re: Viceland's new series "The Dark Side of the Ring" is amazing * (Season 2 starts 3/24) *

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although Im sure Bill Watts would have still f'd it up.

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Bill Watts is a wrestling genius. Everyone blames him for the bad run of WCW when he was in charge which is a bit unfair. He was brought in to cut costs, which he did, otherwise the company would never have lasted long enough for Eric Bischoff to steer it onto the rocks and for Vince Russo to rape the dying corpse.

Give Watts the money that Bischoff got to play with and things would have been different. Granted, pushing his son was dumb, but other then that Watts would have been fine.

Oddly enough... we almost got this years earlier. Watts and Ted Turner had come to an agreement and TBS was airing Mid-South wrestling to insanely high ratings. Watts was getting ready to go national when Vince McMahon, who had bought out the Georgia wrestling promotion, sold out his time slot on TBS to the Crocketts.

This gave the Crockett family the oomph they had to not only move Mid-South off the air but launch a massive talent raid on the surviving territories and eventually form WCW on the ashes of the NWA. Vince, meanwhile, got enough money to put on Wrestlemania.

That whole long chain of events all started years before when Ole Anderson (then part owner of Georgia Wrestling) called Vince McMahon Sr. a whole slew of cuss words for promoting Ohio (Which Ole owned) and stated that Vince Jr. and his wife were a pair of whores at an NWA convention. Then Ole forced out Jim Barnett, who went to Vince McMahon Jr. and gave him the contacts in the wrestling business to expand nationally. The first thing Vince Jr. did was to nuke Georgia Championship Wrestling.

Magnum TA was part of a run of just incredibly horrible luck for the NWA/WCW. Their future seemed pretty set. David Von Erich and Barry Windham were going to be swapping the belt back and forth with Ric Flair and someone like TA would be in the mix as well.

Instead David passed away, Barry sort of drifted back and forth between the WWF and NWA/WCW, and Magnum had the car accident. The whole territory system died as a result. Memphis and, oddly enough, Portland held on a lot longer then you'd think before they went under.