Fifteen Years Ago
The Monday Night Wars were over for all intents and purposes.Fifteen years ago today, WCW World Champion Kevin Nash laid down for Hulk Hogan after a single fingerpoke to the chest. The NWO factions that had been at war for nine months reunited again and Goldberg was the second coming (and failing) of Sting from a year ago. The whole thing just made no sense and whatever explanation they had didn’t work either. This set up Hogan vs. Flair again because we hadn’t seen that a million times before.
Over on Raw, the WWF Title changed hands as well with Mankind beating the Rock in a huge upset with the help of Stone Cold Steve Austin, giving us the loudest pop you will ever hear at a wrestling show. For reasons that Eric Bischoff alone can comprehend, WCW announced this match on their show, thinking that fans would be offended that it was taped. According to Mick Foley, something like half a million people changed the channel at that announcement, sinking Nitro for the night.
So to recap: WCW screws the fans over and gives them the polar opposite of what they wanted (more Goldberg, less NWO) and the WWF gave the fans what they wanted (Vince at the Corporation losing at Austin’s hands). Combining this with all the other reasons WCW was moronic, the winners of the Monday Night Wars really were becoming clear around this time. For the life of me I still do not get what WCW was thinking. Yeah it’s taped. So is almost every show and entertainment broadcast on television. It astounds me to this day.
Hogan managed to tank two companies, on the same date, 12 years apart. If Dixie knew anything about the business, she’d have (maybe) waited, or (perhaps wisely) called it off.
By all accounts, the reason why Bischoff announced the taped results of the Raw match was to give the audience a reason not to tune into Raw, since they already would know how it would end.
Its still hilarious that it backfired. The lowest number of people that switched the channel I’ve read was 400,000, and the highest being 700,000.
Moral of the story: Don’t mess with Mick Foley, especially when he was at his career peak.
I’d be interested in seeing some time stamps on the shows. Mankind vs. Rock wasn’t announced until part of the way through Raw. There’s a chance that fans watching Nitro wouldn’t have even known a world title match was happening on Raw at all while they knew one was coming on Nitro.
Way to make me feel old, KB.
It was so nice of WCW giving free advertisement to the WWF. They didn’t even have to yet they did anyway.
A lot of wrestling related things happen on January 4. Just to add, NJPW holds their annual Wrestle Kingdom show with CMLL today and AJ Styles will wrestle for the first time completely outside of TNA control today as well.