In light of the fact that there was a Who Killed WCW documentary series – yes, another one – I figured that it would only be appropriate that I revisit that lovely period of World Championship Wrestling in the year 2000. Specifically, the first PPV of the Bischoff/Russo reboot era… which took place a week after said era began on Nitro where they stripped everyone of all the titles and divided the roster between the Millionaire Club of old guys and the New Blood group of young guys… and of course, hilarity ensues as a result.
For the sake of prosperity, I went back and re-read all my old musings on the WCW 2000 shows that took place prior to this. I then went ahead and RE-WATCHED the aforementioned shows. Hell, I even went back and sampled a few Nitros… what I witnessed was fucking horrible and I never want to watch that shit again.
With that in mind… is this new collaboration between Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff the shot in the arm that WCW needed? Well, of course not, we wouldn’t be talking about Who Killed WCW TWO FUCKING DECADES LATER if it did… so right now, my only concern would be whether this tried to usher in that new era of WCW that was promised… or was it just the same old shit with a new coat of paint?
Well, let’s find it’s the same old shite. There, the bandage is off. Let’s get this over with.
So here’s the deal… it’s a giant reset and all the titles have been vacated. Most of the titles are filled here via a bunch of tournaments with a bunch of short matches. A lot of those matches have stupid shit happening because this is Vince Russo at the creative helm and Eric Bischoff is simply along for the ride while Hulk Hogan is in a good mood (for the most part.)
Normally, what I’d do is that I divide the matches up between tournament matches and the non-tourney matches. There’s three tournaments to follow here (crowning new World, Tag, and U.S. Champions on a single night) and they’re all more or less the same thing. Lots of stuff happening at once, all the matches are short, no reason to care about anything because you’re not given the time to care because we gotta go to the next thing to not lose the viewers, bro… even though you’re on PPV and what viewers decided to tune already gave you their money, so why even worry about that? Just book a quality PPV show and give those casuals… well, what causes? This show did a shit buyrate and none of the casuals cared enough to buy the fucking show. If anything, the few watching probably pirated the fucking thing.
I wouldn’t have gone that far… this show really wasn’t worth the effort.
The whole New Blood thing is kinda tossed out the window when your stable includes guys like Jeff Jarrett and Scott Steiner, who aren’t what I would call “new” blood. This isn’t a knock on either guy, but when the whole philosophy behind New Blood is pushing younger guys, you’d figure someone that isn’t closing in on their mid-30s at the time would be a more suitable candidate. Sadly, there wasn’t anyone on that age spectrum that could qualify and so we have Jeff Jarrett doing his usual Slapnuts thing while we have a bunch of young guys wearing new black t-shirts that aren’t nWo shirts, but yes, we’re totally redoing the nWo because that’s the only thing in our wheelhouse that works. After all, if it worked before, it must work again.
But yeah, let’s do the Tag Tournament first.
Lex Luger and Ric Flair (wrestling in a shirt and slacks) defeated The Mamalukes (Big Vito & Johnny The Bull) in the first of two semi-finals to advance. At some point, Vince Russo comes out to cut a promo because that’s what this program neeed was more Vince Russo talking… this is what really killed WCW; not the Fingerpoke, not the Streak ending, not the millions of dollars lost. It was Vince Russo talking. That’s what turned away viewers! Anyway, the Harris Boys show up to make it 4-on-2, but the old guys manage to win anyway… fine, whatever
In the other three-way semi-finale, Buff Bagwell & Shane Douglas defeated Harlem Heat 2000 (Stevie Ray and Big T, the former Ahmed Johnson and I forgot this was even a thing) in a short as shit match to advance. This leads us to the finals that saw Shane Douglas square off with his (legit) hated foe Ric Flair (I’d imagine Flair wasn’t too fond of Douglas either) in the ring and then the team of Kronik would help Bagwell and Douglas win the tag titles… okay, fine. Whatever. That’s that.
There’s a match between Jimmy Hart and radio personality Mancow that is a thing that is there for the lulz, but Mancow hits poor Jimmy for the win in a short match… oh, wait, Jimmy Hart is supposed to be the heel… but then out comes Billy Kidman to beat up on poor Jimmy, which draws out Hulk Hogan and all of a sudden, people feel bad for Jimmy… which is it, you dumb fucks?
Scott Steiner defeated The Wall via DQ when Steiner poked Wall in the eye and Wall ended up chokeslamming the referee through a table, which caused another ref to call for the DQ. This was stupid, but Steiner advances in the U.S. Title tourney so that’s a step up. This is followed by what is teased to be Mike Awesome (fresh off dropping the ECW belt to Tazzzzzz at a house show somewhere) facing off against Ernest “The Cat”… actually, never mind. Bam Bam Bigelow comes in and kills the Cat to take his spot. And we almost get a nice hoss fight out of it with two big fuckers beating the fuck out of each other… and then the Cat comes back to kick Bam Bam in the head so he could dance… and Awesome murders him to advance to the U.S. semis.
Sting defeated Booker (no T since he lost it to Big T… the less said about that stupid angle) to advance in the U.S. tourney while Vampiro defeated Billy “Can’t Draw At A Flea Market” Kidman with an assist from Hulk Hogan, who is apparently upset about the beating poor Jimmy suffered… hey, the Sting/Booker match was the best match I’ve seen so far… which isn’t saying much because it was still largely a thing that happened, but it’s a better than usual thing that happened. The Vamp/Kidman match could’ve been decent before the bullshit Hogan run-in. Self-fulfilling prophecy indeed.
Oh, and Hogan goes on a rampage backstage and is cornered by COPS! With GUNS! On Hulk Hogan… welp.
As for the rest of this U.S. Title tournament, Mike Awesome submits to Scott Steiner’s Steiner Recliner (so much for that Youth movement) while Sting goes over Vampiro in a thing that happened. The tournament would end with Scott Steiner defeating Sting to win the vacant U.S. title. Lots of shenanigans and all that. It’s not even worth keeping track of all this shit.
Some titles were filled via single matches. Terry Funk defeated Norman Smiley in a hardcore match to win the Hardcore title, while Chris Candido would win the Cruiserweight title in a nothing happening multi-man match. I’ve got nothing to say about these matches; they were short and stuff happened. Whatever.
And in the main event, Jeff Jarrett defeated Diamond Dallas Page in the World title tournament finals to win the title with an assist from Kimberly Page, who turned on poor DDP via el-kabong to the head. For context, Kimberly got el-kabonged by Jarrett at some point before hand, so her being here was supposed to be lead to people thinking she’s supporting DDP… but it’s a swerve. Problem was that even my dumbass younger self who had only been watching wrestling for a couple years and was mostly exposed to the Attitude Era stuff figured that Kim was turning on Page… and it didn’t help that you had all the other bullshit beforehand to lessen whatever impact this may have had had people actually bought into it, which no one did… unless you were an idiot.
And what’s Russo’s excuse about wrestling fans? They think this stuff is real? Is that it? Dude, everyone I knew saw this coming. There was never a shadow of a doubt that Jarrett was winning this thing. The swerve would’ve been having DDP win the whole thing and he’d joined the New Blood, which is just a rebranded nWo at this point and why are we even pretending?
So I suppose the question is whether I came into this show expecting to hate it. Did I ever really give it a fair shake? More to the point, would I have minded all this stuff back in the day? I think that back then, I would’ve been more lenient and forgiving of certain things. This was the wrestling that I was first exposed to back in the day. This is how I knew things worked. But even back in the day, I knew which parts of the show were genuinely great and which parts didn’t. I wasn’t blindly accepting everything as great on the surface; even in WWF, I knew there was stuff that sucked and this was during a time when I wrote a short blurb about why the WWF was better than WCW.
WWF had better storylines because I cared more about the characters involved. And a lot of that was due to the talent involved. When you have talent that people cared about and are telling stories that people care about, that’s what usually drives the show. All the other stuff – the less than savory stuff that’s not quite as good or is rather god-awful – that stuff can be forgiven or skipped over in favor of sticking with the good stuff. And yes, Vince Russo had a large part in that show doing great stuff… but he wasn’t the be-all, end-all. He was a cog in the system that produced great stuff and when that cog moved to another system that was not quite as productive of great stuff… well, there’s only so much you could do.
Whatever magic Russo had working in WWF… clearly stayed in WWF. He tried the same tricks and stories that he did in the other company, but lacked the tools and foresight to recreate that success. People can point to mild rating boosts all they want, but if those ratings aren’t translating into ad revenues, pay per views, or merch sales, they mean nothing. That’s why nobody gives a shit about WWE hitting lower viewership numbers nowadays than they did twenty years – they’re making more bank than ever before.
I’m getting off track here, because I really don’t want to talk about this show… but I’ll just end it on this note. Spring Stampede 2000 promised me a brand new era… and all I got was the same old shit with a new black shirt.
dtm666 