Mezmermized | WCW Monday Nitro 2/1/99
In the wake of the Fingerpoke of Doom, a road not taken presents itself: Early 1999 Scott Steiner should have been the WCW Champion.
A question that often occurs to wrestling fans who care enough about the history of this great sport is when, exactly, WCW's death warrant was signed. I recently wrote about one date that's thrown around a lot — December 28, 1997 — but others place it a bit later, the one-two punch of Goldberg losing to Kevin Nash at Starrcade 1998 and dropping the WCW Title to Hollywood Hogan on January 4, 1999, the same night Mick Foley beat The Rock for the WWF Championship.
There's a certain sad poetry to both dates, but the truth is that a lot of WCW's history, its rise and fall, had more to do with its being owned by Ted Turner than anything else. The unlimited money glitch Eric Bischoff exploited to launch Nitro and put his shoe to Vince McMahon's foot was never going to work forever, and when the time came for the twin albatrosses of the Time Warner media empire and America Online to merge, the fact that WCW had basically been burning barrels of cash for all but a fraction of its existence made it easy for the company that owned it to cut bait.
Colette Arrand
This likely would not have happened had Ted Turner remained in control of said empire. He was a sentimentalist who believed he owed a great deal of his success to professional wrestling, which he saved from the abyss in the late 1980s and stuck with through some pretty miserable creative and financial spells outside of WCW's brief moment in the zeitgeist. AOL-Time Warner's problems weren't exactly remedied by cutting bait on wrestling: they would later sell their stake in an NHL team and one of the surer licenses to print money in all of sports: the Atlanta Braves.
Why bring this up as the preamble to a random 1999 episode of Monday Nitro? Because despite the fact that the company is unmistakably, palpably dead here, a month removed from the Fingerpoke of Doom, there are signs of life, ways forward not taken, embers glowing that could have burned, and maybe did in another, kinder universe. All wrestling needs to catch fire is talent and airtime, and this episode of WCW has plenty of it. Some of those guys are watching JJ Dillon throw a softball like he's just learned how that motion works. Some of them are saying hello to their cat back home. Some of them are wrestling The Cat. But there was something good here, once, something worth watching almost in spite of itself. There's more than a few matches from this episode of Nitro that rank high on the MASTERLIST, each of them featuring wrestlers who could have been anchors of a new generation of WCW, some of whom aren't who you've been told should have led the company forward with the nWo in pieces. I suspect this won't be the last time I come to a few of these conclusions.
Colette Arrand
Up Next: I don't get to meditate on those embers long, as the 288-sided die has me on the other end of 1999, and in my hometown no less. I used to beg to go to WCW shows at the Palace of Auburn Hills, but it's November 22, 1999, Episode 218 of WCW Monday Nitro, and among the 13 matches I was thankfully not in the crowd to see, there is Meng vs. Miss Elizabeth. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Oh, before we hit the paywall, I need you to see this logo the boys in the lab cooked up for Lex Luger.
