You’re not Dennis Trobich trolling here, are you?

“Nitro 7/6/98 – Hollywood Hogan vs. Goldberg”

Obviously this has been on a couple DVDs but I never fail to laugh when the camera cuts to Karl Freaking Malone outside the ring (it was a good diamond cutter at least) and they miss Goldberg’s power kickout after the leg drop – which was kind of really significant, all things considered.

For the ordinary fan watching WCW at the time, and following the business through the markazines that still sold lots of copies at the time, they would have felt that the WCW Title was the #1 Title in WCW at the time. WCW Title matches typically headlined shows, and PPV Main Events were based around whatever match the WCW Champion was in. Windham or Flair never got to shoot a minimovie somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico now did they?

Vader only had the belt when his segment directly related to the Title itself. Otherwise you get stupidity where a tag team champion fights in a singles match, and then lifts the belt over his head after the match, as though he’s successfully defended it, when in fact the match he’s just been in wasn’t even a tag match! Or a champion celebrating after surviving a Survivor Series match with the belt! If the Title was actually involved, Vader had his WORLD Title belt.

Also, the NWA and WCW Tag Champions were the same people at this point. And the NWA have tried to appropriate the WCW Tag Title lineage as well, whereas their belts only stretch back to 1992!

Anyway, the basic point, again, was that WWE now recognize that Windham, Flair and others were NWA Champion, yet they also claim that the WCW Title is the same thing as the 1948 NWA Title. And this after they even had the NWA Champion on RAW back in 1998 or so.

Except for…

a) Flair returning to WCW in the spring of 1993, with WCW billing him as a nine-time world champion (at this point, they were specifically counting seven NWA & two WWF reigns). When he beat Windham for the NWA belt, it was (once again, specifically) referred to as his tenth world title.

b) that period in mid-1993 where Vader was stuck in said horrible feud, being referred to as simply the “WCW Champion”, and sometimes not even wearing his title belt to the ring.

To further reinforce the true point, while all of this was going on, the U.S. title was “held up” and not defended on TV between May and September, and explained away with an angle revolving around Rick Rude having stolen the belt after a disputed match with Dustin Rhodes, and holding it hostage in a briefcase. In fact, one of the first things WCW did after losing control of the NWA world title was to immediately put the almost-forgotten U.S. belt back on Dustin.

The statement “the NWA belt was a secondary WCW Title at that point” is wrong and uninformed. Before WCW had to abruptly switch gears because of the dispute over Rude’s planned win, they had more than established that the NWA World & World tag championships were the top prizes within WCW. Only the dispute (and the subsequent lawsuits) changed that.

Furthermore, WCW actually had you know a roster of wrestlers. They had their own tv shows, magazine, brand etc. All the NWA had was a name. That’s why in 1994 the NWA had to piggyback ECW for their tournament, and we all know how THAT ended up.

Nobody ever said that Flair wasn’t NWA Champion in 1993, but that title was a shadow of what it had been in 1983.

And anyway the point was that WWE are now claiming that the lineage went NWA-WCW-World, meaning that in 1993 the guy holding what was the NWA Title in 1948 would have been the WCW Champion. But by WWE recognizing that Flair, Windham were NWA Champion, WWE’s are refuting their own claims.

That’s the ultimate irony of HHH being handed the ‘World Title’ by Eric Bischoff on live TV: that’s the way it’s been done for decades and most of us realized this, but that was the first time we were basically slapped across the face with the fact.