Everything You DIDN’T KNOW About WCW’s Final Days
WCW’s sale to WWE dominated serious news headlines - but the secret gossip was top-tier…
What you think you know about WCW’s final days is probably what WWE has told you. The company was a walking corpse so rotten that hundreds of thousands of fans could no longer handle the stench. In WWE’s defence, this is not revisionist history.
Here’s the abridged version of WCW’s final days, as remembered by the collective consciousness:
The company was haemorrhaging money and thus utterly doomed to die, the final swing of the ax hurled by its owner, Warner, which had lost its key proponent of wrestling. Ted Turner was out by March 2001.
WCW, while still highly-related relative to other programming on TNT and TBS, was a money pit that was never going to make the ad money back, since it was not the “upscale” programming that Turner’s replacement, Jamie Kellner, had in mind for his big revamp. The cancellation of ECW spooked the TV industry, which had never viewed wrestling positively to begin with. WCW’s product was actually decent, at least compared to 2000, as the last rites were read.
The proposed deal to sell WCW to Fusient Media Ventures collapsed - Kellner could not sanction Fusient’s attempt to continue to control the TV time slots in the event that Nitro and Thunder were cancelled - and thus, the promotion as you knew it died.
Because this story was amongst the biggest in the history of the industry, it’s the only one people remember from late 2000 and early 2001. Of course it is. It was the end of the world. Who cares about minor backstage arguments when there’s a giant iceberg ahead?
Well, you will, because some of this last-gasp LOLWCW bullsh*t is fantastic.
The tabloids were overlooked in favour of the big headlines in the business papers - but there’s hilarious, forgotten, solid gold in those gossip columns…