15 Years Ago: WCW's “Slip” Backfires … Twice

From John Cannon: I think most wrestling fans who were fans back in the late 1990s remember the “Monday Night Wars” fondly. After al...

From John Cannon:

I think most wrestling fans who were fans back in the late 1990s remember the “Monday Night Wars” fondly. After all, it was twice the wrestling, and no matter whether you preferred WCW or WWF/WWE, it made for good talk, and often a few good arguments. For those of us who knew how to work our VCRs, it didn’t matter. We just watched both.

I will admit that starting from the beginning of the NWO takeover I leaned towards WCW. The whole storyline shook up wrestling. Aside from “Stone Cold” Steve Austin there was little I found interesting about WWE, which would eventually become littered with lame “factions”. While the Kliq/D-Generation X were cool and edgy, fans would also have to deal with the Hart faction and the Nation of Domination. But to be fair, even WCW eventually went nuts with the same idea offering every type of NWO offshoot. In the beginning it’s easy to see why WCW was gaining the advantage, but by the end it was also easy to see why they were losing it.

This leads us to January 4, 1999, and the live episode of WCW's Monday Nitro that many consider to be the beginning of the end of the Monday Night Wars. The night that WCW decided to leak results to that evening’s episode of the WWF's RAW is WAR – taped a week earlier – backfired, causing thousands to not only switch over to RAW, but also to return back to Nitro afterwards for one of the most horrible Nitro finishes ever.

Broadcast live from Atlanta, GA, Nitro was gearing up for another punch in the Monday Night Wars and this night’s secret weapon would be a sneaky eye poke as commentator Tony Schiavone would go against all that is holy in pro wrestling and reveal match outcomes. Unfortunately this first “finger” would backfire as thousands switched over to RAW when it was announced that Mankind would be winning the WWF World Heavyweight Title. Not only were fans privy to a major title match on television … but a title change! Who the heck would wanna miss that?!?!?! But as bad as that was, Nitro countered with a … lame … waste of time … champ – okay, I can’t even call it championship – match that … pretty much wasn’t a match.

Nitro kicked off with footage of the Goldberg-Nash match from Starrcade in an effort to pump up what was supposed to be the championship rematch main event later in the show. At this point you would figure this to be a helluva start to the new year, but after Goldberg gets arrested on some trumped up charges new WCW President Ric Flair makes a new main event match. Now it’s bad enough that fans got screwed out of seeing Nash take on Goldberg for the belt on TV, but nowhere near as bad as what ended up happening.

The match was setup for WCW World Heavyweight Champion Kevin Nash, leader of the NWO Wolfpac faction, to defend the belt against a “retired” Hulk Hogan, leader of the NWO Hollywood faction. Well, by now the whole NWO thing had started to become stale and, to be honest, fans were sick of Hogan a la Hollywood guise. To say that fans were pumped to see Nash power bomb Hogan was … hhmmm … I guess pretty accurate. What fans actually received was Nash shoving Hogan into a corner before way overselling a poke in the chest – referred to in wrestling history as the “finger poke of doom” – and allowing Hogan the pin for the win, making Hollywood the champ again, reuniting both factions of the NWO. (WOO HOO AND WE ALL CHEER … NOT!)

As everyone now all knows, Nitro ended with Goldberg returning from the police station and running into the ring, getting jumped by Lex Luger, handcuffed, tasered, spray painted, and all the grand NWO stuff that the fans have seen a million times. The result? Fans were pissed and finally fed up, and started to make the switch to RAW.

The only thing worse was the NWO version WWE … okay, Mantaur was pretty awful, too.