World Wrestling Entertainment does marketing tie-ins to their new films all of the time. Usually, they involve their contracted wrestlers that are in those films, as well, a purely wrestling-based tie-in involving a non-wrestler would be pretty silly, right? Right? Right? Or, if you're WCW in 2000 promoting Ready To Rumble, putting the WCW Heavyweight Championship on David Arquette makes all of the sense in the world. There are pro wrestlers who will happily tell you that "wrestling belts are props." Yes, that's true. But the key is that they're big shiny props meant to highlight to fans who the people are who are the most eye-catching and noteworthy parts of a promotion. In 2000, WCW wanted you to know that it wasn't Goldberg, DDP, Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, Jeff Jarrett or any other wrestler who was noteworthy, but rather the actor who starred in their wrestling-themed movie was more important than all of them combined. Even more ludicrous is that the match in which Arquette won the WCW Championship was a tag match where Arquette and Diamond Dallas Page wrestled Eric Bischoff and Jeff Jarrett, the man getting the pinfall becoming champion. So, yes, it could've been worse if say, Eric Bischoff were champion instead. Arquette remained champion until Slamboree, a pay-per-view based around the idea that the cage used in the Ready to Rumble main event would be used in a real-life WCW main event. Not since Hulk Hogan wrestled Zeus in 1989 had something like this been broached in wrestling. Of course, wrestling in 1989 versus wrestling a decade later are two COMPLETELY different industries. And, yeah, there's also that time that five months after David Arquette was champion that Vince Russo suffered a concussion after being speared through a cage door by Goldberg and (accidentally) winning the WCW Championship. This occurred at a NItro event where the native New Yorker was wrestling Goldberg in a steel cage in Uniondale, New York. The heel non-wrestler wins the world championship in his hometown, where he has no hometown fans. What kind of booking sense does that make?
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.
