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Lunch » Tags » Books » Reviews » The Death of WCW

The Death of WCW

2 Ratings: 4.0

Book chronicalling the rise and fall of World Championship Wrestling

At head of title: Wrestlecrap and Figure Four Weekly present: This detailed tell-all of the demise of the former top pro wrestling company World Championship Wrestling explores the colorful personalities and flawed business decisions … see full wiki

Tags: Books, Nonfiction, Wrestling, Wwe, Wwf, Wcw, see all

Author: R.D. Reynolds , Bryan Alvarez

Publisher: Ecw Press

Date Published: November 2004

Book telling the story and doubling as a case study of World Championship Wrestling's stumbling beginnings to rising to the heights of the North American wrestling world before falling into despair.

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How do you lose so much money so quickly? Complete ineptness helps.

Jun 22, 2009

by TheJohn

Rating:

Consider this fact for a moment. WWF/E is the biggest name in the world of wrestling. The mid 90's wasn't very kind to them and they lost a ton of money in revenue to WCW a Ted Turner owned business which was making more money then ever and by the end of the decade, had lost 95% of their audience and somewhere around 62 million dollars. Months later, Vince McMahon bought the company for about $3 million.

Ow.

Maybe thats giving things away but not when it's even on the back cover.

The Death of WCW is a very interesting book written almost like a case study concerning the history of WCW. Seen as a more athletic and less cartoony competitor to WWF back in the day, the WCW rarely made a profit despite it's fanbase. Ted Turner came to purchase the company for it's cheap programming and easy ratings for his cable stations. The company still remained in dissarray though. Enter Eric Bischoff who jumped into a leadership position, convinced Turner to put WCW on against WWF and spent millions stealing away WWF's best talent to use against them. Pretty bold, but it worked. WWF worked hard and struggled to regain it's perch and through a combination of this and WCW's ever growing incompitance and being poorly run with big wrestlers egos in charge of the booker's ears, WWF made it back.

Mixing humor with some biting statistics concerning ratings, shifting talents and PPV buyrates involving money, The Death of WCW makes for a fascinating read. Authors RD Reynolds and Bryan Alverez keep the book moving and interesting.

What comes to be the biggest problem with the book, if you can even call it a problem that I've noticed on repeat readings. I love RD Reynolds of Wrestlecrap.com but you can tell what side of the bread the authors butter is on with the way they talk about certain wrestlers. Guys like Brian Pillman I'm sure they would if they could tell us what they had for breakfast some days they try so hard to mention him when they can. Bret Hart who they remark was "the hottest free agent" talk about almost anything they can concerning his WCW career which was very short lived. Even worse is a very detailed account on his ugly breakup with WWF which is a severly over talked about subject in the wrestling world. It's a matter of taste to be sure but you also can tell without a shadow of a doubt who the authors of they're fans of. By the time your done reading the book, you will hate guys like Kevin Nash, Hulk Hogan and Vince Russo.

Other then this one nit, The Death of WCW is an interesting read. Do not dismiss it simply thinking it's just about wrestling and therefore stupid. There isn't much wrestling in the book outside of recapping some stupid storylines but that's about it. Death of WCW goes to show it doesn't matter how big you might get, in that it can all come tumbling down. Of course looking at commerce in the last year or two, thats not quite a shock anymore.