An Inexact Comparison

Comparing the fate of GOP to fall World Championship Wrestling is more nuanced than one might think

Aug 18, 2020

I don’t often pay that much attention to The Bulwark, but one recent story caught my eye.

Matthew Stokes wrote a piece for them that suggested that Republicans need to learn the lessons of the failure of World Championship Wrestling to avoid joining them in the dustbin of history. The piece obviously piqued my interest since it combines politics and wrestling (and helps prove my point that everything you need to know about politics you can learn from pro wrestling).

I encourage you to read the piece because it’s an interesting read, and the general vibe that the GOP is in long-term trouble is 100% accurate. However, Stokes forgets a few things that blurs an exact comparison between the GOP and WCW.

I agree with the political analysis of the piece, just not necessarily the wrestling analysis.

To wit:

Why did WCW collapse? A couple reasons stand out. For starters, the company focused too tightly on the personality of one man: Hulk Hogan. After Hogan’s gimmick became stale in the WWE (then WWF) in 1993, he signed with Turner’s WCW in early 1994. For the next several years, WCW programming revolved around Hogan’s NWO. The company put other top-tier talent around him—Randy Savage, Kevin Nash, and Scott Hall—but all of these characters were still yoked to a single, central storyline. This one error compounded several others.

Stokes is not entirely wrong insofar as how the product, for a while, was built around Hulk Hogan. Except there’s a few gaps in logic:

Hogan went to WCW in 1994 and immediately won the title. But WCW didn’t really take off until the start of the NWO in the summer of 1996.
WCW Executive Vice President Eric Bischoff signed Kevin Nash and Scott Hall as free agents from the WWF. Their signings had nothing to do with Hulk Hogan.
Hall and Nash were only paired with Hogan when Hogan finally agreed to be the third man of the NWO. This was not set in stone until the day of the Bash at the Beach pay-per-view event where Hogan turned heel.
Hogan did not have an issue putting over some new talent. He put over Goldberg, and was willing to put over Jeff Jarrett before that broke down on live television (more on that later).

Stokes also neglected to mention how WCW was dominating the WWF in the ratings war at this time.

Stokes is right in that new stars like Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, and Eddie Guerrero were not pushed in WCW. But he also forgets to mention that Goldberg went from a nobody to undefeated WCW World Heavyweight Champion in nine months. He also didn’t mention how Rey Mysterio was also pushed as a major star and the luchador division basically reinvented American wrestling.

Stokes critiques about the GOP as it relates to this, however, are spot on. Donald Trump is the star of the show. The party has consistently failed to build new leaders, and the ones that who have been built and promoted will never become stars because they are built as clones in the model of Donald Trump.

But here’s one I take issue with:

Just as fans eventually turned away from WCW, the national GOP is giving voters fewer and fewer reasons to turn out for elections.

Fans turned away from WCW in two phases for two distinctly stupid decisions involving the WCW World Heavyweight Title.

The first one involved Hulk Hogan:

For context, Nash had just ended Goldberg’s year-long winning streak and won the World Title a week before in a convoluted ending involving a cattle prod.

The second was involved David Arquette. Yes, the actor.

Yes, David Arquette won the WCW World Title thanks to a tie in with a terrible movie.

But even then, there are two things that really killed WCW that got no mention in this Stokes piece:

The Time-Warner Merger: Eric Bischoff talks extensively about this on his excellent 83 Weeks podcast. When WCW was owned exclusively by Turner Sports, the buck eventually stopped with one man: Ted Turner. Ted Turner like wrestling, so wrestling got what it needed to be competitive. While there were executives in Turner who may not have been enthused with having professional wrestling in their portfolio, WCW was untouchable. That began to change after Turner merged with Time-Warner in 1997. Ted Turner had less and less influence going forward, which meant that WCW had no allies in senior leadership. Combine that with the pains of being in a multinational corporation trying to shed assets after an expensive merger and WCW began to feel the bite of micromanagement and cost-cutting all at the same time. A second merger in 2001 of Time-Warner with AOL led to the plug being pulled on WCW after the company decided to both sell its WCW division and pull pro wrestling off of TNT and TBS.
Vince Russo: Vince Russo was put in charge of WCW programming in 1999 and it was all downhill from there. Russo was a lead writer for the WWF and he left New York for Atlanta to both be in charge in WCW and for greener pastures. But Russo was, for lack of a better term, unsupervised in the way he wrote WCW programming and promoted new stars. This was far different than the situation in the WWF where everybody answered to one Vincent Kennedy McMahon. McMahon was able to control Russo’s worst instincts. There was nobody to control Russo in WCW and his “shock TV” production style was illogical at best and infuriating at worst. It was Russo who decided to make Arquette champion. And it was Vince Russo who decided that Vince Russo should win the World Title. One of an unending number of WCW title changes in 2000 alone.

But Stokes really does nail one thing, toward the end of his discussion of management issues. Stokes writes:

The company forgot that their business revolved around exciting characters and compelling stories, not cartoonish personalities and flash-in-the-pan gimmicks. The Republican party has spent the last four years living on Donald Trump’s personality with all the Barnum-like capital he accumulated through years of appearances in tabloids, reality television, and, you got it, World Wrestling Entertainment. And while the number of boat parades for him may be numerous, the hard work of reaching out to voters beyond the base has been ignored.

That will be the biggest legacy of Trump’s GOP. While activists at the state and local level or doing plenty of voter outreach, this has been virtually ignored at the national level. The Republican National Committee has been nothing but a Trump promotion machine, promoting Trump, promoting Trump products, and promoting Trump candidates. The number of Republican National Committee meetings held at Trump properties in recent years has been appalling. The Republican National Convention next week is likely to feature not distinguished Republicans but primarily Trump sycophants (why else would anybody give Diamond and Silk a platform?).