Everything You DIDN’T KNOW About WCW’s Final Days
1. The Darkly Funny Final Message
On March 16, 2001, President of Turner Entertainment Networks, Brad Siegel, issued a company-wide memo to WCW staff.
In it, he advised everybody within WCW that, effective March 27, “WCW programming will begin a period of hiatus”, and promised that “during this hiatus, WCW will review its programming plans and determine the course of future WCW-branded entertainment events”.
In an absolutely incredible line that was presumably written in earnest, Siegel also wrote “I hope that you will maintain the level of professionalism that distinguishes our organisation”.
This is probably an exaggeration, but a lie of such severity really should be punished by incarceration. You literally should not be allowed to say sh*t like that. In addition to “virtually everything WCW ever did throughout its history”, WCW was so unprofessional during its final months that Scott Steiner kicked the sh*t out of everybody who looked at him sideways and nobody was brave enough to punish him. Buff Bagwell was so difficult to work with that he ran around like he was Dustin Hoffman. Not many wrestlers wanted to work hard; fewer still wanted to do jobs.
That line somehow gets worse, too; Siegel set out in the same memo that an in-person meeting was scheduled for 10:00AM on Wednesday, March 28 so that he could share “further information”. The site of this meeting, ahead of which Siegel hoped that the wrestlers would maintain their professionalism?
The WCW Power Plant: the place where the smallest man in the world, DeWayne Bruce, tortured aspiring wrestlers under the pretence of training them.