WWE: 10 Things Today's Wrestling Fans Wouldn't Understand About The 90s

4. When Wrestlers Jumping Ship Was A Big Deal

The battle between WWE and WCW was such a huge thing in the 1990s that something fans loved seeing was when somebody would go from on promotion to the other. When Ric Flair jumped to WWE late in 1991 it was a huge story because he was always a NWA/WCW guy. Not only that, but he was a champion over there for many years. Everybody knew who Flair was. His initial WWE run lasted less than two years, but his famous 1992 Royal Rumble win for the WWE Title is still considered the best Rumble match ever. The biggest jump was when Hulk Hogan went to WCW in 1994. He was a difference maker. It made WCW more known worldwide. Soon after, Randy Savage would follow. In 1996, Scott Hall and Razor Ramon took the money from WCW and formed the NWO with Hogan, which was the best angle that WCW ever did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGsBRImD0po Lex Luger was a guy that worked for both companies in the 1990s. His biggest jump happened on September 4, 1995 when WCW Monday Nitro aired for the first time. Luger was a WWE guy up until that point although he wasn't used that much, so it made sense for him career wise to head to WCW. If you wonder why he isn't in WWE's Hall of Fame yet or why he's almost never mentioned, that could be a big reason why. Vince McMahon probably didn't like the way he left. Rick Rude wasn't an active wrestler in 1997 when he appeared on a taped episode of Raw the same night as a live Nitro, but he was the first guy to be on both shows on the same day. When the WWE roster was getting thin in the mid 1990s, they picked up a couple of WCW guys that you may have heard of: Steve Austin and Mick Foley. Neither guy was a main event level player in WCW. In WWE, they became top ratings draws within a couple of years. There was no intelligent reason for WCW to dump either guy, but they did because they mismanaged talent all the time. One of the best WCW to WWE moves happened in August of 1999 when Chris Jericho bolted from WCW when he was a free agent and made a huge splash in WWE immediately. That move was huge because Jericho was a beloved figure among internet fans and we knew that when he got to WWE he would get a better opportunity than what he had in WCW where they did a poor job of moving people to the main event level. The point is that any time somebody went from one company to another, or even when an ECW guy went to a bigger company, it was big news. There was always a question of whether somebody would be used right and there was outrage when they were used wrong. That feeling will likely never happen again because the chances of another company competing with WWE that way is over.