10 Best Booking Decisions In Wrestling History
9. Hulk Hogan Is The Third Man
For all the chatter of WCW being the most incompetent wrestling promotion of all-time, they at least arrived at one of the most obvious booking decisions ever in a third of the time WWE did.
It took WWE six years to finally accept that the fans weren't fond of Roman's babyface character. They loathed him, in fact.
Six years!
Six!
In that time frame, between 2014 and 2020, two World Cups took place and two European Championships were scheduled to take place, and all the while, Roman won LOL.
In 1994, Hulk Hogan became the cause of and solution to all of WCW's problems. He grew business, setting a PPV record, but the diehards hated him. WCW fans liked pro wrestling. It's strange that they didn't protest and migrate to the WWF, which was more of a territory in 1994 than it ever was, but they wanted a great version of WCW. Hogan prevented that, and they resented him.
That's the narrative, anyway, one that doesn't fully explain why the WCW fans liked the nWo too much - but the decision to turn Hogan in '96 was ingenious. As the leader of the nWo, he made WCW bigger, much bigger, bigger than the WWF for 83 weeks, and unlike Kevin Nash and Scott Hall, he wasn't remotely cool.
He became the literal necessary evil, catalysing the second mainstream boom, and he, again, was at the forefront of it.