$ The Money Shot $

    Hello all! Thanx for checking out the first article i'll be writing for my column, "The Money Shot". This column is basically my forum to express my views on the world of professional wrestling. Hope you enjoy!
 
    In this installment, i would like to address the position of World Championship Wrestling(WCW), in the ratings war.
    In 1996, the rating war between the World Wrestling Federation(WWF) and WCW heated up to the hottest that the feud had ever been. One of the first logs on the fire was WCW premiering a Monday night wrestling program to rival the WWF's "Monday Night RAW". This program was called "NITRO", and was put in the same time slot as RAW. Perhaps the biggest event(s) in this feud, was that of the changes in the talent rosters of the WWF and WCW. The WWF signed such former WCW talent as Vader, Marc Mero, and Steve Austin. The WCW signed Diesel(Kevin Nash), Razor Ramon(Scott Hall), and Jeff Jarrett to name a few.
    WCW then took a big step. The New World Order(nWo) was born. Plain and simple, the concept of the nWo is cool. The wrestlers and their actions are cool. Being cool is what draws in ratings, and the nWo brought WCW's ratings to a new high, dominating the WWF for many months.
    Lately, the roles have been switched. The WWF is once again on top. Last time i checked, WCW was involved in about half a dozen lawsuits with such names as Ric Flair, Greg Valentine, and Rickey Steamboat to name a few. Supposedly, there is also a lot of tension in the locker room. True, he does draw fans, but Bill Goldberg isn't very popular with the more experienced wrestlers. Money is another issue. You can only imagine how the wrestlers would feel about WCW trying to sign the Ultimate Warrior for a couple of million dollars with an alleged "no-job clause", working significantly less than half of the dates of... well, everybody! Is pissing off the entire locker room worth pushing one or two high paid athletes for ratings? I don't think so.
    The question is: what can WCW do to improve ratings? Personally, i think that concepts of matches would be a good place to start. Some of my favorite matches are the Lethal Lottery and the Tower of Doom. The Lethal Lottery makes an awesome pay-per-view event, and could you imagine a Tower of Doom match on NITRO? Picture this: 3 teams of 4 in the Tower of Doom: team WCW, team Hollywood, and team Wolfpac. That could be a dream match right there! However, WCW gives us 3 hours of singles, and tag team competition, with the main event ending the same way: a member of the nWo runs in, spoiling a potentially good match. Triangle matches, four corners matches, ladder matches, and battle royals are all great matches, but somewhere the WCW stopped thinking about concepts and focused more on the talent, i.e.. Goldberg, Dennis Rodman. I'm thinking that if the Ultimate Warrior signs, things are really going to get sour.

    To conclude, i'd like to thank you for reading my horribly long article. I'll try to keep 'em shorter in the future. If this article has sparked any questions or comments, e-mail me. Hopefully WCW can pull themselves together, to show us, the fans, what we want to see. See Ya After
                                                                  ---Nomad---