Hey Scott, just thought I'd give you some column fodder.
Why do you think the WWF/E has blown so many money and/or dream matchups? For whatever reason we never got a proper Demolition/LOD feud. The promised Flair/Hogan Wrestlemania dream match (with both men prettty much in their primes) was teased and then yanked away. Of course the ultimate dream match (WCW vs WWE) could possibly be the worst epic fail in wrestling history. Couild it be that vince had a hard time getting behind big matches that didn't invole all "home grown talent"?
I think that’s 100% the reason, in fact.
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Tags: WCW, Wrestlemania, WWE, WWF
I agree, there is no doubt really. It’s happened too often to be purely coincidental.
Luckily for Vince, nobody else could really make good on those dream matches either, although I think you have to give WCW credit for pulling off Flair/Hogan and booking it well. Regardless of the outcome, I felt it was a lot better received/booked than all of the WWF versions of Flair/Hogan in 1992. It’s even more astonishing that they pulled it off, given that they were prone to screwing up big money matches in the Hogan era.
Vince missed the boat with Flair though, if he’d jumped in 1988 or even 1990, I think it would have been a much bigger deal. Both Flair and Hogan had lost some luster over 1991 and into 1992 in the fans eyes.
I always heard that when they tested Hogan/Flair in the early 90’s at house shows, it always drew poorly. You can probaly blame that on both of them to some degree, but McMahon saw it as proof that Flair was overrated. That’s why he never intended to push Flair as anything more than an authority figure in 2001 and 2002. HHH was the one that had to convince McMahon that Flair was still a big deal.
The Invasion was botched big time, and I think McMahon did it on purpose. As soon as it was over, he signed every big WCW name outside of Sting. It was a huge joke. Of course, he ended up costing himself in the end. He could have had about three years worth of dream matches, but it was more important to throw dirt on his rival’s grave. WWE still hasn’t recovered from messing that up completley.
Yeah, but.. Would signing all those WWF/WCW dream matches have ultimately paid off? You could’ve thrown all those matches out there from 2001 – 2004′ish and let the business develop in a completely different direction from there… But what would have happened after that? Instead, Vince just said fuck all those WCW guys, and built his company around the guys you see today (Orton, Cena, HHH, HBK, Undertaker, Edge, etc. etc.).. homegrown guys, with some exceptions like Rey Mysterio who draw HUGFE revenues for completely superficial reasons (a mask..)…. Anyway, I think he just took a different path, and it obviously is working out for him.
Rey’s drawing power is a lot more than a mask.
He taps into a fanbase that otherwise wouldn’t care about wrestling (there was a group of people from Mexico who traveled to the Rumble just to see Rey fight for the title), he provides amazing matches and has a style completely unique from any other main event player the company’s ever had.
Flair-Hogan drew; it just didn’t have legs to last until ‘Mania. Granted, they went out of their way to present Flair as a delusional outsider, killing the dream match aspect.
As far as the Invasion, remember the plan, up until like 3 weeks before the PPV, was to run WCW as a separate promotion on the cheap. Once Tacoma happened, all those plans were out the window and they had to change it around on the fly.
So we have Buff Bagwell to thank for rewriting the future of wrestling?
Well, you can also thank whoever decided that the future of WCW should ride on a frickin BUFF BAGWELL match.
I know I’ve heard this story before but it’s been a long-ass time: refresh my memory on the Tacoma incident?
They debuted WCW in the main event of RAW and brought out Arn Anderson and Scott Hudson to commentate. Their choice for the first WCW match ever to be seen on WWF TV? Booker T Vs. Buff Bagwell. They had a bad match but I don’t remember whose fault it was. I also seem to remember the live crowd turning on the match but I may be wrong. Click here for a recap of the entire show: http://slashwrestling.com/raw/010702.html
If they HAD presented Flair as an outside, it probably would have drawn better. It only took a few weeks for Flair to end up being just another guy in the mix.
Or, maybe if they didn’t blow their wad early with the Hogan/Flair matches. There was no reason to start those matches in October if it needed to have legs in Mania.
It was less to do with the Bagwell/Booker match, and more to do with the fact that Viacom refused to allow WWFE to run a WCW-branded program on TNN.
As much as it sucks as a fan to have never gotten those matches, I have to admire him for the tenacity it took to deny them. It was a business decision, and it clearly worked…
Bottom line, vince is a moron. How many tens of millions of dollars did he blow not signing goldberg, flair at the very least during may 2001. The invasion ppv did nearly 800,000 buys with booker t/ddp as headliners.
I mean they ended up signing flair, hogan, hall, nash within the next 8 months anyway and goldberg a year later.
Not really the one to defend Vince but he can’t be too much of a moron, he’s the only left from the old era to still have a wrestling promotion. The problem was that the invasion was booked on the fly, if he’d sat through 2001 and had a good think about the best way to go about an invasion angle we may have had something special. Though I must agree that it still would’ve been McMahon v McMahon with the WWF guys burying the WCW guys but it would have been more interesting, assuming you had Vince sign the guys when he did, surprises would have actually been surprises, Flair, Hogan, Nash, Hall, Goldberg (not till 2003 but had he come over sooner), Rey. Benoit & Eddie could have returned and joined the new WCW, and with all those guys there WCW would have almost had a stronger line-up than the WWF without having to cross Austin and everyone else over.
In Vince’s defence he managed to raise buy rates based mostly on the WCW brand name with none of the talent to back it up, which is rather impressive. If he had brought in Nash, Mysterio, Sting, Flair etc would it really have raised buy rates further to justify their massive wage demands? And even turn a profit?
I think not.
And that’s without all the political bullshit they would have brought with them.
As it was Vince brought them in one by one and managed at least a initial pop in fan interest, tv rating and PPV buy rate that their singular contract fee didn’t dwarf. The majority were also pretty much pumped for all they were worth and kicked on the scrap heap with very little value left.
I’m afraid wrestling is a business and making money is more important than making critically acclaimed angles. Vince doesn’t give a shit about your perfectly booked Invasion angle. I’m sorry you had to find out like this.
If you want to see the positives in bring in a load of wrestlers at once. have a look at TNA’s current rating and PPV buys (if they will let you lol)
Yes, that Sting is such a political manipulator.
You can’t blame Vince for not signing the WCW main eventers because the ball was in their court. Nash and Goldberg have both said they had zero interest in signing with them at the time, and I honestly don’t blame them.
Go back to work in an environment where the entire roster resents you for a fraction of what you’re making to sit at home? No, thanks.
A moron, no. But he’s far better at eliminating effective competition than he is at making money for himself. Where he did make obnoxious money for the company, it was due to the effort spent in eliminating competition.
I think Vince didn’t go for the dream matches that wouldn’t help his bottom line. It’s not like he didn’t give us huge dream matches….yea, there wasn’t Flair/Hogan but there was Flair/Savage at WrestleMania.
Looking at those examples — Demolition was basically over by the time LOD showed up with Crush being added, so that’s a pass. Hogan/Flair…a million reasons why that didn’t happen, but I think timing is the main culprit. And WWE vs. WCW….I think the mistake was doing the angle so quickly but, as was stated, the plan to make WCW its own thing for a while and let the TimeWarner contracts run out so they could get all the big stars in order.
I think my biggest problem with denying these dream matches isn’t the fact that they were even denied at all. I’m more miffed about what they’d end up going with *instead* of the big name matches.
Wrestlemania 8 they do Hogan-Sid instead of Hogan-Flair. Of course, this is the one time I don’t really fault them as Flair-Savage is probably in my top five Wrestlemania matches ever, and the angle was really ballsy stuff for the time. Also Sid Justice (not Vicious, though there’s very little difference) is one of my all-time favorite characters. Also, they were sort of painted into a corner since Hogan was leaving to shoot a movie after Mania so they couldn’t book Hogan-Flair without Flair going over, and that was never going to happen at WM.
But with Demolition/LOD it was especially pointless. We could have gotten that match, but instead we had LOD feuding with Power and Glory while Demolition jobbed to a Japanese team brought in on a limited run. They could have squeezed the last little bit of relevance the Demos had at the time and gotten a minor dream match out of that feud.
But the Invasion was the biggest offender. It wasn’t so much that one particular dream match was avoided, it was that an entire dream ANGLE was botched. And in such a way that hardly anybody from the Alliance was relevant beyond the midcard level coming out of it. RVD could seemingly never escape the IC title level, while guys like Storm, DDP, O’Haire, and Helms couldn’t really find a decent foothold. Booker did well for himself, though. Really well. But Booker didn’t really require any investment to get over like Storm, O’Haire, and Helms would have. He was already pretty damn over when he got there.
But yeah, if they’d just held off on the Invasion for a year, they could have had Steiner, Nash, Goldberg, Hogan, Hall, AND the guys they already had, like DDP, Booker T, RVD, Flair, etc. Now THAT would have been an invasion. Only problem is that some of those guys had gone repeatedly on-record as having thought WCW was a hell-hole. So why even fight in its honor? Unless it was just to be anti-WWF? And that storyline, that Vince wasn’t going to give anybody a shot that wasn’t homegrown, could have been interesting television. Especially if they started to do shades of gray booking with the guys who got big in WWF but weren’t necessarily homegrown talent (like Austin, Jericho, the Dudleys, Benoit, Guerrero, etc.). But that would almost require the Alliance to be considered the faces at some point, and really nobody back then was ever just in one major company (non-Indy) their entire career. The Rock and the Hardys are the only guys off the top of my head who could legitimately claim to be homegrown. I know there are a TON more, I’m just having trouble processing.
Also, if they’d held off a year, HHH would have been back from injury. And I really wonder how the angle would have changed with Hunter around. Guess we’ll never know. Needless to say, if they’d been smarter in booking the Invasion and showed the kind of patience they used to show in their storytelling, then John Cena wouldn’t have to be at the top of the card simply because he moves a lot of merchandise. They could take the risk of pushing a new, untested main event face because even if that face fails, they’d still be rolling in dough from the Invasion storyline. I’m absolutely positive they’d have made absolutely stupid money. But that ship has sailed and sunk.
I think HHH tearing his quad was a big reason it was expedited. You could tell that HHH/Austin was going to be the summer/fall angle, probably starting with the quad tear tag match. I think the finish was going to be the same: HHH costs them the match, one turns on the other, and volia. HHH was still bringing it back then and his 3 Stages of Hell match with Austin was probably the best of that year, but Austin/Rock at WM was in the way, even with Rocky heading off to film The Mummy Returns.
WCW? I think if HHH wasn’t injured and the same result in Tacoma happened, we would have gotten a simple “WCW is Dead!!” in ring segment with Vince, much like how he killed off the nWo and ECW just this week. We probably would have had the Kiss My Ass club early, with others having to “win” roster spots by beating WWF Superstars. I really do think it would have happened that way.
I don’t know if Vince was even thinking of some big InVasion angle before HHH got hurt. After all, it was plainly said (both kayfabe and shoot) that Vince owned both companies, so really he could kill it off at any time. Why would he let them even appear on television? At least with the nWo you had Bischoff (eventually) on their side to justify it.
But HHH planted his leg incorrectly and they went into panic mode with their big summer angle out the window. If he hadn’t gotten injured, I think we would have still had the Tacoma WCW Disaster and Vince killing it off shortly afterward. Of course, we’ll never know.
Whoops, forgot that Shane “owned” WCW–but it was all WWF TV. Unless Shane found a magic clause that allowed him a certain number of hours or segments a week.
But really, I doubt that Vince had an Invasion in mind before HHH went down.
Just to bust a myth, there was a long standing rumor that Sid was promised a main event spot at Wrestlemania 8 and that’s why Flair/Hogan didn’t happen.
Total BULLSHIT. In it’s history, the WWE has promised exactly ONE GUY that he would get a main event spot on a big four pay per view (or the WWE would pay him a $25,000 bonus, or roughly equal to the bump in pay you get for heading a show).
Guess who?
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TIME’S UP!
The answer is… Mark Henry. When he was signed to his 10 year deal in 1996, one of the provisions that kept him out of WCW (something people forget, WCW was going for him too) is that the WWE promised to make him a main eventer. It’s true.
Why do you never provide sources for anything?
If it matters that much to you why not google it yourself you fucking cunt stain.
Stay classy, San Diego.
What is he supposed to do, give you an annotated bibliography? I mean, he clearly knows what he’s talking about.
I could be wrong but I don’t think hmc wants a bibliography–I assume he’d just be happy if Charlie siad “according to Meltzer” or “according to Keller” or wherever he gets his information from. I’m not saying Charlie has to give sources; I’m just saying what I think hmc is looking for. Tell me ifI I’m wrong, hmc.
You are correct, sir. A gentleman and a scholar.
To be clear, I never make anything up. I get both the observer and the torch, read pretty much every news site, watch pretty much every non-pedophile produced shoot interview out there, and even have some wrestlers that i keep in semi-regular contact with. It all bleeds together and thus I don’t always remember where I heard shit from. I assure you I don’t make shit up though. That said, I often and always say that there is no truth in wrestling and even stuff reported by multiple sources as fact almost always has a tinge of dishonesty towards it. The wrestling business is built on a foundation of dishonesty and thus the truth never shows up in full.
For the Mark Henry being guarnteed a spot in the Rumble main event by contractual obligation, I’m pretty sure it was Wade Keller and the Torch. Don’t remember. That story was like four years ago at this point.
So that’s everything not involving Rob Feinstein then, right? I understand how you feel. After 14 years of online reading plus the dozens of wrestling books over the last 10 years, I have trouble remembering specific places I learned things from as well.
And in fact I used to regularly purchase RF shoots before Perverted Justice caught Feinstein with his hands in the cookie jar. And most consider pre-WCW buyout shoots to be superior in quality because guys were less likely to hold anything back in those days.
Clearly? How is it clear? He’s just saying stuff.
I or you or anyone could do the same thing.
Benoit was out too during this period.
Benoit could have added some intrigue to the whole mess and probably put on some great matches with the Alliance members.
But, we also have to just consider that transitioning from the Attitude era and the climax at WM 17 was a huge peak for the company, so where would they go from there? If you look at it like that, there was really no where for them to go but down, and they couldnt get all the Big Name contracts. Plus, they were in limbo with the Rock coming and going and Austin finding his rhythm as a big-time heel again and no HHH and a BUNCH of really promising Mid-Card guys that when push came to shove, couldn’t cut a promo to save their life at this point. That was a HUGE factor for who they push and who they don’t. RVD never even cut that many promos but they STILL eventually pushed him to main event status a few years later (and he got suspended).
What would you all have done after WM 17? That’s a tough transition to make. They were essentially starting a BRAND NEW ERA of wrestling.
I think the idea of having the brand extension after WrestleMania 17 with Shane having control of Smackdown and Vince having control of Raw would have been really cool
I always comically blamed Christmas Morning Anxiety on the WWE blowing these dream matches. Hear me out.
When I was a kid, there were certain gifts I couldn’t wait to get for Xmas. When I was around five to six, it was Transformers. Then Christmas would come and I would always play with the stuff I didn’t ask for first, sometimes not touching the stuff I *really* wanted for days.
So Vince McMahon has a really hyper version of what I had as a kid. He would dream about what LOD/Demolition or Flair/Hogan would draw, but then he get the tools to do it and have an almost performance anxiety.
There’s other factors. They ran some of those ‘dream matches’ in house shows and they didn’t go over well. Flair/Hogan matches were not huge draws. Jake Roberts/Hulk Hogan they ran at house shows and they had to cancel the feud because the fans ended up split, even with Roberts was a heel.
I saw LOD/Ultimate Warrior vs. Demolition (Crush, Smash, Ax) as the main event from an MSG show on a Coliseum home video from the summer of 1990. The match sucked balls. I think Vince knew LOD/Demolition was a shitty match waiting to happen….that’s why he ran it on the house shows.
Yea, they were brutal. There were a lot more then that too. They just had no chemistry.
I think the original Demolition would have gelled just fine with the LOD. Brian Adams, god rest his well quaffed hair, wouldn’t have good chemistry with anyone if his match was booked by Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff.
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GOOGLE IT FUCKERS!
ROTFLMAO.
Charlie, can I be the president of your fan club?
This whole “Flair/Hogan didn’t draw at house shows” stuff in 1991 is part myth though.
They did consistently better business for those shows than they had done in a long time — house show attendance had been falling since 1990 and if anything it made their shitty returns in 1992 look much better than they were.
They just didn’t do AMAZING business and I think they expected too much out of it, given how far they had sunk in just two years.
I mean you’re right. Hell, they even sold out a couple places that hadn’t drawn full houses in years.
But the icing on the cake was they didn’t come close to selling out MSG (and you can check the Flair/Hogan WWE matches that have hit recent DVDs and see it for yourself) and since the WWE uses that as their gauge, the feud was aborted. Maybe. Hell, there’s so many conflicting reports on why it didn’t happen that the truth will likely never in a million years come out. I’ll end up reporting one of the rumors, label it as a rumor, and some douchebag will say “there you go reporting it as a fact again.”
Most of the time when these dream feuds are blown, there is no malicious intent of “we didn’t want our home grown guy to look bad against the guy from the other place.” Not that such stuff hasn’t happened (see the Invasion).
I will say this: historically, dream matches featuring two guys who were separated because they worked for rival promotions just don’t see to draw in the United States/Canada. There are exceptions (Hogan/Flair in WCW in 1994), but for the most part they don’t work. One of the reasons is because when the guy jumps ship, he’s entering a company that devotes a lot of time and money towards marketing themselves as the superior wrestling company and the other place as bush league.
Thus you get Flair vs. Hogan, and the home grown WWE fans in Madison Square Garden are like “Meh, what’s the big deal about Flair? He works for WCW. WWE says WCW sucks. Why would I want to see that?” The reverse happened in WCW, where Hogan didn’t draw in the traditional southern parts of the country that WCW worked, and thus they had to mostly use Hogan in places like Orlando or Detroit to protect him.
Territories cater to a certain style, and most fans won’t settle for just any wrestling. The proof of that is the week after the final Nitro, which mind you was also the day after Wrestlemania 17, people expected the 3.0 rating that Nitro drew to be added to the WWE’s 5.0 or whatever it got (rough estimate, I didn’t look up the exact numbers). Instead the WWE’s ratings bump was only very slightly above the usual bump it gets the night after Wrestlemania. A small minority of WCW fans jumped and started watching Raw, but for the most part they just quit watching wrestling.
Why? Because they were conditioned for years by WCW to believe that the WWE’s product was inferior and obviously they agreed with that.
Applying that logic, you can see why dream matches don’t draw. Again, there’s exceptions. It’s not a definitive rule. And I’m sure someone will say Hogan/Rock as an example of why the rule doesn’t work. You’re wrong, because Hogan’s history was in the WWE and thus the fans treated it more like “returning star vs. current star”. The major exception is Hogan/Flair, but again you’re talking about the biggest star ever for one company vs. the biggest star ever for another and WCW actually MARKETED IT with a huge multi-million dollar main stream budget, something the WWE didn’t do.
There’s not a whole lot of other exceptions.
This is well said.
But don’t forget, WCW wasn’t getting a 3.0 anymore. Weren’t they usually getting a 1.9? Most of WCW’s audience was watching WWE now. That 1.9 audience definitely left wrestling and soon so did much of WWE’s audience.
But I’ll tell you why I think that is. A large audience that got into the attitude era were kids in Highschool. I’ve always believed once you go to college that unless you make friends with other wrestling fans, you stop watching wrestling as well. I know I did for 6 years. I barely even watch anymore.
You were close. The last few, sans the final one, were doing a 2.1
By funny coincidence, I actually just threw a number out there for the final Nitro and got it spot on: 3.0 is what it drew.
Just for shits and giggles, I went to check that night’s Raw rating.
4.7
The next week’s Raw did a 5.7
The week after: 5.4
The next two weeks: 5.1
The next week: 4.98
By May 7th, 2001, the ratings had slid under the pre-WCW buyout’s ratings.
The ratings went back up a point between July 23 and August 20, but then Summerslam happened and the ratings crashed again.
So I’ll admit that the WCW model and perhaps my whole theory was wrong. There was interest in the Invasion and it clearly had some fans returning to the business after a lull, but it didn’t last.
And of course you have the InVasion pay per view, which drew a 1.63 Buyrate in 2001. Now if you take into account how buyrates work (they measure the total percentage of people who have the option to order the show and choose to do so), it’s one of the top 10 drawing wrestling shows ever, if you take into account that the pay per view universe in 2001 was larger then it was years earlier (despite cable and dishes being fairly old at this point, the ‘universe’ grows every year). Thus it’s 1.63 is greater then most of the Wrestlemanias, all the Royal Rumbles, all but two of the Survivor Series, and all but three Summerslams. And it completely slays all the ‘in your house’ shows any anything done recently.
It’s truly remarkable. But like Scott said in one of his books, the WWE’s attitude was “This WCW Invasion would be better if we could just get rid of these WCW guys.”
Vince has failed in other areas as well. I always felt the first SummerSlam should have been bigger. I’m currently watching Wrestling Challenge on WWEClassics.com and I just don’t get how they got the card they did for that event!
Randy Savage vs. Ted DiBiase – World Title
Andre the Giant vs. Hulk Hogan or Hacksaw Jim Duggan (he was big then don’t forget)
Beefcake vs. Honky Tonk Man – Hair vs. Hair and IC TItle on the line
Hercules vs. Ultimate Warrior re-match
Jake the Snake vs. Rick Rude
Hart Foundation vs. Demolition
Dino Bravo vs. Ken Patera (crowd was into their feud)
Rougeuas vs. Bulldogs
Hacksaw Jim Duggan vs. anyone from Heenan Family
The Outsiders vs. Team WCW. This seems like a dream match that actually worked. The build-up boosted ratings, drew new fans and stole fans away from the competition. I have no idea what the Bash at the Beach PPV drew, but I’m going to guess it did big business. The match itself had one of the most talked about finishes in wrestling and was followed up by an angle that changed the industry — at least for a time.
It was WWF vs. WCW, and it was done right.
For as bad as it all eventually went for Bishoff and WCW, I’m not sure you could go back and “fantasy book” that one any better. We all know Vince wouldn’t have done it if the situation was reversed. If he got Sting in 1996, he probably would have introduced him with a series of vignettes as “THE BEE KEEPER — Bzzzzzzz… FEEL THE STING!”
Shhh. Around here, WCW was horrible and made nothing but bad decisions, logic and facts be damned.
Oddly enough, WCW’s newfound ratings success on Cable TV took awhile to translate into big PPV numbers.
Up to the point of the BATB 1996 show, they averaged about a 0.56 buy-rate for 1996, with the biggest show of the year being Uncensored 1996, which drew a 0.70. BATB drew a 0.71. Starrcade 1996 however drew a very good 0.95 buyrate — the best since BATB 1995.
Comparatively, the WWF was doing better on PPV (not by a whole lot though), but it would take until 1997 for WCW to overtake them buy-rate wise. WCW’s buyrates were stronger overall in 1995 than they were in 1996.