Maybe Some Guys Deserve CTE | WCW Monday Nitro 9/18/00
Is this the worst episode of WCW Monday Nitro ever? Probably not. But four weeks in to a 288-week project, it does make one wonder just how bad Nitro can get before it ends.
Wrestling fans are capable of feeling nostalgic for anything. You talk to someone who grew up watching monopoly-era WWE and they’ll tell you all the livelong day about how loaded the roster they grew up with was, and wrestling fans who’ve been cursed to love outfits like TNA or ROH are ride-or-die for the years they were most in tune with the subculture. People my age have plenty of microeras of WWF, WCW, and ECW to choose from, and people even closer to death’s door than I am have the goddamn territories.
Nobody, and I do mean nobody, has any nostalgia for this era of WCW.
It isn’t that the promotion is in its death throes, either. In 2000, with terrible creative and a checked out roster, World Championship Wrestling was putting up numbers that would be the envy of a modern promotion. This episode of WCW Monday Nitro, which probably isn’t even the worst one I’ll watch this year let alone over the course of this project, popped a 2.8 rating. I actively loathe thinking about ratings and am thus likely misunderstanding something, but that is, according to said understanding of how ratings work, roughly what Raw currently draws on Netflix. The media ecosystem has changed a lot in 25 years, and the value of 2.8 million people putting eyes on a product has gone up drastically, especially in comparison to how much money it costs to put that product on the air, but the last American wrestling promotion to draw 2+ million people to a weekly television show that wasn’t WWE was World Championship Wrestling, and this is what they were doing with their time and attention.
It’s bad, self-sabotaging stuff produced by a person, Vince Russo, who at once seemed to hate the fact that he worked in wrestling while fancying himself a legitimate draw in it. The nicest thing anybody says about his way of booking is that everybody on the show has something to do, that they have a character and a direction, but when you watch those characters trudge miserably in that direction like the insane penguin from Encounters at the End of the World, it becomes clear, very quickly, that entropy is preferable to this.
There are now 41 matches on the WCW MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST — four of the bottom five are from this show. Is that fair? I’m not sure. Further research is required. Like, there are bits of the current #37 match that are a lot of fun, but Vince Russo’s way of booking doesn’t let wrestling matches be wrestling matches — they must all be reckoned with as part of an extended universe of interconnected vignettes whose ambition is to present the great sport of professional wrestling as the mutant offspring of a network sitcom and a Girls Gone Wild commercial. It is sad that the best thing you can say for any of this is that Sting and Booker T carry out their duties with dignity — only one company in wrestling history got to do a Booker T vs. Sting singles match and instead of the generationally cool thing it should have been, it’s something they endured and made it out of with their reputations intact. But hey, at least Vince Russo gets to main event the Nassau Coliseum — his dream, which all wrestling fans had reason to care about!
Next Week: The 288-sided die smiles upon me as we retreat to the summer of 1997, when WCW is white hot and the world is slightly less painful. It’s episode 95 of WCW Monday Nitro, July 7, 1997, from the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, TN. It’s got the match where DDP disguises himself as La Parka. It’s got Vicious and Delicious vs. Los Guerreros. It’s got lucha tags and lucha tag teams, and it’s got a Steiner Brothers vs. Four Horsemen main event as Rick and Scott collide with Chris Benoit and Steve “Mongo: McMichael. This is nice. This I can do.
Colette Arrand