Everything You DIDN’T KNOW About WCW’s Final Days

19. A Very Insulting Offer

To put the following insanity into its proper context, think of the in-ring atrocities committed by WCW in 2000.

Vampiro might have set a record for most WON minus-star matches wrestled in a calendar year, with three Worst Of All-Time-level efforts against Mike Awesome (Halloween Havoc, -2.5), Sting (The Great American Bash, -2), and The KISS Demon (Bash At The Beach, -2). Vampiro was Volk Han compared to David Flair, who, despite having working tendons, wrestled as if he was a character in a buggy demo of a terrible PS1 game. The only reason why even more WCW 2000 matches aren’t remembered as all-time duds is that the vast majority were rushed, and over within minutes.

WCW’s in-ring output in 2000 was absolutely diabolical. You’d think that the promotion would be desperate to sign good new talent after the self-imposed hiring freeze - but, incredibly, ECW’s Tajiri was only offered a tryout match, per the February 5 issue of the Wrestling Observer. That is mental.

Tajiri would have walked in as the best cruiserweight on the roster before his first collar-and-elbow tie-up. Bear in mind, WCW was sued this exact month by a group of wrestlers, one of them the Japanese-American Sonny Onoo, for racial discrimination. That’s not a good look, lads!

As insulting and silly as this offer might appear on the surface, Lance Storm actually defended WCW’s approach on his website, urging his fellow wrestlers to drop their ego and play the game ahead of a scary new landscape with fewer opportunities than ever to get paid.

Also, to understand WCW’s perspective here, they had been taken to the cleaners time and time again by lazy wrestlers who, on very good downside guarantees, felt they didn’t have to graft. If this was the start of a new WCW that was trying to be careful and functional, perhaps this wasn’t among their dumbest ideas.