Now, the prospect of a glorified nWo circle-jerk still didn’t stop 5000 fans from buying tickets, but once the live audience figured out that the nWo was going to win every match, they pretty much gave up cheering… or booing for that matter. nWo, and let everybody see how lame and self-defeating it would be if the nWo ever did take over the wrestling world? Which this PPV kind of accomplished anyway… Wouldn’t the best way to combat the nWo have been to simply no-show the event, force every match to be nWo vs. mode just so they could win every time.Ĭonsidering that there was, barring some miracle, no chance for the WCW wrestlers to win, it’s hard to figure out why any WCW wrestlers even agreed to be on the show. The nWo, the badasses who had taken WCW by storm, were apparently no better than kids who played video games alone on two-player Vs. In fact, besides 1995’s World War 3, where he co-headlined with 59 other guys, this event had the lowest buyrate of any PPV Hulk Hogan had ever wrestled on to that point.Įvery match proved to be an exercise in futility for the WCW crew as guaranteed victory after guaranteed victory piled up for the heel super-group. To the surprise of Eric Bischoff, few people wanted to plunk down money to see a faction, no matter how cool or popular, be handed victories in three hours’ worth of farcical matches. The #1 problem with this pay-per-view, and probably the reason it had the lowest buy-rate of the nWo era, was that it featured crooked referee Nick Patrick in each match. If you thought the all-heel commentary team and ring announcer mocking the babyfaces all night was juvenile, wait until you saw the matches themselves. It was funny for the first few matches, but as it continued on through the night, you realized it was just childish - unless you were seriously amused by Eddie Guerrero being dubbed a “ Mexican jumping bean.” Not even Scotty Riggs got the luxury of theme music in his match against Buff Bagwell, which unfortunately lacked the tagline, “ The American Males Explode!”Īnd just for good measure, the nWo would every once in a while pipe in a sound bite of that same voice shouting “ loser” at the WCW wrestlers. They couldn’t even bring themselves to abandon their “indoor voices” when, say, The Giant attempted an elbow drop off the top rope.Įvery match saw nWo wrestlers face WCW wrestlers, and while the nWo got entrance music, every WCW wrestler walked down the aisle to silence and the smart-ass comments of the disembodied nWo announcer. The rest of Eric’s commentary was about how cool it was to be around motorcycles, and he and Ted never let anything going on in the ring interfere with their ego-stroking. Throughout the show, Ted DiBiase and especially Eric Bischoff showered praise on Hollywood Hogan, even going so far as to claim that all the promoters he made money for in the past owed him “ a grebt of datitude.” …and three fat guys who sat on stage the entire night, but the novelty of an nWo-run show wore off quick. …dancers whom the commentators compared to Bond girls (though I don’t recall Pussy Galore having mall hair)…
To that end, the arena had a distinctive set-up, with black and white decorations, a giant set of steps in the entranceway, a live band, cameras on sticks… Sure, the company made the right call by not presenting it as just another WCW show. Put them in charge of the whole show, though, and all that anti-establishment appeal would fly right out the window. See, the nWo had gained a following for being rebels who played by their own rules and sought to take over the company. All in all, this pay-per-view would end up being about as satisfying as making out with an ugly chick. I would say that Eric should have known better than to put on this experimental inmates-run-the-asylum show, but given the symbolic garbage trucks that the nWo rode into the pay-per-view on, maybe Eric did have a feeling this event would be a piece of junk. No, that dubious distinction belonged to 1997’s very first wrestling pay-per-view, which was also supposedly operated entirely by the heel faction. That wasn’t the first time that a product stamped with the nWo logo had bombed, though. Bischoff’s ultimate plan was to run the nWo as its own entity, split from WCW, but a one-off “nWo Nitro” episode operated entirely by the heel faction at the end of 1997 flopped and the idea was scrapped. In fact, the faction had grown so dominant that they were regularly (and intentionally) making the rest of the company look weak. The difference was that starting in 1996, the spending spree was really paying off, with the New World Order angle being perhaps the hottest in wrestling history. Before he was getting paid big bucks to spend bottomless pits of someone else’s money in TNA, he was… well, doing exactly that in WCW. Let’s face it: it has almost always been good to be Eric Bischoff.