Clearly, not everything Hogan achieved in wrestling was designed solely to power his own successes. This was the moment the Goldberg brand was built, and according to Hogan, the decision to crown Goldberg champion came from his own mouth, when Eric Bischoff called him for advice on how to pull WCW's ratings up:
"If this was your company," he said, "what would you do?" I said, "That's easy, brother. If it were my company, I would put the belt on Bill Goldberg."
For fans of the big man, that was good news: but for the WCW brand, it wasn't quite the roaring success it was presumably designed to be: Hogan indicated that although the outcome of the match was met with raucous approval by the Atlanta fans, the move didn't help to improve WCW's ratings, adding that Goldberg became difficult to work with from that point forward.
The numbers didn't change. The only thing that was different was that Bill Goldberg had the belt-and that turned out to be another type of problem.All of a sudden, he became this monster who didn't ever want to lose a match. He just stopped like a mule in midstream and said, "I'm not losing." You have to be flexible in the wrestling business. You have to be able to go in different directions. When a guy's one-dimensional, you can't do anything with him. You can't write story lines and create emotion when somebody refuses to do business. So working with Bill Goldberg became a nightmare.
