WCW Doesn't Let Arn Anderson's Retirement Get in the Way of a Bummer Night | WCW Monday Nitro 9/1/97
On a night where you'd expect WCW to rally around one of the all-time boys, they get stomped by the nWo.
This episode of Monday Nitro is dedicated to the memory of Arn Anderson. In 2026, that feels somewhat strange — Arn is still with us, and tribute shows are generally presented in memory of wrestlers who have passed. Arn’s sudden retirement hit differently though — he was 38 years old when his in-ring career ended, and while it’s a cliche to point to how that age, which once meant you were on the supposed “senior tour” of professional wrestling, is when many wrestlers hit their prime, I cannot for the life of me tell you what Anderson’s “prime” was. He was so excellent for so long, so capable of refashioning himself to fit any need a wrestling promotion had of him, that his worst year, whatever that even is, would qualify as most wrestlers’ best.
Anderson’s worst year probably is 1997, at least from an in-ring perspective, and that’s because there wasn’t much of it. He wrestled eight times that year, six times on tape, most of them brief and booked to keep Anderson out of the action. This had to be agonizing. Anderson was and is a master of the wrestling promo, of making every word he said seem real beyond reckoning, as if the fights were real and meant more than money, and a lot of his WCW promo work from this point forward, as great as it is, feels like a frank, honest self-assessment, a man grappling with not knowing what he was if he was no longer a professional wrestler.
He figured it out, obviously. He became a road agent and remained on television in his capacity as Ric Flair’s Enforcer. Some of that run was incredible. Some of it seemed written to mock him and Flair. Regardless, he never gave less than his all to the material because that’s the standard he set as an active competitor, and fuck it if Arn Anderson was going to lapse as a worker because his neck made it impossible to wrestle. This was something he carried forward in his limited screentime on WWE television, as well as in his role as The Only Member of the Nightmare Family You Wanted to Hear From on an Episode of AEW Dynamite. He’s the fucking man. The Greatest Wrestler of All Fucking Time. The less said about the nWo parody of his retirement speech (its great sin is how fucking long it is, besides how it should have waited a week), the better. WCW also probably missed out on one trillion dollars by not doing a “tradition bites” shirt with the Four Horsemen logo where four horses have the IV branded on the ass.
UP NEXT: Early on in the MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST project I had a quiet realization that if I stuck it out I could probably write a series of zines about my favorite Nitro Guys as their run as wrestlers on the show came to an end — where does a guy like Buff Bagwell start, and where does he end, and what does that say about him/Nitro/wrestling in the 1990s was the basic concept. Then I was like “wouldn’t it be fun to do random die rolls to determine what episode I was going to watch next?” which it was, but having hit the episode celebrating Anderson’s career, I find myself a little frustrated that I’ve only written about two of his 39 matches on the program. So the MONDAY NITRO MASTERLIST will be taking a more traditional path through the bulk of WCW Monday Nitro for the foreseeable future, journeying back to September 1995 for episode 3 and moving week by week until I inevitably can’t handle Dungeon of Doom-era WCW or get curious about Jason Jett or whatever. What’s on episode #3, you ask? Well, American Males vs. Harlem Heat for the WCW World Tag Team Titles, Paul Orndorff vs. Johnny B. Badd, and Ric Flair vs. Brian Pillman. Arn Anderson worked a dark match. I will be no closer to an Arn Anderzine.
Colette Arrand