1. When There Was More Than One Wrestling Show To Choose From On Monday Nights
The battle between WWE Monday Night Raw and WCW Monday Nitro became known as the "Monday Night War" because two huge wrestling companies were doing everything they could to survive during the hottest period in the wrestling business. It seems silly to call it a "war" in a lot of ways, but like most wars one side emerged as the clear winner while the other was clearly defeated when it was over. For wrestling fans, it was the best time to follow the business because we had options. If you lived in America from September 1995 to March 2001 you could watch either Raw or Nitro. There wasn't DVR back then. You could record one of them on the VCR while watching the other, but what most people chose to do is flip to what was airing the better product at the time. When Nitro first started, they trailed Raw because Raw was on the air two years earlier. They had an audience that was used to them. By the summer of 1996, things changed after Hulk Hogan went heel and the New World Order dominated Nitro. Fans wanted to see what they were going to do next. At the same time, a guy named Steve Austin was cutting his first "Austin 3:16" promo and by 1998, WWE was back in control. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSa80CxTbCU Six years after Nitro debuted, Vince McMahon's son Shane appeared on the show to say that he (or in this case, WWE) had bought Nitro and that was the end of it. It meant an end to the battle and for the wrestling fan watching at home they lost the option to choose what wrestling show they wanted to watch on Monday nights. Remember in 2010 when TNA made the stupid attempt to air Impact on Monday nights? They got destroyed by WWE. It was a silly move by a company that overrated just how big they were. We will likely never see another show going up against Raw on Monday nights. Raw is too much of a juggernaut. Nobody else is going to think they can compete with them, nor should they. That's what made the late 1990s so fun. We had options. We also had more wrestling on TV than ever before. It's a shame that the Monday Night War didn't last longer because it was the best time to be a fan and that's something today's fan will not experience again.