Dildo Saggins
Banned
No one argues that WWF was better in the ring than WCW during that period. No one ever. At best, you'll get "WCW had excellent mid cards, but shitty main events, while WWF had shitty mid cards, and excellent main events". Everyone everywhere acknowledges that WCW had a much better in ring product and roster during 1996-1999. WWF didn't blow up because of great wrestling, but because of good characters and stories. And then WCW let their mid card go to shit, kept the shitty main events, and went on a steady decline from Summer of 1999 on. Once they lost Eddie/Dean/Saturn/Jericho/Benoit, there was really no reason to watch WCW except for the train wreck aspect. You can't have shitty characters and shitty wrestlers and expect to compete no matter how much money is behind you.
Well the stories bit is kinda part of what I'm talking about. Outside of Austin/Mcmahon/Rock there really wasn't much there. The DX stuff alone makes me cringe everytime it comes up. The Corporate Ministry is one of the dumbest angles in the history of Wrestling (reveal aside). A lot of the angles involved so much bad toilet humor it's really hard to look back at it now and think "this was great". I think South Park had more influence on the WWF at the time than they are probably willing to admit (despite the oddities...ugh).
When you start breaking down the WWF roster, what their gimmicks and storylines were, it looks even worse. Ho' Train? We Want Head? Val Venis? Triple H doing all kinds of things that would land any regular person in jail and on some kind of watchlist upon release?...so many of their storylines relied solely on shock value.
WWF built Stone Cold by having him beat Vince with a bedpan, drive ridiculous vehicles into the arena to do stuff, and have him talk all kinds of obscenities in the ring. Not to shortchange SC tho, he's one of the best, ever. WCW built Goldberg by having him be a bad motherfucker who handled his shit in the ring and that's pretty much it. He was insanely over because of it. They went with the "sport" aspect of wrestling and let this guy do all of his talking in the ring. That was the difference between the 2 companies at the time, imo.
And then you had guys like Jericho and Malenko. Legends. Malenko couldn't cut a promo for his life, but he was so damn awesome in the ring that him and Jericho were able to have an awesome feud, based around....wrestling! Where the hell is that with Brock Lesnar and CM P- oh, wait...