15 years ago tomorrow — March 26, 2001 — this video opened what would be the final episode of WCW Monday Nitro. It still gives you that same chilling, ominous feeling, and it’s even better now that you’ve lived through 15 years of WWE without competition.
Growing up loving the NWA and WCW, aka growing up in the American South, made you the minority. To most casual fans, it was like growing up preferring the Go-Bots to the Transformers, but it never seemed that way. It was just a different thing. It was a different flavor, that played on the instincts and hidden natural impulses of its audience.
For ultimate sadness memories, I — a diehard WCW fan who once skipped out on meeting Sister Helen Prejean in college because I’d heard Billy Kidman was wrestling Vampiro — watched the final Nitro from a stool in a liquor store in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. That sounds like the beginning of a pretentious indie comedy. I remember feeling like the rug had finally, officially been yanked out from under me. I considered what it felt like to be on the losing side of a war. History from now on, I thought, would be written by Vince McMahon. Every time a new Monday Night Wars show airs, I know it.
“Mr. McMahon is here tonight on the very last telecast of WCW Monday Nitro here on TNT. It has been an emotional four or five days for all of us involved in World Championship Wrestling. This is… The Night of Champions. Tonight on our very last broadcast, all five titles in World Championship Wrestling will be decided.”
If you’ve never seen it, here’s a bit of what you missed.
– You can’t have a legendary Nitro without Ric Flair cutting an impassioned promo and removing his jacket. Flair was tasked with summing up the history and vibe of WCW in like five minutes, and spoiler alert about Ric Flair: he did it. More than anything else on the episode, this felt like the “us against them” moment. Of course, Flair would go on to be a loyal WWE company man who thinks everything they’re doing is great, but let us pretend, dammit.
Also:
“In all my years in this sport, my greatest opponent in this company has been Sting. So tonight, if we’re going out, if we’re going out on a high-note, Stinger, The Nature Boy wants you right here in the middle of the ring, because Sting, STING, my greatest opponent, STING, it’s your last chance TO BE THE MAN. To be the man, you’ve got to BEAT THE MAN. AND I AM, THE MAN! WOO!”
For more, consult this guy in a La Parka mask:
– Speaking of Mr. McMahon …
Before the big Shane O’Mac reveal everyone remembers, Vince gets an entire episode of backstage segments built around him hooking up with Trish Stratus, emasculating Michael Cole for interrupting him, and making thinly veiled comments about rape. No, really. They toast to “being forceful,” for one. Even 15 years later, watching this makes me stare at my computer screen like I’m Steve Harvey and someone said “penis” on Family Feud.
– There was a lot of wrestling on this episode. Some great — Scott Steiner dropping the WCW Championship to then-U.S. Champion Booker T in a moment that absolutely had to happen, Rey Mysterio and Kidman teaming up for two cruiserweight tag team matches, Chavo Guerrero vs. Sugar Shane Helms (still the best-ever version of Shane Helms) — some not. There’s a Shawn Stasiak match, for God’s sake.
The highlight has to be Sting vs. Flair. It’s the perfect bookend to the show that began with Sting vs. Flair, and even if it’s far from their best match, it might still be their most sentimental. It was the only way to go out. Flair and Sting ended the show hugging in the ring, quickly overtaken by what one McMahon thinks about the other. You couldn’t have a more thematically perfect transition from WCW to WWE, even when WCW was at its worst.
– The most surreal moment in wrestling history. The night Nitro and Raw became the same show.
There was so much promise here, but it was killed by the mentality that has creatively killed so many exciting pro wrestling things: stories that begin with WWE and Mr. McMahon as the bad guy, which are then overtaken by pride until WWE and Mr. McMahon are the heroes. It always happens. Shane and WCW (and Stephanie, and Paul Heyman, and ECW, and everyone who had ever challenged WWE) were very quickly the bad guys, a group of opportunistic whiners who lost and “couldn’t handle it,” and tried to take away the hard work Mr. McMahon had put into running a company where he was the evil overlord bad guy.
You may know it from nearly any Authority storyline, in which people who challenge the status quo are portrayed as whiners, and the bad guys drift between heel and face until “WWE” is the only hero. The brand before the boys. The brand before money, creative fulfillment, anything. The end of the story is always “WWE” winning out, whether that makes any sense or not.
And it’s been 15 years, you know?
Looking back, it’s still arguably the most important night of modern American wrestling television. It was goodbye to a broken thing that could have and should have been saved — they pulled in a rating over 3 for this episode, which Raw would kill for right now. It was the beginning of an invasion angle that seemed to purposely squander, warp and ruin the most bulletproof fantasy booking in the sport’s history. It was an unfortunate side effect of a merger causing a show to lose its time slot that would become, “they got canceled because we were so much better than them.” It was the end of too much, and the beginning of not enough.
As we head into WrestleMania, Sting is hurt, Ric Flair is retired, and Shane McMahon is main-eventing. Seems about right.
