One MIND-BLOWING Secret From Every Year Of WCW History
2. 2000 | Asya II
In wrestling, you should only sing when you’re winning. When you’re losing, it’s a good idea to shut the f*ck up, get your head down, craft a plan to get the audience back on your side, and execute that plan without making any sad and desperate attempts to tell the audience that you’re back. Make them trust you.
It’s a dumb idea to mock the competition when you aren’t pulling up any trees. AEW mocked WWE almost relentlessly upon launch. This was, at least initially, a clever tactic. The AEW base loved the idea that “their” product was considered so much better than the joke that was WWE - particularly since WWE had spent so long talking down to that type of hardcore fan. By the time Chris Jericho formed his sports entertainment parody group the Jericho Appreciation Society, in early 2022, WWE was months away from making the grand comeback. The timing was disastrous. AEW very quickly felt like latter-stage WCW.
That is because, in October 1999, WCW debuted the ‘Asya’ character. Months and months removed from winning a weekly battle in the Monday Night War - which they’d never accomplish ever again - the company thought it was a good idea to mock the WWF and claim it was bigger and better. You see, Asya is bigger than Chyna, on account of being a continent (with nu-metal spelling). Christi Wolf was nowhere near as strong a performer as Joanie Laurer. The whole thing was pathetic, the equivalent of walking up to a male porn star and dropping your trunks after spending an hour in an outdoor pool in January. In Siberia. With a smug expression on your face. And if you were six years old. And had a medically diagnosed micropenis.
This was such a monumental self-own that you’d never expect even the idiots running WCW to repeat the error. Surely, they’d have been too embarrassed. Also, you’d never have expected them to do this a year later, when the gulf between the two promotions had widened to an even more humiliating distance. WCW repeated the error.
Or tried to, anyway; per the September 26 edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, there was a plan in place to bring Dustin ‘Goldust’ Rhodes back under the moniker of ‘Platinum’. Platinum is one better than gold. You see, if your album goes gold, it has sold 500,000 copies. Platinum goes all the way up to 1,000,000!