It all started out as a joke. David Arquette was the latest in a long line of celebrities that had been brought into WCW in an effort to garner mainstream attention for the promotion. The company also had a movie to promote, with Ready to Rumble heavily involving WCW stars and branding in addition to Arquette playing a starring role. In a backstage meeting new head booker Vince Russo was discussing ways in which the company could take advantage of this attention to get one over on the WWF. This led to Arquette making a joke about how they should put the WCW Championship on him. Everybody laughed and, in an ideal world, the joke would have been discarded and WCW would have made plans that people actually wanted to see. Instead Russo immediately fell in love with the idea and, despite protestations from the rest of the members of the meeting, including Arquette who was a lifelong fan of wrestling, decided that putting the company's most prestigious title on an actor made perfect sense from a business standpoint. Of course, nobody would buy the idea that a man built like Arquette would be able to wrest the belt away from Diamond Dallas Page and the two were actually allied at that point anyway. This all led to a tag team match on an episode of WCW Thunder in which Arquette teamed with DDP to take on Bischoff and Jeff Jarrett, with a stipulation that whoever scored the pinfall would become champion. Shenanigans ensued and Arquette ended up scoring the pin and winning the title. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3g37-9nu_g Fans hated the idea from the get-go and, as expected by everybody except Russo, completely turned on it. The incident only further served to devalue a belt that had already been damaged by the Fingerpoke of Doom incident however, much to his credit, Arquette would go on to donate every penny of the money he earned from his stint as a wrestler to the families of the recently deceased Owen Hart and Brian Pillman in addition to the family of Darren Drozdov, who had been paralysed following a wrestling move gone wrong in a match against D-Lo Brown.
Lee Price is a writer for 411mania.com and Starburst Magazine, which is published in the UK. He is currently working as a freelance writer. He hopes to one day fund his addiction to video games by writing about video games, and he maintains a sporadically updated blog at leesrandombulls*it.wordpress.com
