What was it like to be on Team WCW when this went down?
JUST
>>1318717
Define "team WCW"
Not all contracts were the same. The upper echelon of wrestlers had fat deals and were going to get at least a million dollars to sit at home for a year or two. Those are also the guys that could afford to sit around and know that their stock wasn't going to go down by being gone. Hogan will always be Hogan. Those guys went to WCW to work less dates for more money anways.
A guy like Sugar Shane Helms? Thats a different story. You have to just jump in and hope for the best. Probably not the easiest feeling in the wold.
And then you have Double J. I'm sure he just instantly thought, "welp, I better start my own promotion..."
>>1318774
I'm talking about the Die Hard WCW fans who would never be caught dead watching WWE
>>1318785
most just jumped to WWE, i mean for a little while the last 30 minutes of raw was WCW with a WCW mat and WCW announcers
the rest jumped to TNA during its glory days
>>1318785
The majority of fans went to WWE. They were the casual type.
The diehard fans begrudgingly watched any Flair segments and waited for TNA to become a thing before going there and ultimately giving up wrestling all together.
>>1318785
Weren't many of those left by the time it folded senpai. They all made the jump to WWE, started watching indie trash or quit altogether years before WCW finally folded.
>>1318785
with the autistic ECW fans to CZW
>>1318798
"little while" aka one night
>>1318798
>TNA
>Glory days
Kek.
Wasn't WCW still getting 2-3 million ratings at the end?
Since Raw's rating didn't just improve by that many millions when WWE bought WCW, what happened to those 2.5 million-ish people?
Were they really so into WCW that even at the end they would rather just give up wrestling than watch Raw?
Raw's ratings didn't even go up by half of WCW's ratings base. Just always seemed strange to me.
>>1320369
Ratings don't mean shit when you are hemorrhaging money like crazy.
>>1320460
That's not what I'm asking though. If there were 2 to 3 million people watching WCW every week, no matter how much they loved WCW, don't you think at least half would finally jump to Raw when WCW folded and Nitro was done?
I guess what I'm trying to ask is: was Raw really so terrible for those holdouts that they would rather give up wrestling than switch to the other brand? It's not even like Raw was mostly shitty like it is today, it was still pretty close to firing on all cylinders at the time.
>>1320526
I can only speak for the people I know, they liked one promotion more then the other but mostly watched both. There was probably some hardcore WCWers in the south who refused to watch anything WWE but it's probably just more of the fact that wrestling's popularity was starting to wane.
>>1320597
>probably just more of the fact that wrestling's popularity was starting to wane.
WCW's audience skewed older. It had a little to do with the waning popularity overall, but also with the fact that the older WCW was a lot closer to "growing out" of it. They liked WCW enough to keep watching, but at that point not wrestling overall to go to another company.
I worked with a lot of guys at the time who fit into that category. I was 16-17 so it was red hot for me. They were mid 30s so it was way less of a draw.
>>1320526
don't you remember post wm 17 WWE?
It was awful the most over babyface ever turning heel and undertaker and kane where top faces.
>>1320526
This I can answer Nitro was live at 5pm on the West Coast and Raw was and still shown on tape delay so you could watch both also TNT would replay Nitro at midnight so you never had to choose.
>>1320526
They were always WCW viewers and just stopped watching
>>1320526
People underestimate how much wrestling was "dying out" in popularity at that time.
At a certain point it was no longer "cool" to like wrestling, and it didn't help the industry at all with the fact that all alternatives to WWE were bought out.
They could have retained a lot of the WCW audience if they actually put some of their wrestlers over.
>>1318717
Do you mean with in the IWC?
Things we not like now where you have WWE Drones who won't watch anything else. There were no WCW drones.
So nobody was making troll threads on forums back then posting smug photos of Vince with captions.
People were hype for the invasion and seeing dream matches.
>>1318785
The fans of southern wrestling stopped watching wrestling completely.
Didn't care anymore. I jumped on the WWF bandwagon after I saw the Rumble in 2000.)
Smarks hated WCW since Goldberg and laughed their ass off seeing it going down the drain because of the constant talent burial.
Stone Cold had always been a smarks darling since his WCW run.
>>1321672
what took so long?
