The Night Goldberg Lost For The First Time

With respect to Curt Hennig's legend, he was thrashed by 1998 and most knew it. DDP was a babyface. Their match was damn good fun for the fans and for TV ratings - it aired in its entirety on the following Nitro after a major farce, the likes of which would become synonymous with the company - but that dynamic, for the first time, asked them to question their unwavering loyalty and support of the Goldberg character. With no real villain to destroy after months of anticipation, there was no hook to Goldberg as a headliner proper.

They certainly f*cked it up more in the weeks that followed. Goldberg had to lose at some point. The best way of losing was the cheap way. He wasn't going to lose clean. Even WCW wasn't dumb enough to do that. In theory, the story was fairly strong; he had a pay-per-view number to generate with Scott Hall at Souled Out before decisively vanquishing Nash. WCW had time in the interim to build challengers in time for March - or even April, if there was enough juice in the programme to stip up a rubber match. There wasn't, as it turned out.

Say Nash didn't book nor heavily influence that Starrcade main: he certainly booked Goldberg to work Bam Bam Bigelow at SuperBrawl, and by then - this was the Monday Night Wars, a time of endless intrigue that intensified relentlessly - the events of December 28 had faded. It took Goldberg until April to wreak vengeance on Nash. It was too late. Were the power players of WCW inept, or so savvy that they knew exactly who and what to kill for their own, selfish benefit?

In either scenario, deliberate or dumb-f*ck, Bam Bam, a beast in the early to mid-1990s, was by 1999 a step down from Scott Hall. The arc was all backwards.

The night that Goldberg lost for the first time wasn't the night that WCW died.

The only thing that WCW was good for, at that point, was throwing water onto deep fryers, saying "Uh-oh!" and using 100% proof alcohol to extinguish the flames.