15 Biggest False Narratives In Wrestling History
8. WWE ‘Beat’ WCW
The WWF did not defeat WCW, not exactly.
WWE’s self-serving revised history is thus: the villainous WCW stole their old talent, got lucky with an angle, got hot through that New World Order angle, and was then offed via justifiable homicide by the great Vince McMahon, whose creative genius was such that he didn’t need the stars of old to win the wrestling war. He just needed his own genius, his own brilliance, and the twisting of karma’s knife right in that plagiarist Ted Turner (who in reality had employed the exact same tactics Vince had in the early-to-mid 1980s).
Vince had “stolen” Sid from WCW itself; the only difference between that signing and WCW’s signing of Hulk Hogan is that one worked, and one didn’t, and Vince threw a childlike tantrum.
The story is much too complex to cover in one listicle entry, but WCW went out of business because it was systemically inept to a laughable extent, failed to retain its own sizeable and viable audience because the creative was so wretched, and because Turner Broadcasting chief Jamie Kellner (in part) didn’t believe that WCW’s audience - despite Thunder dwarfing everything else on TBS at the time - could attract the “right” advertisers. Alarmingly, Fox recently elected not to renew Friday Night SmackDown for the exact same reason.
The general public’s attitude towards pro wrestling had as much to do with the death of WCW as anythin