25 Crazy WCW Facts (That Get Progressively More Ridiculous)
10. The INSANE Reason Why WCW Turned Goldberg Heel
Goldberg was so popular, for a brief time, that he rivalled Stone Cold Steve Austin, one of the biggest box office sensations in the entire history of pro wrestling, in the Nielsen ratings.
Goldberg was an intense, scary dude with a graphene-strong crowd connection. The WCW faithful adored him. They believed in a guy who went undefeated for so long, and the man was so explosive that he aroused almost unprecedented levels of blood lust. Watching Goldberg wreck dudes was like mainlining testosterone. His loss to Kevin Nash at Starrcade 1998 dampened his aura, but he was still by orders of magnitude WCW’s top attraction. His style and persona wasn’t built to last, but he should have lasted longer in the top spot.
In a terrible move, WCW turned Goldberg heel at the Great American Bash in June 2000. This wasn’t even a dismal swerve for the sheer sake of it, either. The motive behind the decision was even worse than Russo’s “you’ll never see it comin’” bullsh*t.
According to the Death of WCW, Eric Bischoff thought he’d struck a money-spinning deal with a group, called SFX, who would purchase the rights to promote WCW events. While this probably wasn’t of interest to the WCW punters, who cared more about the product than the financing of it, Bischoff still hopped on Thunder to brag about this landscape-changing event. Turns out that SFX apparently wanted to purchase WCW outright, with Jim Ross at the helm, which Ted Turner outright rejected. A scrambling Bischoff and Russo then turned Goldberg heel because they’d promised something huge, and that was the only angle that qualified.
If not the absolute most ridiculous development in WCW history, this is probably the most symptomatic of the company’s demise, in that WCW management messed up, and a wrestler’s career suffered.