Bill Goldberg Goes Nice-0 | WCW Monday Nitro 4/6/98
Kevin Nash battles Sting for the WCW World Title! Goldberg is 68-0 heading into a match against Van Hammer! You'll never guess what happens in either match!
As you may know from my being unable to shut up about it, I just moved into a new home. It’s great, though I’m at the stage of unpacking where I am realizing both folly of owning physical goods of any kind and hating myself a little as things emerge from their boxes a little damaged or totally busted. One of the totally busted things is the ancient external hard drive that had all of my wrestling on it. It was an outdated repository of stuff that I’d purchased from Smart Mark Video a decade ago (someone had to have my complete run as a commentator in AIW, why not me?), torrents of territory and pre-super indie boom stuff I’d either watched a little of here and there or swore I’d get to someday (sayonara, early PWG and ROH, goodbye Shimmer), and TV from just about everywhere, including VHS rips of every WCW show, Nitro included.
I can get all of this stuff back, but it’ll take time — the VHS rip Nitro torrent is incredibly, excruciatingly slow to download, and the HQ rips of the WWE Network versions are not my cup of tea — so the Monday Nitro MASTERLIST’s first dip into the final stages of WCW will have to wait. Instead, I went with the April 6, 1998 edition of Nitro, which was uploaded to the WCW Vault channel last week.
Not that you’re interested in my thoughts and opinions on the state of preserving wrestling footage in 2025, but I have a real love/hate relationship with everything the WWE has done since the closure of WCW and ECW, and the purchase of its tape libraries. I was a voracious purchaser of WWE DVD box sets, a subscriber to their Classics on Demand service, and would have subscribed to the cable TV version of the WWE Network that was shelved in favor of what we eventually got, which was eventually dismantled for parts as streamers like Peacock and Netflix and ESPN sought to add value to their various services.
Classic footage has always been an icing on the cake/spoils of war proposition for the WWE, and that’s never been more true than now. The WWE and WCW Vault channels, to say nothing of what’s to come if they ever do ECW or Territory-era channels, are a firehose of content, largely an effort to remonetize content that’s been widely available for years (a lot of WWE Vault content already exists as 10-15 year old content on the WWE’s main YouTube channel), further tightening the company’s grip on an algorithm that’s been gamed to favor them for nearly a decade now. When they drop invaluable content, like lost Omni shows or Crockett Cups or dark match tryouts, it’s a little treat for nerds who otherwise wouldn’t take a pass at WWE’s slop trough — we aren’t as easily fooled by in-house alternatives like NXT as we were a decade ago now that the brand has entered Chef Michaels’ eternal goonstate, but give me five minutes of some fan at the last Nitro talking about how awful the coming wrestling monopoly would be for everybody and I’m there, man. I mean, why would anyone overseeing vault content even release that 25 years later?
To gloat a little, I guess, which has always been a function of WWE’s tape library, from The Self-Destruction of The Ultimate Warrior to coercing Bret Hart into working with WWE again to avoid his retrospective DVD to follow a similar vein to the whole “rise and fall” conceit of its territory and Monday Night War era sets. The WWE gets to tell the history of wrestling the way they want to, and now that they’ve got two Vault channels dripping out choice material without the paywall of the Network, they get to present themselves as good, careful stewards of that material, when they’ve never been that in the past and will only pretend to be so long as it keeps an otherwise disinterested fanbase engaged with material they could have been releasing this way for a decade or more. It’s great marketing, but every piece of unseen or lost footage they unearth, from One Man Gang huffing his way through an Attitude Era tryout to the Last Battle of Atlanta to Bret Hart vs. Tom Magee to Takeshi Morishima’s tryout, is a miracle that’s happened more in spite of WWE than because of it, a reminder that the real stewards of wrestling history are the tape traders, bootleggers, and pirates among us.
Anyway, here’s an episode of Nitro booked around a heinous attack on Randy Savage that totally had nothing at all to do with tensions within the new World order. Just your normal everyday parking lot attack, the likes of which would later fuel years of NXT storylines. Definitely not the result of a rift between the Mega Powers or anything like that, no sir. That pavement jumped up and got him good, nothing to do with the yellow and red Dodge Viper Hogan was last seen driving in 1995.
Colette Arrand