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As those of you who have been reading my wrestling blog (and shame on you if you haven't been) will know, I'm going back and rewatching a ton of my old wrestling videos from back in the day. Most recently, I've been going through what could be considered WCW's golden years of 1996 and 1997, and I have to say, I've been eating this stuff up. For as much as WCW has been demonized in the years since its demise, there was some very good stuff there pretty much from the beginning of the nWo period onward, and today I'd like to talk about some of that.
The Cruiserweights
This is probably the one thing that even WCW's biggest detractors can't argue. WCW had, without a doubt, the greatest collection of lightweight talent in the history of the buisness, and even as big of a ROHbot as I am, that includes Ring Of Honor.
For starters, there was the core group of cruiserweight mainstays in Dean Malenko, Chris Jericho, Eddy Guerrero, Rey Mysterio Jr, and Ultimo Dragon. More often than not, the Cruiserweight Title was around the waist of one of these guys through the glory years, a move I can't argue with because, whatever greater accomplishments they had already achieved or would go on to, these five were in the prime of their careers at this point, and were regularly having matches so good that they almost make Bryan Danielson look like Snitsky.
None of them seemed to be capable of a bad match, and in fact when they were matched up with one another, they'd put on matches that were as good as or better than other matches more widely recognized as the “best of the decadeâ€, except that these matches were so good on such a regular basis that they often became indistinguishable from one another, a problem that Ring Of Honor always faces in year end voting. The only other thing that could be considered to have been a knock on the cruiserweight division was that there wasn't often the same kind of storyline development that other, more well known feuds had, but the flipside is that this appealed more to the hardcore workrate fans who didn't care about the nWo, Luger's latest face/heel turn, or whatever else, and just wanted to see good wrestling matches.
In addition to the core group, outside talent was often brought in to spice things up. While there were some one shot tours involved, most of the international talent brought in became as well known to WCW fans as the regulars. Jushin Liger (who was already well known in WCW from his run there in the early 90s) and Shinjiro Otani (the first Cruiserweight Champion) both became familiar faces, but the bulk of cruiserweight imports came from Mexico. The slight against the Mexican cruiserweights is that they were basically interchangeable and were usually thrown in meaningless six man tags, but those six man tags often stole the show, and Psicosis and Juventud Guerrera both broke through and eventually became seen as part of the core group of mainstays.
The division did end up hitting a rough period in the late 90s when Malenko, Guerrero, and Jericho jumped ship to the WWF, and then things got worse when Madusa and Ed Ferrara held the belt during the Vince Russo Era, but the division hit a huge renaissance in the last years of the promotion, mostly centering around the Three Count vs Jung Dragons feud. These two groups put on amazing spotfests that weren't as technically sound as the days of Malenko, but were amazing to watch in a more aerially spectacular way. Chavo Guerrero, Jr, Mysterio and Billy Kidman (who had risen the cruiserweight ranks in 1998) stayed with WCW until the end and were always focal points of the division in its later years, and WCW even crowned Cruiserweight Tag Team Champions, but unfortunately the promotion closed before that went anywhere and then WWE turned the division into an afterthought before quietly retiring the title earlier this year.
The Heavyweights
With the cruiserweight division becoming a holy thing to wrestling fans of the time, the heavyweight division was often forgotten about, but it was an impressive group of talent in its own right.
One of the centerpieces of the non-main event heavyweights for most of the Nitro Era was Chris Benoit. While Benoit was technically small enough to qualify as a Cruiserweight, he was elevated into the midcard and put in some of the more memorable feuds of the time. His first major feud was with Kevin Sullivan, a feud which lasted over a year and became quite personal, both on screen and in real life. Regardless of the behind the scenes fallout from their angle, Benoit and Sullivan had some brutal brawls including two brutal Falls Count Anywhere matches at Bash At The Beach 1996 and 1997, and a San Francisco Street Fight at Superbrawl VII, matches which showed that Benoit was capable of more than just the New Japan junior style. Sullivan himself, even that late in his career, was quite the brawler and was not at all shy about working very stiff with people, and his ability to promo helped make up for whatever he lacked at his age.
From there, Benoit moved into a feud with Booker T over the TV Title, leading to a best of seven series between the two. By this point Benoit was established enough that the wins Booker got over Benoit helped legitimize him as a singles star after mostly making his name as a tag wrestler, and this was a rare case these days of two young guys having matches so good that the feud got both of them over and helped push them to the next level. Booker would, of course, go on to become a multi-time WCW World Champion in the company's dying days, and is still regarded as an excellent worker even today with his prime behind him.
Diamond Dallas Page is often dismissed out of hand, with people saying he was given preferential treatment because he was buddies with Eric Bischoff and pointing out to the fact that he liked to plan out his matches step by step ahead of time, but the fact is he still had some great matches, had WCW's best feud of the year in 1997 with Randy Savage, and worked harder than just about anyone at the time. We're talking about a guy who didn't even become a wrestler until he was past his mid thirties and had a lot of ground to make up in order to be successful in the business, and he did it. He busted his ass in the gym, worked hurt, and studied tapes to get better, and he kept steadily improving. Sure, it’s hard to have a bad match when you’re in the ring with people like Savage and Benoit, but he was good at telling a story with his matches, and while I won't say he was a headliner on the level of guys like Sting or Hogan and I’m not sure he needed to be WCW World Champion, the one thing nobody can say about DDP was that he didn't work his ass off to get where he did.
For as much heat as he has, and as little respect as he shows the business sometimes, the fact is that Goldberg was also a successful homegrown WCW talent. In covering for the fact that he’s not the greatest worker in the world (so bad, in fact, that he inadvertently ended Bret Hart’s career with an errant kick), he was booked to squash his opponents in dominating fashion in just a few minutes every time out. Between his dominant performances and the fact that he just looked like a badass, he got over huge with WCW fans, and even the lame way in which he suffered his first loss to Kevin Nash didn’t slow him down because he remained as popular as ever through the remaining days of WCW. He is to this day one of the VERY short list of people that Hulk Hogan never got his job back from, and he still remained over during his lackluster WWE run years later.
There were other names as well like Jeff Jarrett, Perry Saturn, Raven, and Curt Hennig who all became major cogs in the midcard through the late 90s, even if they never broke through in WCW like Benoit, Goldberg, Booker T, and DDP did. Jarrett did come back later on and became a multi-time WCW World Champion, but that was often attributed to them just not having anyone else to put the belt on, which is too bad because when you look at Jarrett's ringwork without a direct comparison to the cruiserweights (which was admittedly difficult in the late 90s), he's a very smart wrestler who could tell a great story with his matches without having to let himself get killed every night.
The Stars
The big joke about WCW for years was that it focused on all the old wrestlers the WWF had outgrown years earlier, and because these guys were the main eventers, WCW became thought of as the senior circuit of the wrestling world. While it's true that the best days of a lot of these guys were behind them, the thing to remember was that the entire wrestling fandom of the mid to late 90s, which was of a pretty significant size, wasn't on the internet and creaming themselves over Chris Benoit and Booker T. A lot of them were old WWF fans who saw their favorite wrestlers on WCW and connected with them better than the new guard in the WWF.
This was something I didn't understand at the time, because having grown up in the 90s, Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels were like gods to me, and I didn't think there was any comparison to the older guard like Hogan and Savage. However, now I'm 29 and I still would preferr to watch Bret and Shawn over John Cena, Randy Orton, and Batista, and now I realize where the older crowd was coming from and why they watched WCW. The same way I'm still a Bret mark and sleep through Randy Orton matches, these people all grew up on Hulk Hogan and identify with him better than they did with Bret and Shawn, or later, Austin and Rock. This generation of fans who for some reason believe Batista is a good wrestler (as I see it) are probably going to look the same way at the generation of wrestlers who are to follow.
But that being the case, WCW certainly had its fair share of established stars to draw the older fans in. Sure, you had guys like Hacksaw Jim Duggan, the One Man Gang, Big Bubba, and Earthquake who weren't exacly setting the world on fire, but you had the two biggest WWF names of the 80s in Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage, and you also had two of their biggest stars of the 90s in Scott Hall and Kevin Nash jump ship to start the biggest angle in the history of the promotion. Of course, you had all the biggest names of the NWA in the 80s with Ric Flair, Arn Anderson, Sting, and Luger. ECW fan? Tune in to Nitro to check out Raven, Shane Douglas, Perry Saturn, Mike Awesome, and Lance Storm. You even had old time regional stars like Chris Adams and the Fantastics showing up, and while you might argue that the WCW roster got so bloated by this point that they couldn't really feature some of these guys as much as they probably deserved to be, I have to think that there were, for example, old time World Class fans who had stopped watching the business years earlier sitting on the couch one night flipping channels and turned to TNT and said “Oh my god, it's Chris Adams!â€, and then started watching and got hooked.
It may sound ridiculous to today's fans that this sort of thing would really make that kind of difference, but it does. How many of you would drop the money in a heartbeat to buy a show if Steve Austin was going to make a wrestling appearance? Or even Bret Hart for that matter? I know for myself that a big reason I ever bother tuning in to TNA these days is to watch guys like Samoa Joe, Jay Lethal, and Christopher Daniels who were headlining ROH when I first became an ROH fan, but aren't there anymore. To the 80s and early 90s fans, there has never been a greater assemblage of collective name talent than there was in WCW in the 90s, and while they did end up wearing out their welcome many times over, it made WCW the place to be for a lot of marks.
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I actually had a lot more to talk about than I got to here, but I have to cut it short, so I think I'll come back soon with another one of these since this was a lot of fun. But until then, thanks for reading and send all feedback to stupwinsider@yahoo.com and check out my wrestling blog at stuwrestling.livejournal.com. Also, make sure to check out the latest columns from Doug Brown, Gregory Honay, and Mike Campbell, and also the weekly PWInsider Town Hall where you, the readers, can throw in your thoughts on the current events in the world of professional wrestling.
