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

18. Even By WCW Standards, This Was Dumb

WCW crowds chanted “We want Hall!” frequently throughout mid-to-late 2000. Scott Hall was a very over wrestler on his own terms, his absence intensified his popularity, and the fans were bereft of other wrestlers to cheer for. They weren’t going to make signs for Big T or Horace Hogan, were they?

It did not matter that Hall had left. The fans wanted him back.

This was a problem for WCW because Hall was a liability who, when he wasn’t under arrest for driving under the influence, was smashing up taxis like he was in Street Fighter 2 because the driver refused to take his credit card. By late 2000, Warner higher-ups remained so furious with Hall’s conduct outside of the ring that Brad Siegel was “vehemently” opposed to bringing him back - to such an extent that an edict from up high stipulated that Hall’s name was not to be brought up on TV in any context whatsoever. The publicity was terrible, and Siegel wished to make it explicitly clear that Hall was never coming back. No teases, no references, no nothing.

Under no circumstances should it ever be mentioned that Scott Hall once worked for WCW.

In a mid-December 2000 airing of Worldwide, of all the matches from the archives that they could have aired, the brain geniuses at WCW went with Kevin Nash and Scott Hall Vs. the Steiner Brothers from Road Wild 1997.

Sometimes, WCW’s incompetence has been so normalised that you need an analogy to drive home how stupid this would be for any other wrestling company. This isn’t too dissimilar to the WWF airing ‘The Best of Hulk Hogan’ in July 1996.