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The First Monday Night War ended almost exactly nine years ago. In the time since then, WCW has been all but written off as a failed joke of a promotion that managed to screw up everything it ever did with all the technical acumen of Beavis & Butthead.
The Cactus Jack amnesia angle. Oklahoma. Stacy Keibler’s pregnancy. The Dungeon Of Doom.
Despite producing top names like Sting, Bill Goldberg, Booker T, and Diamond Dallas Page, as well as being renowned as the place where huge stars like Ric Flair, Ricky Steamboat, Big Van Vader, and Lex Luger found their biggest successes, WCW is more famous for being the place that let Steve Austin, Mick Foley, and Triple H slip through their fingers before they became three of the biggest draws of the last 20 years.
The White Castle Of Fear. Evad Sullivan. Rick Steiner vs Chucky. Glacier.
Despite being the only wrestling company to EVER beat Vince McMahon for any period of time, despite crushing Monday Night Raw in the ratings for nearly two straight years, despite changing their product to appeal to the disillusioned young males of the 90s and forcing the WWF to either follow suit by getting rid of the smiling, high-fiving Hogan clones and goofy gimmick wrestlers or perish, the WWF is now regarded as the company that knew what it was doing all along and never sweated WCW for a second since they clearly couldn’t do anything right.
Arachnaman. Monster Trucks. David Arquette and Vince Russo winning the World Title. Ric Flair being buried in the desert.
The one clear, indisputable truth about any war is that the winners write the history, and that’s exactly what’s happened following the First Monday Night War. In much the same way the he taught my generation that wrestling before 1984 was held in “smoky arenas” and never drew a dime, Vince McMahon has successfully trained an entire generation of fans who are too young to know better that WCW was filled with inept management, overpaid and lazy wrestlers, and never did anything successfully other than throw money at the top WWF stars that the WWF was done with anyway, since it was a new generation and younger stars clearly needed to be given their shot.
The truth is that if it weren’t for WCW, things would have been different in a number of ways. For one, a lot of those top stars would likely have continued to be the focus of the WWF for many more years. Hogan was long gone and Bret was getting his shot, but I question whether Shawn would have ever gotten his run at the top if Lex Luger, Diesel, and Razor Ramon had stuck around. But even without those guys, the WWF was still very comfortable pushing race car drivers and evil ninjas and if WCW hadn’t started beating them so badly, it’s likely that a lot of the WWF’s biggest stars never would have become stars. Steve Austin would never have been more than IC Champion, Triple H would still be playing the blue blood as Hunter Hearst Helmsley, and Mick Foley would never have been more than an upper-midcard bump machine for the Undertaker and Kane. The Rock probably would still have gotten his shot, but never as the Rock: we would have instead been treated to WWF Champion Rocky Maivia.
The notion that WCW couldn’t do anything right is just ludicrous, because if it was true then Vince McMahon wouldn’t have such an obsession with destroying it and burying its name as bad as humanly possible. The fact is that WCW did quite a lot right, enough so that they made Vince McMahon very nervous about the future of his company on more than one occasion. WCW’s successes are usually narrowed down to the NWO and Bill Goldberg, but such a simplification really doesn’t come close to telling the entire story.
Wargames. The Hollywood Blonds. The Nitro Girls. Clash Of The Champions.
One of the most commonly mentioned examples of WCW’s stupidity is the fact that they let the Radicalz just walk away, and the WWF snapped them up and turned them into superstars. The reality is that if WCW had never brought them in and allowed them to showcase their abilities, providing the strong in-ring wrestling to supplement the more story-driven main event angles, the WWF would never have had any interest in any of them. They’d all still be working in Japan or, at most, brought it and given Bob Holly or Al Snow-style silly gimmicks and made into opening match jobbers. Would Booker T or Chris Jericho, or Rey Mysterio have meant anything in WWE if they didn’t first mean something in WCW?
Battlebowl. The Dangerous Alliance. Raven’s Rules. Vader’s Reign Of Destruction.
Another misconception is that the older stars came in, collected a huge paycheck, and never brought anything to the table. Make no mistake, getting Hulk Hogan was a huge deal for WCW and not only would Monday Nitro probably never have happened without him, but the NWO simply couldn’t have had the same kind of steam with anyone else leading the group. The eventual blowoff match was pure crap and I’ll never dispute that, but Hulk Hogan vs Sting angle that ran for all of 1997 was the most successful angle WCW ever ran and led to Starrcade 97 earning one of the biggest PPV buyrates in company history.
Hogan wasn’t the only one: if Randy Savage had stayed in the WWF, he would have spent the rest of his career behind a broadcast table and only making occasional in-ring appearances as a special attraction. By coming to WCW, he proved to Vince McMahon that he could still be an effective wrestler by winning four WCW World Titles and having what was one of WCW’s most famous feuds ever with Diamond Dallas Page.
The Steiners. The Benoit-Booker Best Of Seven Series. Ralphus. The WCW-NJPW World Cup Of Wrestling.
Probably the greatest thing about WCW from a wrestling purist’s standpoint was the cruiserweight division, which featured a wide array of different wrestling styles all coming together in a division specifically designed to give smaller performers who would not otherwise get a shot a platform to show what they could do and make their name on a national stage. Where the main events of WCW were often more story driven, the cruiserweight division usually provided the strong, in-ring backbone of any given WCW show. Dean Malenko, the second champion, took on a variety of challengers and would put on wrestling clinics against guys like Jerry Lynn, Shinjiro Ohtani, Brad Armstrong, and Rey Mysterio on a weekly basis, becoming one of the top highlights of WCW programming in the process. Future Cruiserweight Champions like Mysterio, Eddy Guerrero, and Chris Jericho would go on to become future World Champions, further solidifying the legacy of WCW’s cruiserweight division.
The cruiserweight division also featured a lot of international talent, as WCW had a regular working relationship with New Japan Pro Wrestling which often saw top NJPW talents in proiminent roles in WCW, and not just in the cruiserweight division (where Ohtani and Ultimo Dragon both became Cruiserweight Champion), but all over the place as Masahiro Chono and the Great Muta both held the revived NWA World Title and Kensuke Sasaki defeated Sting to win the US Title in 1995. Antonio Inoki himself made a rare stateside appearance to face Lord Steven (aka William) Regal on a Clash Of The Champions in 1994.
The international influence also included a large number of Mexican luchadores, and though they weren’t usually given the same push as their Japanese counterparts, were a constant and entertaining part of Nitro broadcasts, and you could usually count on at least one six man lucha match lighting up the crowd every week. Their fast paced, high flying style, along with elements of the stiff Japanese style, were clearly strong influences, for better or worse, on today’s independent wrestling scene.
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As a longtime fan of WCW, it greatly pains me to see what WCW’s reputation has become in recent years, as I see so many fans who honestly believe that WCW was never good, and that’s just not the case. There were so many good things about the company that I could write a hundred columns on the topic. Hopefully this column opened some young eyes and reminded some older ones of just what they once had. As WWE prepares to go to war on Monday nights once again, TNA finds itself in a similar position to where WCW was. No, they don’t have the years of history that WCW did, but they’ve worked very hard to get to the position they are in now, and there a lot of parallels you can draw between the two companies, from the fact that people are declaring it a bad move before it even happens down to the fact that many of the same people that were involved with WCW all those years ago are now involved with TNA.
But if there’s one thing that we can hope for starting on March 8th, it’s that this is the beginning of an age of renewed interest and competition. In much the same way the First Monday Night War turned the business from a sarcastic punchline into a wildly popular attraction, hopefully this time around will also make wrestling better for the fans, who will once again have two companies fighting for their viewership and PPV dollars, and also for the wrestlers, who will hopefully soon be in a position where they have more than one viable place to make a worthwhile living. We know Vince is ready for the Second Monday Night War, is Dixie?
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