Everything You DIDN’T KNOW About WCW’s Final Days
10. Too Little, Too Late
While wrestlers from the cruiserweight division were never realistically going to headline pay-per-views and pull monster buy rates, fans at the time wish-cast the best wrestlers into that role because they were so tired of the lazy, overexposed, unprofessional main event crew. Kevin Nash almost tried hard at doing nothing towards the end of his WCW run, because it was cooler if he didn’t. The “push the cruisers!” message board initiative was an extreme reaction to an extreme problem - but surely, there was a balance to be struck.
Instead of having Lieutenant Loco and Mike Sanders main event Starrcade, why not simply book the cruiserweights in actual programmes that might allow them to connect with the crowd?
Too often, and this was the case at WCW’s peak, not merely its dying days, the cruisers were sent out to fill time and get the crowd hot in random matches.
The blinding Chris Jericho Vs. Dean Malenko storyline proved that this sort of thing could work. It was literally actionable, in that toy figures were sold on the strength of it.
Dave Meltzer reported in the February 26, 2001 issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that he had heard whispers of WCW attempting to hire a designated booker specifically for the cruiserweights. Previously, one booker and whomever was helping out would mostly concentrate on the main event lads, since that’s where the money was. Then they’d write some cruiser matches on the back of a pack of cigarettes.
This didn’t happen, obviously, but it’s funny that Bischoff’s response to WCW’s imminent death was to do a death-bed repentance, praying to the WON message boarders of 1998.