Everything You DIDN’T KNOW About WCW’s Final Days
5. The Last Ever Backstage Argument
The backstage fights were a fixture of WCW locker rooms right until the very end. So, too, were the backstage slanging matches between wrestlers and management.
In WCW, discipline was nonexistent. The wrestlers were overgrown children whose egos were completely out of control. Not one of them wanted to take responsibility for the promotion’s free-fall, and in a measure of just how omni-f*cked the whole thing was, they had a point. The booking was a disaster. The constantly shifting management structure was a joke that not only enabled laziness, but also, in the case of Scott Steiner, horrifying, threatening behaviour. The WCW backstage area, for virtually all of its existence, was just a bunch of incompetent morons pointing the finger at one another as the ice cracked below their feet. Lex Luger was amongst the most vocal of the WCW primadonnas.
Luger had already pissed everybody off, per the March 26, 2001 Observer, when he loudly complained about putting Chuck Palumbo and Sean O’Haire over at the Greed pay-per-view. Lex and Buff Bagwell actually left the building in order to intimate that they might not return. They might as well have not.
In a match that was due to last eight minutes, Luger and Bagwell went into business for themselves by orchestrating a friendly fire comedy spot and losing within seconds.
Luger whined all month about doing jobs, likening himself to a Ferrari - and if you smash a Ferrari with a sledgehammer, it will become worthless, Luger said. John Laurinatis was said to have responded to the effect of “You’re a Ferrari? What the f*ck are you talking about?”, which got him over with the boys.
Lex never learned his lesson…