that had plenty of young talent on it, it was just too late for them to make a difference.
World Championship Wrestling was dead, and by this point it was basically a corpse that somehow managed to continue walking, the headless chicken so to speak. Eight days after this show ended, Vince McMahon turned up on Nitro. The rest is history.