The WCW Conspiracy Iceberg EXPLAINED!
10. Why WCW Signed The Ultimate Warrior
WCW was not floundering in 1998, but its most profitable year ever was a lagging indicator of 1997 and driven by the excellent albeit brief Goldberg push. The systemic reality is that the promotion, by the summer, was wading into deeper and deeper sh*t.
The New World Order was overstuffed, passe, and as much as the Wolfpac theme rocked, the civil war angle barely actually happened. Bret Hart was doing nothing. Hulk Hogan’s terrible adventures with the least athletic celebrity wrestler ever, Jay Leno, positioned WCW as the lame company - which was less than ideal, since the WWF had never felt cooler. The good times were coming to an end. WCW, for once, was not oblivious. The promotion sensed this, and made a call to arrest the slide.
In football, as in soccer, when a football team loses a lot and drops down the table, panic sets in - and when panic sets in, irrational decisions are made. It is felt that there isn’t enough time to craft a careful, long-term solution; instead, high-ranking club management will almost invariably turn to somebody who once experienced success, no matter how long ago, just in case it happens again. They are a “safe pair of hands”. Think of the Ultimate Warrior, then, as a face-painted, turbo-homophobic Sam Allardyce. The signing was abysmal on every conceivable level.
Warrior was a hopeless in-ring worker who walked apathetically into a toxic promotion with a fanbase that actually cared about match quality - and, as an early ‘90s relic, was not cool enough to get away with doing nothing. His first promo was such an overlong and meandering mess that those fans tired of him well before his first night was over. WCW, naturally, was too stupid to grasp that Warrior functioned best as a short burst of adrenaline. WCW also failed to recall that Warrior was far better as a squash match killer who just happened to talk gobbledygook, booking him instead in Papa Shango-style supernatural nonsense.
The real reason WCW signed the Warrior can be reduced to one word - desperation - but some cynics have theorised that Hulk Hogan simply wanted his win back from WrestleMania 6 in a feud that also enabled him to avoid Kevin Nash scooping his heat in the Black And White Vs. Wolfpac angle.
There is almost certainly something in that conspiracy theory.