The WCW Conspiracy Iceberg EXPLAINED!
4. Dusty Rhodes Booked WCW While Wrestling For The WWF
In the week of December 6-14, 1990, Dusty Rhodes was an independent contractor working for the WWF.
He was on the way out, finishing up his dates of a run that was more fun and memorable than it had any right being, given the sheer level of spite that drove his push and even his signing. He spent his last bookings doing jobs for Virgil and Ted DiBiase across the U.S. and Canada. In his excellent and ultra-exhaustive Between The Sheets podcast, though, journalist David Bixenspan reckons that wasn’t the only thing Rhodes was up to. Bix speculates that while contracted to the competition, Rhodes was actually shadow-booking WCW using Barry Windham as a puppet of sorts.
WCW was without a booker. At the TV tapings that week, per an old dirt sheet named ‘Mat Watching’, Windham suddenly and vocally took control of the match finishes, “among other duties”. Bix and Kris Zellner think this was a sign that Dusty was pulling the strings. After all, Windham was simply a talent who never harboured aspirations to book after the fact, and Rhodes very quickly joined WCW as a member of the booking committee on a formal basis. Windham himself confirmed on an old Kayfabe Commentaries shoot interview that he did in fact book the promotion between Ole Anderson and Dusty’s stints, but stopped short of confirming if he was simply following Dusty’s orders on the telephone.
There’s a visual clue to support this theory, in that Dusty had taken to wearing a sheriff’s hat on WWF programming - a secret hint that his Fed days were numbered, and that he was throwing his authority around elsewhere.