By "Net.cop" Scott Keith

"Why WCW Pisses Me Off." An essay of sorts by Scott Keith.

[Warning: The following a tirade against my favorite target, WCW, so those of you with lemming tendancies may wish to turn back now.]

I'm not really in a funny mood this week. Rarely can a PPV upset me that much.

I found Road Wild to be pretty upsetting.

Eric Bischoff has always been power-hungry. I think we know that. He's pretty much admitted to it on several occasions. He's always wanted to be #1, and now here he is. The Big Boys are playing to record ratings and revenues have never been higher.

So how come I'm not happy?

Oh, sure, I'm just a whiny wrestling fan. I don't really count, now, do I? I haven't bought an nWo shirt yet, and WCW doesn't run house shows here in Canada, so I'm not really part of the WCW Marketing Machine. But I'm pissed off, and I'm sick of getting screwed around by their booking.

Screwjobs are bad. But I'm sure you knew that. They seem, however, to have become something of an institution in WCW recently. Eric hardly seems like a student of the sport, so perhaps he can be forgiven for not fully knowing what an irritation they are to us poor peons who shell out the $30 to watch these shows.

Wrestling itself has a long tradition amongst the fans. Wrestling fans tend to not be the sophicated celebrity types who frequent basketball games and boxing matches, but rather a simpler type. Wrestling is the poor man's answer to boxing. With boxing, you never know who you're supposed to cheer for. Wrestling solves that quite nicely by presenting the ideas of the face and the heel, the good guy and the bad guy.

There's some basic rules for wrestling that have evolved over the 100 year history of the sport.

For instance, the face always beats the heel. You can make the heel as big and mean as you like, more evil than Lucifer come to life and nastier than a hurricane, but in the big match the face must win. Because it's the fan's identification with the face that ultimately provides the necessary "blowoff" in the blowoff match. It's the fan who needs the win, not the wrestlers. The fans pay their money to see the clean cut good guy take out the evil bad guy, and when you don't deliver that then you have a problem.

The babyface is universal in some ways. No matter how cynical a fan might be, given the right buildup, a babyface wiping the mat with a particularly vile heel will feel *good*.

Let's use a recent example.

Lex Luger v. Hulk Hogan from Nitro. Everyone hates Hulk Hogan. It's pretty much universally accepted that Hulk Hogan is the heel. Lex Luger, sickening as he may be in the Bouncing Babyface role, is universally accepted to the face. On Nito, after month after frustrating month with Hogan as champion, you knew someone was going to have to beat him eventually. Didn't you, as a wrestling fan, at least smile when Luger got the submission and held the belt up over his head? Whether you know it or not, you probably did, because that's an inborn thing as a wrestling fan -- deep down, we all just want to see the good guys win. That's why we watch, it's catharsis. Throw Vader at us, throw Flair at us, throw Hollywood Hogan at us, we can take it all as long as we know that, in the end, the good guys are going to win, because then, maybe, that means that the good guys might win in real life, too.

Which is where the problem lies with WCW.

It's very political. Everything is about politics in WCW. Hall and Nash have become symbols of everything that is wrong with wrestling. They break kayfabe to come up with the newest catchphrase. They freely associate with the very people they're supposed to be feuding with. They can't even be bothered to "act" during the match, because they know no matter what they do, they're the lifeblood of the nWo cash cow and they can't be fired.

Which is why the whole nWo thing is so frustrating as a fan. Because we *know*, instinctively, without being told by the announcers or having it explained to us by a pseudo-intellectual writer like myself, that these two guys should have been beaten a long time ago. They are the heels. Eventually, the heels must lose. And yet they continually do not lose. In fact, they do everything but lose. They have been built up as unbeatable heels and put over everyone so much that there is no longer any team that can conceivably beat them within the realms of normal logic. At Road Wild, in a match where 99 times out of 100 the faces win, the Outsiders completely dominated the entire match, lost the advantage for all of 1 minute, then DQ'd themselves to keep from having to job.

Let's break this down a bit, shall we?

Now let's keep in mind they didn't job. They knew going into this fiasco that they would not have to job. And yet, knowing this, they still couldn't even be bothered to make the Steiners look good. No, they had to have ALL the offense, all the moves, all the insulting gestures. That, my friends, is Taking The Crowd Out Of The Match 101. When the heels pound on the faces for 15 minutes+ with no offense from the face, the crowd gets bored and frustrated. Hall and Nash have been in WCW over a year now, and I can't recall ONE MATCH where they put the faces over. I don't just mean jobbing, I mean making the opponent look worthy enough to be in the ring with them.

They are, perhaps, the two most selfish workers in the business right now, second only to the king himself.

Hulk Hogan.

It's not enough he's in the main event of a heavily hyped PPV. No, he has to beat on the World champion for twenty minutes, allowing Luger NO offense while he rants to the camera the entire match. Hogan's ego is totally out of control, and maybe if he listened to all those disadvantaged children he was supposedly visiting during the Hulkamania days, he'd realize what an asshole he is inside and out of the ring. Bad enough Luger is the new Tommy Rich, he also has to suffer the indignity of getting beat up by Hogan the entire match.

And why does WCW even need Hogan?

Most people don't realize just how mind-bogglingly big this federation really is. There are at least 200 wrestlers on the active roster of WCW. Keeping in mind that, in the glory days, the WWF had maybe 50, this is astonishing. WCW has 20 or 30 main event caliber matches that they haven't even touched yet just because there's so many combinations.

Sting has become a real slap in the face to the WWF, I feel. Sting is simply becoming the symbol of superiority, Eric's way of saying "I have so much money that I can pay a guy $700 thousand a year just to sit in the rafters and brood. And he's one of my most talented and popular guys."

Now I'm not going to make one of the those stupid statements like "I'll never buy another WCW PPV again," because that's ridiculous. Just by sheer chance they give us two **** matches per show because with all the mixing and matching you have to get *something* good out of it.

But I am pissed off at WCW. And judging by the overwhelmingly negative reaction of the newsgroup, many others support my position on this. Maybe they're all smart enough to realize the damage of wanton nWo screwjobs or celebrities putting themselves over established stars or washed up hasbeens signing multimillion dollar contracts just to show up the WWF.

Or maybe like all wrestling fans, they just want to see the good guys win for once.

As always, I remain the net.cop...