Breaking Down The Myth: The NWO Saved The Wrestling Business
2. The Limp Invasion Angle
Can you blame talent for being offered huge guaranteed contracts? Absolutely not. It's those same guaranteed contracts, though, that led to the whole Invasion angle of 2001 falling completely flat.
Sitting on massive Time-Warner deals, 'Hollywood' Hogan, Kevin Nash, Scott Hall, Sting, Goldberg, and Scott Steiner were just some of the top WCW talent who were off the table for the Invasion. In their defence, they were perfectly entitled to sit at home and be paid by Time-Warner rather than taking a major pay cut to get back on the road with WWF.
From the WWF standpoint, if they really wanted to, they could've bought out those Time-Warner deals. It's just that Vince McMahon and his inner circle weren't prepared to pay the money necessary to do that. It's to the credit of Booker T, DDP, and Buff Bagwell (yes, really!) that they chose to take a lesser deal with WWF and grab that opportunity (sorry Buff!) instead of sitting on their couch and collecting a monster paycheck.
The nWo isn't responsible for the ludicrous contracts that WCW was offering to so many talents during the peak of the Monday Night Wars, but you could argue that Hogan, Nash, and Hall helped to drive up the money being spent by Ted Turner's company on talents who may or may not have deserved it - with these deals being so ludicrous that it made it completely non-viable for WWF to pick up these stars and deliver the WWF vs. WCW storyline people had spent years dreaming of.