The Natural Born Thrillers MASTERLIST | WCW Monday Nitro 10/9/00
Watching too much Natural Born Thrillers really makes one wonder about the liklihood of WCW's survival.
In the year 2000, beleaguered and with their backs against the wall (a metaphorical wall, not the wrestler), WCW went on a tour of Australia. Despite the enthusiasm of the wrestling-starved sellout crowds, the tour did not go well for WCW — Juventud Guerrera was arrested after he went mad on drugs and assaulted cops, and a clause in WCW’s contract with Australian promoters stipulating that the company would eat the cost of every unsold seat in the venue meant that their sellout shows still bled money, as a fourth of the arenas they utilized were occupied by the gigantic Nitro set. A boondoggle!
I have made not caring about the This Business-ing of wrestling my thing, but engaging with this much WCW means engaging with This Business at massive highs and crushing lows. Here, that means watching WCW setting up the tee for several fledgling enterprises that emerged in the wake of its demise, finding an entire continent of wrestling fans who rarely got live shows at the scale of what they were watching on cable and giving them what they wanted. The WWA did this. Hulk Hogan’s Hulkamania tour did it, too. It’s a wise practice, one adapted, I imagine, from the WWF’s “we’re in crisis” playbook of 95-97 where foreign tours and extended stays in Canada were a saving grace for the company’s bottom line. The WWF just had a much smarter person making deals with those promoters than WCW did.
I have nothing smart to say about this, really. Booking a tour in a territory that hasn’t tired of your bullshit is a great idea, and WCW managing to pull off this huge logistical undertaking after the Juvi scandal is a legitimate accomplishment — honestly both are more impressive to me looking back 25 years later than the loss of $400K in a year where even a massive success would have ended with AOL-Time Warner looking to jettison the company.
I know that WCW bleeding money like it did in 2000 made it an easy decision, but I think WCW would have been sold off regardless of their profitability or lack thereof. The merger of AOL and Time Warner was a massive undertaking that was doomed before the dot com bubble burst, and with billions of dollars in debt to pay down, operations like WCW become assets that can be sold to slow the bleeding. The $2M they sold WCW to Vince McMahon for was a pittance, but they sold other, surer sports franchises in the years that followed, the Thrashers and Hawks as a package in 2003 and the Braves and their stadium in 2007, all of which was done because paying down debt in the short term was more pressing than the long-term value of owning a sports team. They got over a billion dollars for the Braves, but the deal for the Thrashers and Hawks looks short-sighted in retrospect, as both teams were sold together for just over $200M. The Thrashers later moved to Winnipeg in a deal that covered most of that, and the Hawks later sold for more than $800M.
WCW may have received a stay of execution if the product was doing well, but so far as extensions of grace go, spinning off the company into its own entity and continuing to air Nitro would have only done so much. The world — or at least the United States — was souring on professional wrestling. The WWF’s ratings bonanza wouldn’t last, and their victory in the Monday Night Wars was pyrrhic — they may have extracted far more value out of their $2M investment than anyone anticipated, but Vince McMahon hardly deserves any credit for driving WCW out of business, and WCW’s executives, particularly Eric Bischoff and Vince Russo, probably deserve a little less than they get. The company was a victim of capitalism, a line item in an endless series of Warner Brothers mergers where the fact that Warner is expected to produce its own content in any capacity is a perpetual albatross around its neck. WCW stayed in Ted Turner’s portfolio as long as it did because he was sentimental about wrestling, but also because he was the kind of media figurehead who liked to feel like he was making something, and also the kind of media figurehead who knew the value of vertical integration — wrestling was theoretically cheap to produce and could, under the right circumstances, generate a lot of money in ticket sales and advertising. If you own two cable networks and have hours of airtime to burn despite your ownership of three sports franchises and a vast film and television library, you could do worse than Turner did in pouring as much money into WCW as he did before the reins of his empire were wrenched away.
The doomers among us point to a similar scenario for AEW, whose place in the media landscape is perceived as shaky given that Warner Brothers is once again up for sale. Any suitor large enough to absorb Warner in 2025, whether that be the Skydance/Paramount monstrosity run by the Ellisons or Comcast, has ties to the WWE, who’ve used their own incessant drive to create content to secure deals with Netflix and Disney, to say nothing of whatever they’re looking to get out of their working relationship with “number two company” TNA. Where would an even tighter landscape leave AEW? Given that it’s a privately held company with the backing of a billionaire, likely in much better shape than WCW, which found themselves without the luxury of a timeslot and without the backing of a billionaire in short order.
They have a better roster, too, which is amazing considering the lengths WWE has gone to spread its influence in Mexico, Japan, and across the American indies. You can complain about AEW’s direction all you like, but they’ve yet to field a roster so dire that someone like “Above Average” Mike Sanders arguably earns his keep as the focal point of the show. All of this is to say that I kinda fuckin’ hate the Natural Born Thrillers, y’all. Jump the paywall if you wanna see my vibes-based rankings of them.
Up Next: I seem destined to stay in the year 2000 forever, as the 288-sided dice leads me to episode 231 of WCW Monday Nitro, the 2/21/00 edition emanating from Sacramento, California. It’s got a steel cage match between Hogan and The Total Package, as well as a Terry Funk/Dustin Rhodes tag team, but Funk and Rhodes are wrestling the Harris Brothers, and I can’t imagine there will be much to love about sub-three matches where La Parka is getting turned out by The Artist Formerly Known as Prince Iaukea. We are in the goddamn doldrums, y’all, but I’m willing to bet that the die will turn favorably next week, sending me back to the safe place of 95-98 WCW, where the big boys play.
Colette Arrand