10 Most Important Weeks In The Monday Night War
When ratings and stars eclipsed star ratings.
How wrestling has responded to 2020's ongoing global b*stard has been at times shocking and at others infuriatingly par for the course.
What are your own personal memories of the last several months? What part of being locked inside for the better part of a year did you hate the most? Conversely, what part did you genuinely treasure and see as a learning experience? Misery mixed with voyages of discovery make up many of the stories from a period in human history that will be studied as the first great global battle since World War 2.
Or in Vince McMahon's case, World War 3, because he's trapped in the same old b*llocks wrestling bubble as always.
Only this time, it's not Eric Bischoff booking a three-ring 60-man version of his best gimmick. Now, it's about how WWE's empty gym is the main reason for Raw's ratings plummeting. This despite AEW and NXT (eventually) stabilising, and SmackDown's graph this year looking something like the heart rate monitor you could hear in the background of McMahon's bedside battering by Stone Cold Steve Austin.
The no-longer-travelling circus is off to Orlando's Amway Center in a move sure to confirm a one month numbers spike made up of curiosity views before the storytelling chases people off as it has done persistently for the last half decade. "They're richer than ever", shout the dullards intentionally missing the point. More than any other corner of the fanbase, they should yearn for the days when Vince McMahon fought for every dollar...
10. January 31st 2000 - The Radicalz Arrive In WWE
Eddie Guerrero, Perry Saturn, Dean Malenko and Chris Benoit were far from the last holdouts from WCW when Vince McMahon snapped all four of them up on the cusp of his single greatest commercial and creative year, but it was what each one of their signatures represented as much as what the Atlanta outfit was set to lose.
As WWE phased out the New Generation mantra in 1997, they placed similarly less emphasis on the in-ring product than ever before. They gained ground not with a loaded roster but by exploiting the very best out of almost everybody they had. The exact opposite was the case in a bloated WCW, resulting in Chris Jericho, half of of the cruiserweight division, and these four ultra-talented mechanics wondering why all the company's growth wasn't reflected in their own career.
Their symbolic guardrail hop on January 31st spoke volumes about how far apart the companies were becoming, the point where referring to the weekly competition as a "war" was itself fairly futile. The opposition offered Jeff Jarrett playing an authority figure and booking himself in a World Title match in something that already felt like a pathetic parody of the business' best ever years. We weren't to know it would foreshadow the bulk of the next five.