The WCW Conspiracy Iceberg EXPLAINED!
WCW: Where The Big Boys Worked The Other Boys.
You have already braved the frigid waters and dove deep to find out the most sinister schemes frozen within the WWE conspiracy iceberg. Now, it’s WCW’s turn. But do conspiracy theories actually exist?
Those with a cynical disposition and an active imagination insist that they do. The world is too often a horrible place, governed by power-hungry psychopaths who will stop at nothing to maintain their grip over it. These people are scum. They make your daily life an anxious grind. They pit you against one another to conceal the fact that they are the real enemy. They wage wars to maintain their political interests, caring nothing about the deaths of thousands of pawns. Is it really so hard to believe that they would concoct evil, elaborate schemes to either tighten this grasp, or to obscure from you the horrific lengths to which they will go?
Others like to apply Occam’s razor to any given situation, preferring the simpler explanation: world leaders and executive management teams are open enough with their disdain for us. They don’t need to hide anything and are probably too dumb to get away with it. This brings us very neatly to World Championship Wrestling.
WCW was an institutionally stupid pro wrestling organisation. The promotion could not even tell you when its programming was scheduled to air half the time, let alone craft a masterplan to commit corporate fraud undetected a full quarter of a century later. WCW as a company was too dumb to reorder the earth to its liking - but some of its top stars were a damn sight cleverer than that.
At the start, you’ll find the more frivolous and amusing conspiracy theories - but down at the bottom of the iceberg, at the end of the list, is Where The Big Rumours Lurk…
28. Vince McMahon Reintroduced A WCW PPV Just To Remind You That It Sucked
Vince McMahon hated WCW. He hated the location of its offices. He hated that it was well-financed and thus able to sign the biggest stars in the United States. He hated that its backer Ted Turner was a more successful, prominent, and legitimate businessman. He hated that WCW, for a couple of years, beat him at the exact same game he played in the 1980s. He hated the promotion so much that he could never even bring himself to say its name without twisting his face in disgust and adopting a yokel drawl; it wasn’t called WCW, but rather Dubya See Dubya.
At various points since November 2001 - at which Dubya See Dubya was beaten to death by the mighty WWF Superstars at Survivor Series - calls were made to bring it back. The Invasion was a mistake, yes, but it’s not as if the brand split was a monumental commercial success or anything. It didn’t matter that SmackDown promoted a great in-ring midcard for a shorter period of time than you remember: WWE’s business was in a quite alarming decline in the early 2000s. Every single metric was down. Why not just admit that a mistake was made, pretend none of this silly business-killing business had ever happened, and reboot WCW - only properly this time?
Fans of the day pipe-dreamed about this on message boards constantly. Some very brave officials within WWE might have even floated this idea to Vince. If an ECW reboot was pitched, it stands to reason that, even just once, someone close to him might have wondered aloud about bringing back WCW when Vince was in one of his less intensely angry moods. Some Redditors have suggested that the WCW Great American Bash was revived as a WWE pay-per-view by Vince for the express purpose of petulant sabotage.
You want WCW to come back? Well, here’s one of their pay-per-views - and it stinks, pal.
The Great American Bash 2004 was one of the worst major wrestling shows ever - a bleak presentation of terrible wrestling, debutants who were nowhere near ready for the big time, and a Handicap match for a main event, which, notably, had never happened before nor since. WWE was terrible in 2004 - but the Bash was exceptionally bad, and was never going to draw money. Did Vince actively sabotage it, just to make a three year-old corpse look bad?
It’s actually not the dumbest conspiracy theory ever conceived - but Judgement Day 2004 was hardly WrestleMania 17. Perhaps WWE was simply very bad that year.