Whenever we as pro wrestling fans get too up in arms over how bad we perceive WWE's booking to be, it's always worthwhile to pause and think about times when promotions had creative slumps that make WWE's current product issues look like a bump in the road. Roughly 15 years ago, there was an era that literally killed a company dead in its tracks. On October 18, 1999 Vince Russo took over as the head of creative for World Championship Wrestling. At that time, WCW was in the midst of the slide that eventually closed the company, but still relatively competitive with the WWF - competitive enough where the idea of "stealing the creative genius that launched the Attitude Era (or however Vince Russo wanted to portray himself)" seemed like a terrific idea. There's more than ten booking decisions made during Russo's run in WCW creative that were "the worst." It's almost as if Russo at times was playing a game of "can you top this" against himself, yet somehow nobody was cheering when he successfully topped his last terrible booking decision. In any event, if you're a disgruntled WWE fan, here's an opportune time to kick back and realize that for as bad as the Wrestlemania main event may turn out to be, these were ten far worse decisions that actually led to a company going down the drain.
Besides having been an independent professional wrestling manager for a decade, Marcus Dowling is a Washington, DC-based writer who has contributed to a plethora of online and print magazines and newspapers writing about music and popular culture over the past 15 years.
