25 Crazy WCW Facts (That Get Progressively More Ridiculous)
12. A World First
It might stun you to learn that everybody in the professional wrestling industry lies for a living.
The wrestlers don’t weigh as much as they tell you. In a bygone era, wrestlers wore lifts in their boots to appear taller, and they’d have worn stilts if they’d have gotten away with it. Very few wrestlers have ever been under threat of serious harm, but several will speak proudly of the riots they incited. The wrestlers don’t hate each other in real-life. CM Punk doesn’t have that many enemies. Well, that last bit is actually true, but you get the general idea.
Promoters have inflated attendances from the dawn of time because it’s the easiest lie to spread. With clever enough camera trickery, a big crowd looks massive when the angles are so flattering. And really, what’s the harm? It’s funny, more than anything else, especially when a promotion loses track of the fake number and makes up a second one. It’s the least offensive and most believable carny activity in wrestling. Vince McMahon, and this is not much of an exaggeration, built his career as a promoter on this idea.
On July 6, 1998, Goldberg captured the WCW World title from Hollywood Hogan on the famous Georgia Dome Nitro. It was a stunning scene. WCW might as well have physically burned a skyscraper-sized stack of cash by not presenting it on pay-per-view, but no matter. People had a great time. 39,919 people had a great time.
Well, that’s not true: 41,412 people had a great time, but WCW for unfathomable reasons decided to reduce the number.
This is not unlike Hulk Hogan saying that he had five inch pythons, but that’s actually good because 24 inch pythons would be uncomfortable.