As we get closer to the top, the stories continue to get more ridiculous, but that’s okay because that’s what wrestling is all about. The problem with these stories are, they’re not part of the act, these are real life grown men behaving like assholes and idiots. What separated this particular disaster from the rest is, it started off as a worked-shoot and spiraled downward from there.
Thanks again to John Cheese and his Magic Pimp Bus for this article, who if I may say, is far sweeter than Adam Rose and his Erotic Express. Now off we go as we continue the countdown.
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#2. Hulk Hogan Story Goes Too Far and Runs Him Out of the Company
This is one of my favorite wrestling moments of all time, because there is so much bullshit going on here, it’s almost impossible to tell what’s set up, what’s scripted, what’s real, who’s in on it, and who has been left out of the loop. It’s just such a gigantic, twisting Inception-like maze of bad ideas.
It all starts with this match at WCW’s 2000 Bash at the Beach pay-per-view. The story goes that Jeff Jarrett, the blond guy in the shiny shorts, was their world champion. He had a title match versus Hulk Hogan, and the creative team wanted Hogan to lose this one to help solidify Jarrett’s character as a legitimate champion. Hogan didn’t like that idea, so he invoked a clause in his contract that gave him creative control, effectively letting him choose his own storylines and match outcomes. In the wrestling world, he’s known for this kind of douchebag self-promotion.
I had a couch that looked like that once.
After some back and forth, they decided to do a “worked shoot.” What that means is that they would be making it look as if what was going on in the ring was unscripted and unplanned, even though every second of it totally was. So Jarrett headed to the ring, along with Vince Russo, the head writer for WCW, and proceeded to lie down at Russo’s instruction. He then threw the belt at Hogan and said, “There you go. Pin him.”
Hogan looked absolutely disgusted and asked for a microphone. As Russo walked away, Hogan said, “That’s why this company’s in the damn shape it’s in — because of bullshit like this.” He then put a foot on Jarrett’s motionless body and had the ref count it out.
This is actually how you get elected to office in Georgia.
Everything up until that point was totally scripted. See, people were for the first time getting into the behind-the-scenes stuff, so they all knew about Hogan’s antics, and they knew about the bullshit politics that happen in wrestling promotions. So Russo took advantage of it. Here’s where it gets crazy.
What wasn’t scripted was that after Hogan had left the building, Russo came back out and went on a total fucking tirade about him. He laid out exactly what happened, including bringing up Hulk’s “creative control” clause. He talked about the plans that they had to scrap because of it. He called Hogan every name in the book and said, “I promise everybody, or else I’ll go in the goddamn grave, you will never see that piece of shit again.” And he was right. At least in the WCW, because Hogan never came back. He filed a defamation of character lawsuit a short while later, but it was eventually thrown out.
“Whatcha gonna do, brother, when Hulk Hogan’s Lawyermaniacs come crashin’ down on YOUUUUUU?!”
Had Russo not come back out and gone on that rant, the plan was for Hogan to return after a four-month hiatus. In the meantime, WCW would have created a new title belt and crowned a new champion, assuming that Hogan had quit the company for good. So when he eventually returned to the ring, he could claim, “Hey, I’m the real champion,” and they’d have to have a huge match to settle it. Instead, when Russo got real, Hogan got pissed and said, “Fuck this shit, I’m outtie 5000, homeslice.” Or whatever it was that old white guys said in the ’90s when they were trying to act all cool.
Wasn’t that a fun ride through ridiculosity? We’ll be back tomorrow with the conclusion of this fiasco and the #1 disaster in professional wrestling. Here’s a hint… Wrestlers should stick to…. Wrestling. That is all.
