11 Misconceptions About WWE You Probably Believe
A lie can travel half way around the WWE Universe while the truth is putting on its shoes
By it's very nature, professional wrestling is one of the easiest industries for misconceptions, half-truths and outright lies to grow into something resembling a fact. As a generation if fans were reminded multiple times a week on WWE broadcasts, "the hazards are real", but beyond the terrifying risks the wrestlers take with their bodies, very little else is.
Kevin Nash astutely/infamously offered the take that the "money and the miles" were the only realities in wrestling, and it's not a bad way to see things. Cash - proper cash, a wage, something to allow you to thrive rather than merely survive - goes some way to to easing the very real pain of the profession. The miles are, per most performers, comfortably the hardest part of the game. Constant travel might look glamorous to the desk jockeys and service workers amongst us, but the endless commute and majority of a life lived moving from one destination to the next takes just as much a toll as the bumps by the end.
Those, for better and worse, are the hard truths. Everything else in an industry where even the hardest punches are worked? Constantly up for grabs, and up for debate...
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11. The Failure Of A WWE-Owned WCW Was The Fault Of WCW
WWE heels Stone Cold Steve Austin and Kurt Angle effortlessly deck Booker T and Buff Bagwell during the first ever "WCW" match on the maiden voyage for the rebranded Number Two on Raw.
SummerSlam 2001 when The Undertaker and Kane massacre and humiliate the duo of Diamond Dallas Page and Chris Kanyon.
Vince McMahon kicking off the build to the Survivor Series showdown between WWE and The Alliance by saying he was "tired of this crap".
The evidence goes beyond those three examples and isn't hard to find, but in terms of a beginning, middle and end to the life of World Championship Wrestling under the WWE umbrella, the case studies are as good as any. WCW - with or without the bloom being off the market leader's rose that summer - was little more than an unwelcome and unwanted interruption to the regularly Feduled broadcast to those in Stamford.
The WWE wrestlers had bought into the "war" narrative too literally and didn't trust their new colleagues nor want to give up their spots. The new arrivals from WCW were too job-scared to fight back politically, while the bigger stars on Turner contracts weren't going to pass up free money knowing that their opportunity would come later anyway. And those with power to affect change at an office level didn't want to do it - the newcomers weren't booked with credibility, and locker room egos were deemed more important than a satisfying creative output.
The call was coming from inside the house - not the old one thad had long burned down by the time Vince McMahon purchased it.