By Blade
28 April 2000
The so called 'new era' of WCW started off with a bang showing some promising signs under the control of Vince Russo and Eric Bischoff but they landed themselves right back where they started, maybe even worse. The New Blood is being pushed more and that is good but the old folks still dominate. The biggest thorn in WCW's ass, Hulk Hogan, is still a major part of storylines which he naturally dominates. More important than that the World Title was given to Jeff Jarrett who wasn't quite ready for it in the first place, then dropped to DDP and just over 24 hours later it was placed around the waist of the 1-800-callATT man David Arquette!??!!
Hulk Hogan needs to be fired, assassinated or deported to Cuba. The wide majority of the fans hate him while the rest rejoice in the memory of Hulkamania. Hogan may be the most recognized wrestler in the world but his name is worth nothing now and his ratings pull ended more than a year ago. He is one of the reasons why WCW fails to fill more than half of the seats at their shows. According to his recent interviews he plans to stay in this business until WCW is back on top. The truth is that if he stays with WCW it will never be number one again.
The New Blood needs to be pushed gradually. Their careers need to be built instead of receiving an instant push to the top. Kidman should not be in a feud with Hogan. Kidman will never win cleanly over Hogan so all it really does is devalue his reputation. It's like if Stone Cold were to feud with D'lo Brown. Both D'lo and Kidman have potential but they aren't nearly at that level as yet.
The established young wrestlers must be pushed. Big Poppa Pump should be a contender for the World Title, so should Buff Bagwell. It's the same old story again. Why should these guys get passed over by someone like Jeff Jarrett? The old 'old boys' network got replaced by a new 'old boys' network.
The WCW World Title is nothing more than a joke now. Russo claims that he and Bischoff made Arquette the World Champion for 'shock value'. They had better wake up and realize that they're practically trying to beg the fans to watch their show. On top of that, this definitley isn't the way to do it.
When Russo was in the WWF an idea like that would immediately be vetoed by the level headed Vince McMahon. That's what made the WWF so great. Russo kept turning out storylines and McMahon filtered them out keeping the good ones and dumping the crap. Russo couldn't handle the fact that some of his stuff wasn't good enough so he jumped ship using the excuse that with Smackdown coming on air the workload was too much for him when in reality WCW had more shows and wrestlers than the WWF. That's what this is about. Russo wants revenge and he's using WCW as his weapon to get back at McMahon. Now the ECW World Title is higher than WCW's and Vince McMahon is laughing his ass off because he knows that Russo will destroy WCW for him.
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