Every now and then we’ll hit you with a, “want to feel old?” WCW post, like mentioning how the Fingerpoke of Doom happened 19 years ago or the various New World Order formation anniversaries. Today — July 6, 2018 — marks an important one: Bill Goldberg defeated Hollywood Hogan in the Georgia Dome in front of the biggest crowd in Nitro history to become WCW World Heavyweight Champion. It happened 20 years ago. GATHER AROUND, GRANDCHILDREN, LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE MATCHES.
If you’ve never seen 27,000-ish people all chant “whoom” at the same time, you can check out a clip from the match below. It’s really insane to remember not only how over Goldberg was, but how important he felt to WCW fans sick of watching people stand still and talk about themselves for 20 minutes a pop.
The quarter-hour featuring the match hit an incredible 6.91 TV rating, meaning they were in the ballpark of nearly 10 million viewers at one point. If WCW had done that on pay-per-view and even some of that audience had had to pay to see it, they could’ve broken company PPV records. There are also reports that the match could’ve made them something like seven million dollars, which is crazy.
Oh, what could’ve been. At least we’ll always have WCW’s most unstoppable wrestler ever needing an assist from Karl Malone to beat Hulk Hogan.
