One MIND-BLOWING Secret From Every Year Of WCW History
3. 1999 | The Dusty Trail
The lineage of bookers in WCW is almost as knotty and convoluted as its association with the National Wrestling Alliance and International titles and whatnot in the early 1990s.
The promotion was a joke, systemically. It was also rife with political sharks chomping through its choppy waters. Swim through the dirtsheets long enough, and you’ll read tales of mysterious booking committees and power struggles and even, in a theory proposed by David Bixenspan on the Between The Sheets podcast, a brief period of time - December 1990 - during which a wrestler (Barry Windham) may well have served as a shadow booker on behalf of another wrestler (Dusty Rhodes) who was actually working WWF house shows with Virgil and Ted DiBiase.
This strange phenomenon recurred in the dying days of the promotion, once the relative stability of the prime Nitro Kevin Sullivan era was breached by Stone Cold Steve Austin. Infamously, Vince Russo got the book in October 1999. His bizarre approach, in which he wrote a meta TV show about a failing wrestling show, was a near instantaneous failure. He was out of a job by January, when one of his booking ideas - Tank Abbott: World Champion - was considered too stupid.
According to the November 15, 1999 Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Dusty Rhodes smelled the proverbial pinpoint of blood in the water as early as November. Meltzer wrote that Dusty was gone from the company after he “made a play for Russo’s spot”, which obviously failed. Dusty’s instincts were sharp, but his timing was terrible. If he’d given Russo a little bit more rope - i.e., let Russo simply be himself for two months - things might have panned out in his favour.
Provided the story is true, it is hilarious how quickly Dusty made his move. It was as if he had watched a single episode of Russo’s WCW Nitro and said “F*ck this for a game of soldiers, baby”. Dusty’s play for the book made one of Russo’s storylines feel like an epic long-term saga.