Wrestling consensuses you disagree with

[westlondonmist]

43 minutes ago, Zaheer said:

Eric Bischoff was a visionary and the WCW rise was brilliant.
He's not - he got tons of money and used it. Had a short stint on top then it fell apart. Has done very little of relevant since and been stealing a living off it.

I'd say even TNA ran longer and has been better than the VERY SHORT time WCW was good.

 

I think most people think that about Bischoff. He spent lots of money, had the company in financial ruin and apparently losing 5m a month which is why he was let go. WWF was having massive problems and they took advantage, once they got their act together Bischoff didn't know what to do. 

[Snitsky's back acne]

18 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I think the "is it art?" stuff misses the point, personally. Video games routinely go through the same debate, and what you see from a lot of both audiences is very similar - they see a medium they love being disparaged and disrespected, and they think that if they could just convince people that it's "art", then there's a shortcut to being taken seriously. They want it to be "art" to avoid criticism, rather than for it to be opened up to critique as art. 

Personally, I think it is art, but usually bad art.

.What constitutes "bad art"? I'm not really wanting to pull at that thread btw, I'm just giving an example of the kind of questions I have had to put up with over the past 6 years.

It's like when I put the term "real" in my thesis - the push back is "Well, what do you mean by real? Objective, subjective or intersubjective realism? Are you coming at this from an existential, nihilistic or pragmatic viewpoint? Your reality is different than my reality"

At the end of the day. it's only saddos like me who sit around with other people who like to over analyse everything while scoffing custard creams and crustless sandwich quarters that go "Actually, it's not art". Nobody else truly cares, or at least cares enough to travel abroad and give a conference paper about it or spend six years writing a 95,000 word thesis on it.

It's not art. It's pro wrestling.

[ReturnOfTheMack]

I feel like I remember that at the time of The Invasion there was already talk about WWF changing its name, so I thought they would lose in order to do it in storyline.

[FUM]

2 hours ago, westlondonmist said:

I think most people think that about Bischoff. He spent lots of money, had the company in financial ruin and apparently losing 5m a month which is why he was let go. WWF was having massive problems and they took advantage, once they got their act together Bischoff didn't know what to do. 

Weirdly, despite the ratings, I’m not even convinced WCW was ever more popular than WWF. Casual fans will mention a Bret Hart or HBK before they mention a NWO (this version of Hogan included) or Sting. I get it’s easy to say the proof is in the ratings but it’s the one thing that is an outlier. WWF sold more merch, done bigger PPV buy rates and was mentioned more in pop culture. 

This is from what I remember right enough, so happy to be put in my place - it’s just a general feeling I always have about the time. I was young so maybe that’s just my UK head of looking at it because WCW never made as much of a mark over here.

Edited August 14, 2025 by FUM
Added a sexy boy to cover more of the timeframe

[Carbomb]

19 minutes ago, FUM said:

Weirdly, despite the ratings, I’m not even convinced WCW was ever more popular than WWF. Casual fans will mention a Bret Hart or HBK before they mention a NWO (this version of Hogan included) or Sting. I get it’s easy to say the proof is in the ratings but it’s the one thing that is an outlier. WWF sold more merch, done bigger PPV buy rates and was mentioned more in pop culture. 

This is from what I remember right enough, so happy to be put in my place - it’s just a general feeling I always have about the time. I was young so maybe that’s just my UK head of looking at it because WCW never made as much of a mark over here.

That said, people remember Ric Flair, and I'm not entirely sure that's purely down to his WWF/E runs. Goldberg as well, perhaps?

 

As regards the "wrestling is art/not art" debate, I'll just say that, from a pure point of categorisation, wrestling must be an art. It's not a science, it's not a sport, it's not a philosophy, and it's not a humanity. If there was a formalised structure of education in it, it would be at a performing arts school.

Whether or not it's definitively an "art" in that people feel it's creatively and culturally worthwhile, I don't know. From a cultural studies perspective, I'd say that it's a fairly concrete example of cultural production, in terms of the definition of culture as the creation, signification, connotation, manipulation, and exploitation of meaning. As an endeavour, it creates a mediascape and ideoscape of messages which are imbued with meanings specific to its consumers. Whether its the roar of the crowd intended to be evoked by the simple sound of glass shattering throughout the arena, or the knowledge that someone standing in the ring before a match is of a high-enough profile that you should throw streamers matching their colour as a mark of respect, or the subversive "oooooh!" to be heard when Nick Aldis calls Ricky Morton "Randy the Ram", these are all skilful displays of inculcating the consumer with an idea that means something to them, to then be pulled out of the Rolodex of emotional experiences in their mind with the push of a button or the utterance of a specific phrase.

By my personal lights, that's a form of art. That it's usually done badly in the sphere of pro-wrestling is, to me, neither here nor there.

Edited August 14, 2025 by Carbomb
John Moncur

[The Gaffer]

5 minutes ago, FUM said:

Weirdly, despite the ratings, I’m not even convinced WCW was ever more popular than WWF. Casual fans will mention a Bret Hart or HBK before they mention a NWO (this version of Hogan included) or Sting. I get it’s easy to say the proof is in the ratings but it’s the one thing that is an outlier. WWF sold more merch, done bigger PPV buy rates and was mentioned more in pop culture. 

This is from what I remember right enough, so happy to be put in my place - it’s just a general feeling I always have about the time. I was young so maybe that’s just my UK head of looking at it because WCW never made as much of a mark over here.

Yeah I get a bit of this too. 

I seem to recall WWE even using it as a party line (an Off The Record interview, if memory serves) that when they started taking the gloves off by 1997 Nitro was a bigger TV show but that WWE was doing bigger business overall.

Certainly by the end of its run there's a sort of valid argument that WCW - throughout the Monday Night Wars - essentially had a run on top as a TV show first and foremost, whereas WWE's run on top is as a company/brand that happens to have a hot TV show. 

I'll chime in with two more off the back of that:

- WCW always looked cheap compared to WWE. A woeful viewpoint that I've seen put across as consensus. The sets we know were far more fun and varied but WCW's production across the board looked far sharper and tighter than WWEs I would say even before the Monday Night Wars - probably 93/94 - right up until 98/99. Not 'better' - per say - as that's subjective, but your average 99 Nitro still often looks more professional than a 99 Raw. 

- I've almost always enjoyed Raw more. I know everyone's hip to 1996 Raw being great now, but even Nitro at its absolute peak doesn't do much for me. I don't like how Nitro was formatted as a show. Technically brilliant matches you knew were essentially meaningless to any narrative/ascendancy at roughly the same spot with roughly the same people every week, the NWO standing around being smug, the complete lack of backstage VTs, promo packages etc until Russo came in, incredibly long pauses in the show for the commentary desk to go over events around the company whilst the crowd stood around bored drinking beer, Mean Gene fucking everywhere, the Disco Inferno fucking everywhere...it's all retrospective because I wasn't watching week to week when it was hot and I know what they were doing was groundbreaking in a sense but the tone of Nitro's never done it for me and I'd rather watch a poor Raw. 

[FUM]

1 minute ago, Carbomb said:

That said, people remember Ric Flair, and I'm not entirely sure that's purely down to his WWF/E runs. Goldberg as well, perhaps?

I’m talking in casual fan terms as opposed to wrestling fans and I’d say they’d still mention Bret Hart or HBK before Goldberg. Possibly before Flair too but that one is up for debate.

[westlondonmist]

14 minutes ago, FUM said:

Weirdly, despite the ratings, I’m not even convinced WCW was ever more popular than WWF. Casual fans will mention a Bret Hart or HBK before they mention a NWO (this version of Hogan included) or Sting. I get it’s easy to say the proof is in the ratings but it’s the one thing that is an outlier. WWF sold more merch, done bigger PPV buy rates and was mentioned more in pop culture. 

This is from what I remember right enough, so happy to be put in my place - it’s just a general feeling I always have about the time. I was young so maybe that’s just my UK head of looking at it because WCW never made as much of a mark over here.

WCW was doing bigger PPV buys for quite a while though, domestically at least. WWF's buy numbers in 1996 and 97 were atrocious, not WCW 2000 levels but still bad. I don't know about merch sales, but I suppose the big issue was while a lot of NWO tees sold, probably not a lot else in WCW did. And how many NWO tees does one person need? WWF had a lot more stars or factions who would have their own merchandise. 

  I do think a big part is WCW wasn't that popular in the UK, it had it's fans (I was one of them) but WWF was more popular even at it's lowest points. 

 

[Carbomb]

12 minutes ago, FUM said:

I’m talking in casual fan terms as opposed to wrestling fans and I’d say they’d still mention Bret Hart or HBK before Goldberg. Possibly before Flair too but that one is up for debate.

I was also thinking casual fans as well - not that they would be more likely to mention Flair or Goldberg, but that they would mention them at all. But overall, I'm broadly in agreement with you.

[BomberPat]

I basically never watched WCW when it was around - I wasn't aware of it when I was a wrestling fan as a kid, beyond the vague sense that there was another wrestling promotion from the WWF, and by the time I got back into wrestling in 2000, it was on its way out and borderline unwatchable. I've watched a ton of it since, and for all its faults I would generally err towards preferring a lot of it to the WWF. Funnily enough, for a lot of the reasons that @The Gaffer listed as the downsides of WCW compared to the WWF, and I expect I probably would have found those things off-putting if I'd watched as a kid in ways that I don't know.

Increasingly, I've realised that I think TV wrestling is at its best when it's treated as a live show that happens to be filmed, rather than a TV show that happens to be live, and I think that distinction is important. Something the Deadlock podcast brought up recently was that one of the reasons the nWo never worked in WWE is that you'd watch RAW, and it was very clearly segmented - the next couple of minutes are the nWo angle, and then it's the next thing - whereas in WCW it felt like a live show, and the nWo showing up felt like something that genuinely interrupted the flow of that show, and it felt a lot more organic and dynamic as a result. That sense was completely gone the more WCW tried to emulate the WWF, but their presentation felt a lot more like a genuine live sporting event - albeit one in the weird universe of wrestling - in ways that WWE actively tried to avoid.

 

In terms of popularity, it's definitely difficult to gauge from the UK, where WCW never got close to the WWF. I wonder if it genuinely felt bigger than the WWF at its height in the US - it sort of must have done, right? But what it never had was the kind of brand recognition that the WWF had - Bischoff tells stories of being frustrated that sports commentators on Turner networks would react to something mad happening by saying, "it's like something out of the WWF!", and there's stories about Sting turning up for conventions or meet and greet events where he was billed as "WWF wrestler Sting". WWF, even at its lowest point, was still just seen as the name for professional wrestling, the same way that people might call any MMA "Ultimate Fighting". They also never had as big or as effective a merchandising or advertising operation, so you were less likely to see WCW action figures prominently displayed in shops, all these little things that aren't really quantifiable in the way that ticket sales and ratings are, but which play into the sense of a product's "popularity" - a kid playing with the same couple of action figures, and watching the same one or two WWF videos obsessively every week, dressing up as a WWF wrestler for Halloween, would be a familiar illustration of how "popular" the company was, but it's not reflected in any stats.

[air_raid]

15 hours ago, HarmonicGenerator said:

Consensus: Steve Austin’s heel run was terrible.

I never enjoyed him more than his heel run. I didn’t like Babyface Austin at any point, but now you were supposed to boo him? I was on board with his guitar playing, Spike Dudley beating, watch listening ways.

For me it’s the notion that the very idea was fundamentally flawed. People seem convinced that turning a still-very-popular Stone Cold right as business was peaking was an awful idea and the decline that followed proves it.

I don’t agree with it at all. If you think about how long Austin had as a top face before he got hurt (near 3 years), then how long Rock managed to hover around the top then supplant Stone Cold as top hero while was injured, leading up to Mania XVII (around 2 years overlapping) you’re basically looking at the perfect timing for the culmination, settling the argument babyface vs babyface. Add on top business being where it was, and that WCW had bit the dust, and Mania XVII is the clearest natural “end of chapter” I think I’ve seen in wrestling history. But you need to ask “OK, so what do we do next” thereafter? What were the alternatives? A couple more months of Austin vs HHH and Rock vs Angle, then Austin vs Angle and Rock vs HHH AGAIN? Completed it mate. Try again with Jericho amongst the real main eventers when he’s just feuded over a piss-laced brew? Turn The Undertaker again even if he’s already had boring matches with both Austin and Rock for a couple of years? The seeds had been not been sown for the semi-regular freshening up of the main event scene and we were heading into a barren summer without drastic change, and the most tempting option was clearly “turn Steve” just as they’d reached a similar crossroad with Bret 4 years earlier only on a bigger scale, box office wise. After doing “how does Steve overcome these odds” for so long, it’s an almost obvious twist to make a villain out of a character you’ve built up as hard to topple, in the name of someone else being a hero. Add on top that you can finally anoint The Rock as undisputed top goodie by having him dethrone Austin properly in the end without splitting your crowd and… why wouldn’t you turn Steve? I’ve heard Prichard and plenty of fans talk about killing the goose that lays the golden egg but the momentum was such that they did monster business through 2000 with Austin on the shelf until Q4. With his reconstructed neck leaving him on borrowed time, I can hear one side or the other pitching to make Stone Cold the bad guy and get some value from him getting defeated decisively before it’s too late. Timing was perfect, and no, it wasn’t the idea that was flawed.

Three things for me fucked how the idea came to fruition, and two of those were (at least in part) not really the WWFs fault.

The first was WrestleMania happening in Texas (hear me out). No doubt when they booked it (I’m guessing late 99/early 2000, they always seemed to announce next years Mania at Mania at the time) they had designs on Austin’s glorious return from injury being capped off by winning the title back as THE hero (probably from Triple H) before “more than 70,000 screaming fans” (who will be part of the biggest WrestleMania of all time*) in the city in which he made his name… before, in 2024 parlance, they had to pivot. And no doubt, turning the hero en route to what seems a clear and obvious bit of “hometown hero” booking sounds like a masterstroke. There’s only two problems with that. Firstly, and selfishly, for a big chunk of fans my age, who were too young to have seen Mania VI at the time and/or unspoiled, this was our generations equivalent. Two titans at the height of their careers, this was going to be our Hogan vs Warrior. It shouldn’t have been turned into Rasputin The Friendly Russian vs Professor Werner Von Brawn, but that’s what Texas did to it. It would have been unbelievable to do Stone Cold vs The Rock in 2001 in a packed stadium in California (here we come*) or the North East - two favourites, pick a side, like Hogan vs Warrior, but fate had other ideas. Secondly and interconnected, because it was Texas, the finish didn’t fully manifest as a heel turn because Austin’s people still cheered - their desired destination was Steve winning and no matter how you get there, just get there.* The Rock had pretty much always been Steve’s enemy so that made him their enemy and McMahon be damned, the ends justified the means for Houston as much as for the Stone Cold character. As a result, the live crowd response was a minuscule fraction as vitriolic as we would have seen on neutral ground. Like a Villa Park semi final between two London sides back in the day or something.

Secondly, The Rock committed to filming one or the other Mummy franchise films which put the kibosh on him playing an active role for several months in the potential build to any serious revenge showdown with the Rattlesnake, which they may have wanted to do first time round even as early as SummerSlam, especially if (with writing on the wall for Dwayne as a full timer) they thought heel Austin vs face HHH might have to be the end game for Mania XVIII - and it certainly was thrown around after Hunter did his quad. Not only did this mean they weren’t able to commit immediately to Rocky’s revenge (and I still can’t believe the only singles rematch they had in 01/02 season was at Rebellion), it also meant that in needing time to create and build up the Two Man Power Trip story for the split to mean something leading to an eventual match initially planned for SummerSlam, other plans for the main event babyface positions had to be hastily made. And therein lay the biggest problem - the execution, for which they only had themselves to blame. Wholeheartedly.

When you commit to baddies the level of 2001 Triple H and a freshly-turned Stone Cold Steve Austin, you need to have your ducks in a row beforehand for decent opposition, and they really didn’t. Boy howdy, they didn’t. The Undertaker had really been struggling to look anything more than crap for a good few months (Mania miracle with Hunter aside) and tagging him up with little brother against the TMPT wasn’t really offering up anything fresh ; Hunter had spent the best part of a year wrestling them both already, and it wasn’t the most impressive first avenue for the Bionic Redneck as a baddie to be matched up with two blokes he’d also spent years (many, in Takers case) wrestling. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen everything, and we’ve ridden off. On the grass. And ride off, the viewers did, in droves - Austin/HHH vs Taker/Kane wasn’t great in the ring either even if the Room 101-threatened Kane beating H3 in that chain match at Judgment Day was probably better than it had any right to be. They made the right call, artistically, to shift from Benoit vs Angle and Jericho vs Regal/E&C to putting Team Chris in place of the “Brothers of Destruction” but for posing an actual threat to Austin and Trips, not particularly commercially viable even if the planned double feud of Austin vs Jericho for the belt and Benoit vs HHH would have led to some decent matches ; of course, injuries on both sides put paid to that plan too and soon the eventual redirect to the “invasion” was in the works, a hasty fake reversion to babyface for Steve, him sucking up to Steph and playing the guitar and all the rest, the various merits of which are not for me to say. Overall however in terms of execution for life after the AstroDome you have to mark the WWF booking braintrust “could have done better” if you’re feeling kind. Not that I think there was much else they could have done, mid 2000 wasn’t probably a time they were planning for a dearth of top babyfaces with Rock on the throne and Austin waiting to come back. I mean, they could have gone full bore with Booker T and DDP as babyfaces right from the off given (a) they were both longtime babyface characters Down South with multiple World title wins under their belt and (b) their fans would have popped for the novelty, but we know that wouldn’t have happened because of plans to run WCW standalone, the need to present WCW to the fans as “the enemy,” and McMahons overriding reluctance to present anyone he didn’t make as equal to those he did - and I’m not sure Hunter would have been too thrilled about it either.

In writing this it makes me laugh complaining about people wrestling the same opponents for years (2-3) or many years (5-6) juxtaposed to later years where, we’d end up brought to tears by how many times they had to run back to, for instance, Cena vs Big Show or Ziggler vs Kofi. Also, my autocorrect thought I was going for Tripe as a pseudonym for HHH, didn’t realise an iPhone 14 was capable of such a critique.

* For tickets, call 1800 877 1414, in California call 213 480 3232.

12 hours ago, Chris B said:

Didn't you write your thesis on wrestling?

I for one at the very least wrote my Company Report (equivalent of a diss) for my MScEcon about the rise, fall and re-rise of the WWF/E between 1985 and 2005. So I can say that while it’s not a doctorate, I at least did my Masters in Thuganomics.

[tiger_rick]

43 minutes ago, The Gaffer said:

I seem to recall WWE even using it as a party line (an Off The Record interview, if memory serves) that when they started taking the gloves off by 1997 Nitro was a bigger TV show but that WWE was doing bigger business overall.

Certainly by the end of its run there's a sort of valid argument that WCW - throughout the Monday Night Wars - essentially had a run on top as a TV show first and foremost, whereas WWE's run on top is as a company/brand that happens to have a hot TV show. 

That's the WWF narrative at play. WCW had a couple of year window where they were killing them everywhere. It's not wrong to say that WCW only cared about the TV numbers though. Even in late 1998, WCW's business was great. TV ratings were excellent, buys were good, pre-sales were massive, merch was strong, 1998 revenues were set to be huge and the stupid bastards completely imploded over the next 6 months because they were completely obsessed with winning on Monday nights.

That said, I do agree with @FUM original point. I imagine a lot of the reason is just geography. I was a massive WWF mark. I think the whole country was. The only WCW I had any access to was the video game on the N64. Even though a couple of hundred thousand people watched WCW over here, watching their PPVs, picking up video tapes and merch was all impossible and they didn't run any shows here until they were done. That was always the biggest difference with the WWF, the visibility of product and just how global they felt.

The brilliant opening bits on all their shows from about 1995 were absolute bullshit but a massive part of just how big it felt to me.

 

[BomberPat]

I think @air_raid is exactly right - an Austin heel turn was in no way a purely bad idea; the WWF was on top of the world, with no competition, and Stone Cold vs. Vince McMahon had been done to death. It wasn't a swerve for the sake of a swerve, either - the seeds had been planted that Austin was obsessive about getting the title, and would do anything in the world to get it back, and telling us to not trust anyone, and not trusting anyone turned out to include him. He decided that becoming champion again meant more to him than his morals, and the guy you thought was a working class hero on your side selling out and siding with the boss is at least as relatable a story as the wish fulfilment "he gets to beat up his boss!" stuff that they always hammered home was at the heart of Austin's success. Hell, going all the way back to the start of Austin vs. McMahon, McMahon's beef with Austin was that he wouldn't be the kind of champion that Vince wanted him to be - now, later in his career and a little more desperate, Austin was ready to be that guy.

The problem was not having a babyface good enough to play off him. I'm sure there's a Jerry Jarrett adage about not turning your top babyface unless you have at least a year's worth of opponents ready and waiting for him. You turn the top guy heel when there's a new top face ready to be anointed, and there just wasn't. The Rock is out the door, and while they might have thought it was worth giving Jericho and Benoit a shot, they weren't anywhere near that level, and they can't seriously have thought that Undertaker and Kane were there either. I don't think it would have gone well, and it was too soon after they had last feuded (though at least had potential to be interesting with the roles reversed), but it seems the logical move would have been heel Austin feuding with babyface Triple H, and I assume the long-term plan was for that to happen post-Power Trip team break-up if Triple H hadn't got hurt, but I'm not sure why they didn't just go straight to it.

I think it was the Invasion that ruined it for most people, though. Because there wasn't any logic behind it any more. It wasn't paranoid Stone Cold aligned to Vince McMahon any more, it was Austin leading a faction that nobody wanted to see him in, with Vince ill-suited to a babyface role, and all of the problems that everyone knows about that sunk that angle. 

 

Looking through that entire run, though, Austin's PPV opponents from Backlash 2001 to Survivor Series 2001 (leaving out Insurrextion and Rebellion as UK only shows) are:
(w/Triple H) vs. Kane & The Undertaker 
The Undertaker
Chris Jericho and Chris Benoit
(w/Undertaker, Jericho, Kane, Kurt Angle & The Undertaker) vs. Booker T, The Dudley Boyz, DDP & Rhyno
Kurt Angle
Kurt Angle
Kurt Angle and Rob Van Dam
(w/Kurt Angle, Rob Van Dam, Booker T & Shane McMahon) vs. The Rock, Chris Jericho, The Undertaker, Kane & The Big Show

So two of those are Invasion and Survivor Series, where the matches are bigger than him and not really about him. That's six unique opponents for the entire heel Austin run on PPV, and the Undertaker is the closest they get to a tried and tested babyface main eventer, and he really wasn't that in 2001. The remainder are people that it was worth taking a punt on as headliners, but not as headline babyfaces at the level of a Stone Cold Steve Austin. And if that's the case, you don't turn Stone Cold Steve Austin heel.

The Invasion was probably an albatross over some of those matches more than it helped them, too. Kurt Angle was untested as a main event babyface, but him beating heel Austin to win the WWF Title, as a full-fledged American hero at the first PPV after 9/11? Take the Invasion out of the equation, and that would have been a bigger story than it was.

[Chris B]

5 hours ago, Snitsky's back acne said:

What constitutes "bad art"?

What constitutes art?

[Carbomb]

Look at that fucking Invasion blow-off match. Ridiculous - a half-in, half-out "wrestler" in Shane McMahon, one pure WWF guy, and one guy clearly WWF despite his wCw past.

If they hadn't fucked DDP over for being a friendly goofball, he could have been one of the Invasion's biggest stars to give it some weight, and could've been in the blow-off match.