How Good Was Eddie Guerrero Actually?
2. Drawing Power
After winning the WWE title at No Way Out 2004, Eddie Guerrero was set to reign with the belt for a long time. After just four months, he dropped it to a character, JBL, who did not exist when Eddie defeated Brock Lesnar.
The change unfolded at the Great American Bash, which drew just 5,500 paying fans to the Norfolk Scope. Eddie was not a needle-moving main event star; quite the opposite. This was a very poor number in the context of WWE’s attendances at the time. The show drew 238,000 buys on pay-per-view: another dire number only marginally better than that pulled by the first Guerrero Vs. JBL match. Judgment Day 2004 drew 235,000 buys. This was WWE’s worst number since Over The Edge 1998, which was before the WWF erupted into the Attitude Era boom.
It’s difficult not to sympathise with Guerrero. He was given the belt in 2004. The business was on its ass. In terms of pure popularity with the general public, nobody matched Steve Austin and the Rock, who Eddie was positioned to replace. Not even John Cena. Eddie wasn’t just a poor draw in comparison to the outgoing Attitude Era stars; he was less popular than some of his peers.
Eddie’s eerily-named DVD ‘Cheating Death, Stealing Life’, released November 15, 2004, had sold just 17,000 copies by May 2005. While the main documentary feature aired on UPN for free months earlier, that number is still very poor. And, while there’s another very reasonable explanation for its failure, the TV special performed terribly, too. The doc went head-to-head against the finals of ‘American Idol’, drawing just 1.6 million viewers overall. By the standards of the time (May 2004), this was so bad that it fell below the average of the worst-performing primetime show of the previous television season (‘Game Over’ on UPN).
The DVD sales number gets even worse when you compare it to Rob Van Dam’s ‘One Of A Kind’ DVD, released on March 21, 2005, sales for which had exceeded 22,000 by May. Van Dam had arguably peaked in 2001, too. By 2005, no longer as cool, he had been firmly established in the midcard with no realistic chance of progressing to the main event.
Eddie does have one metric in his favour: he really was putting it together as a bonafide TV draw in 2005. A July 20 TV match against Chris Benoit gained in excess of one million viewers from start to finish. A week later, when Eddie claimed that he was Dominik Mysterio’s father in a highly publicised angle, the segment gained in excess of 1.5 million viewers - one of the biggest gains on a WWE TV show in years. That entire saga was a ratings sensation by 2005 standards.
Eddie Guerrero was not a particularly popular wrestler, at least in the context of a ‘GOAT’ debate. Just as soon as he started to build a case, he tragically died. It’s a fact that can’t possibly seem true, but it is.
5/10