WCW managed to leapfrog WWE as the number one wrestling promotion in the world in the 1990s due largely to the fact that they lured away much of Vince McMahon's established talent with lucrative contracts. McMahon was forced to create new stars and eventually, he found the winning formula and won the wrestling war. Still, during WWE's lean years (and even after they regained control), McMahon would take frequent potshots at the competition, criticizing WCW's top stars - who had headlined in WWE many years earlier - as over-the-hill and nonathletic. Once WWE put WCW out of business, they ruled the wrestling world, and anyone looking to make a comeback in the U.S. had to go through them. Eventually, bridges were mended in the quest for mutual wealth, and many old faces returned to the company. With only a few exceptions, every star who made a name for himself in WWE and then jumped to WCW came back to WWE. The same men Vince McMahon and his stars had called old in the 1990s returned to active competition for the company in the 2000s. The most egregious example of pushing old WCW wrestlers came in 2011, when CM Punk was sacrificed to Kevin Nash to provide heat for Nash's upcoming feud with Triple H. It proved that there had been a major shift in priorities since the late 90s, and it wasn't for the better.
Scott Fried is a Slammy Award-winning* writer living and working in New York City. He has been following/writing about professional wrestling for many years and is a graduate of Lance Storm's Storm Wrestling Academy. Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/scottfried.
*Best Crowd of the Year, 2013
