The WCW Conspiracy Iceberg EXPLAINED!

In 2001, WCW was not a hot or popular product. 

It had been stigmatised as wretched and immaterial laughing stock at best, a decaying, glorified corpse at worst. In the most tragicomic LOLWCW moment of them all, the promotion was actually good in March, the very last full month of its existence. The booking was relatively sensible. Young, exciting wrestlers were the focus. Vince Russo was gone forever; John Laurinaitis did a halfway acclaimed job during those death throes. 

Prior to what was barely a renaissance, just a passable if pointless and brief phase, WCW was an abject wrestling product for years, plural. The storylines made no sense. The characters changed alignment so frequently that it was impossible to invest and believe in any of them. The main event crew was either past-it or utterly unmotivated. A thick coating of sleaze oozed over everything. It was noisy and vapid and charmless and rushed. WCW had no identity nor selling point; once considered the purer product with tremendous in-ring focus, the best wrestling was going on up north, with its excellent and star-laden main event, midcard, and tag team divisions. The Rock and Steve Austin were adjacent to household names; the former was even on the cusp of breaking into the actual mainstream. Fleeting glimpses of a futuristic new internet darling AJ Styles on WCW Thunder could not even hope to compete. 

The thing about a stigma, though, is that it can be shaken. Wrestling fans are at once fickle and forgiving. It does not require much to spark their imagination. There’s a reason why the vignette was once such common practice; fans can and will run away with a fantasy booking story at the merest tease. Moreover, wrestling fans over the years - more in hope than expectation - have fallen for several false dawns. Wrestling fans, your writer included, bought the idea that CM Punk would bring about systemic change to, of all promotions, Vince McMahon’s WWE. Wrestling fans just three years later - after being told the exact opposite on television - believed that WrestleMania 30 and Daniel Bryan’s win was the moment that WWE would sprint into a great new workrate youth movement era. The Nexus inspired hope. Some even bought the December 2018 McMahon family apology. Even the promotion of Paul Heyman as Executive Director of Raw drew a lot of praise on his first episode of Raw. People thought he had turned it around - “it” being WWE in 2019!

All of which is to state that WCW might just have been salvageable. A break would almost certainly have made people miss it; an actual hard reset leading to an almost unprecedented real season premiere might have convinced fans to either believe in WCW again or, at least, driven them to check it out through a sense of curiosity. WCW still had names under contract that were fully established legends, legitimate stars, or very dependable workers: Sting, Booker T, Goldberg, Diamond Dallas Page, Ric Flair…

This almost happened in an alternate timeline very close to that which unfolded. Eric Bischoff had struck a deal with Fusient Media Ventures: a venture capital firm that was ready to commit to financing the deal and the rebooted promotion. They were a legitimate operation, having founded the Classic Sports Network in 1995 and sold it to ESPN in 1997 for $175m. WCW, as promised in an advertisement laid out in the penultimate issue of the official magazine, had set a name and date for the relaunch live on pay-per-view: The Big Bang, May 6th, 2001. The new WCW was said to be built around Goldberg, who had been pitched detailed creative plans at a high level. Joey Styles was in talks to become the lead announcer following the shuttering of ECW. He suggested Don Callis as his colour commentator; Bischoff was trying to recruit Jerry Lawler, who had fallen out with Vince McMahon and departed the WWF. 

This was not a pipe dream dangled by some money mark. It was very, very close to happening. The negotiations between Turner and Fusient were somewhere between advanced and finalised at a reported cost of $50m minimum in January 2001. Instead, in March 2001, WCW was sold to the WWF for $4.3m. So what happened? 

Jamie Kellner had succeeded Ted Turner on March 7, 2001, and unlike his predecessor, he was not a champion of pro wrestling. Contrary to an established narrative, though, he was not an enemy of pro wrestling intent on killing it off. He actually grew up as a fan. But he was a businessman, first and foremost, and he nixed the deal. While WCW ratings were pathetic compared to the WWF, Nitro and Thunder were still performing well relative to other programming on TNT and TBS. The issue, as was always the case historically, was advertisement revenue. The industry has always looked down upon the average pro wrestling fan, deeming them poor and uneducated. Why sell to those who can’t afford it?

Even when WCW was white-hot, certain dissenting voices within Warner were never as enthusiastic as the fanbase. This didn’t help, but when Kellner determined that the terms of the buyout were far more favourable to Fusient than Turner, everything collapsed. Basically, Fusient had attempted to acquire the time slots for a lengthy fixed term, not merely WCW’s IP. That way, if the new post-Warner WCW shows had underperformed and ended up being cancelled, Fusient had a lifeline in their ability to air their chosen replacement telecasts. This removed control from Turner. Zellner’s position was entirely reasonable. But there was actually more to it, if certain players are to be believed. Zellner is cast in the narrative as the villain that killed WCW - but was there another ‘Big Bad’? 

Eric Bischoff has spoken in less than glowing terms about Brad Siegel, then President of Turner Entertainment. Bischoff had accused Siegel of “not really wanting to fix” WCW. This is how the sale was explored in the first place. Bischoff sensed that Turner never wanted WCW. 

Bob Ryder was the man who revolutionised pro wrestling content, ushering in coverage in the digital age as the founder of 1Wrestling.com. He leveraged his standalone position in a brand new industry to get a gig with WCW, co-hosting its ‘Live’ programme with Jeremy Borash, before part-founding TNA. The four-part ‘Who Killed WCW?’ series on Vice featured a segment that covered Ryder’s lost, years-old theory. Shortly after the death of WCW, Ryder argued that Siegel conspired with the WWF to drive the price down because he was close friends with Sty Snyder: the man who served as the WWF’s President and Chief Operating Officer between June 2000 and November 2001. Snyder and Siegel were former colleagues at Turner. Contemporary reporting suggested that Siegel actually had the temerity to announce to his WWF colleagues, on the day the Fusient deal was announced, that it was not going to close, and that Eric Bischoff was not going to gain control over WCW. If you’re feeling conspiratorial, you might see why a high-powered media executive might say this - they are often brazen in the extreme - but how could he have known it? 

Ryder claims that it was Siegel who gave Zellner the idea to remove the TV slot from the sale contract, which of course convinced Fusient to abandon the deal. This also created a workaround for Vince, whose initial attempt to buy WCW in late 2000 was thwarted. Viacom owned TNN, to which WWF had handed over the rights to Raw. Viacom stated that WWF-owned property airing on TNT and TBS would have violated the exclusivity agreement. Fuelling the conspiracy, Warner cancelling Nitro and Thunder enabled Vince to both buy the IP for next to nothing and, as was the original plan, reboot Nitro in Raw’s time slot. 

Ryder also claimed that Jerry Jarrett was interested in purchasing WCW, and was deep into the paperwork phase, before he was mysteriously “stonewalled” by somebody not named Eric Bischoff. Jarrett was not the only prospective buyer; Ryder claimed on 1Wrestling back in 2001 that a consortium fronted by former WCW executive Jay Hassman tried to get to the table, multiple times, but were ignored. Ryder called for a criminal investigation into the buyout, arguing that the Fusient offer included a $5m deposit owed to Turner in the event that the deal would collapse at the latest stage - which was more than the overall fee paid by the WWF. Ryder insisted that Turner was only ever interested in selling WCW to the WWF for a shocking bargain price - and that Siegel “took steps to make sure [WCW] was of no value to anyone except the WWF”. 

Snyder, meanwhile, is adamant that this conspiracy theory cannot possibly be true; the Federal Communications Commission would have detected this illegal transaction, which would have ruined his career and life. (Moreover, since the WWF was now a publicly traded entity, a class action shareholder lawsuit would have surely arisen). This conspiracy theory can’t possibly be true, can it? 

In addition to the aforementioned counterarguments, it seems daft to suggest that Siegel would have risked his reputation purely to do an old work colleague a favour. Surely, if any of this were true, Siegel would have had to have been financially incentivised - which would have led to a very easily discovered accounting paper trail. The simplest explanation might just be correct: 

Fusient was the only credible group that had proof of funds to enter serious negotiations. 

Fusient sensed this, and attempted to procure the best, failsafe terms. 

Those terms were deemed too much of a long-term risk by Warner. 

The deal collapsed. 

WCW was haemorrhaging money, justifying the cancellation of its programming, and with no television slots, it was considered worthless by every other party other than the WWF, which could both promote its wrestling brands with their own television distribution and release thousands of hours of archive content on the physical media market (and later digital).

The WWF swooped in. 

WWE's purchase of WCW was finalised.

The end.