10 Best Possible Last Words Of Vince McMahon
4. "I Stole Everything From Nitro"
History is written by the winners, which is why every single historic lament on the Monday Night Wars made from within the bowels of Titan Towers will be tinged with various reminders of just how heroic McMahon and company were for fighting back against Ted Turner's evil empire. "To beat a billionaire, Vince McMahon had to become one" and so on and so f*cking on.
Or, to beat a billionaire, Vince McMahon had to watch the product the the billionaire's billions were funding and take the best bits for his own show. Raw wasn't a direct copy of Nitro - far from it - but in Eric Bischoff, WWE had a rival that had an ethos and dogged spirit long missing from the dormant and sparse tapings plaguing the company's increasingly repetitive offering.
WCW - forever in the shadow of Turner's Standards & Practices department - was forced to try and not go too Wild West in comparison to WWE at its 1997 best, but instead used talent and incredible creative endeavour to make the very most of the money they had to use. McMahon cribbed much from ECW during the formative years of the Attitude Era, but the equal-parts on-the-fly dynamism and calculated strategy were right out of 'Easy E's playbook.