“You know who I am. But you don’t know why I’m here.”
To pro wrestling fans, that quote is as famous as the Gettysburg Address.
Thirty years ago this past Wednesday, Scott Hall showed up on “WCW Monday Nitro” to launch the nWo invasion.
It’s the biggest angle in wrestling history.
It enabled WCW to beat WWE in the Monday night TV ratings for 83 weeks.
It spawned WWE’s Attitude Era by way of retaliation.
It was the forerunner of D-Generation X in the immediacy, the Bloodline more recently and all points in-between.
It took wrestling even further into the mainstream.
It really was a New World Order.
It was the time of my life.
I worked for World Championship Wrestling from 1993-2000. I saw it all.
Hall arrived first. Then Kevin Nash. Then Hulk Hogan turned heel, went Hollywood and blew the roof off the place, brother.
Monster TV ratings. Packed arenas. The crowd was electric and divided. Buzzing like a neutral-site big game in so-called “real” sports. Like a Super Bowl or a World Cup final.
If you think that’s exaggerating, then you weren’t there.
Sting, revamped to resemble “The Crow,” provided the perfect babyface to fight back. Just as cool. A loner.
It was the last time wrestling fans believed. Will ever believe.
Oh, the marks didn’t think that the fights were real.
But they believed this was an invading army from WWE, that WWE and WCW were working together.
That wasn’t said, but implied. Hall and Nash had just left WWE, where they were Razor Ramon and Diesel. Hogan was a long-time WWE icon.
That’s copyright infringement. I guess, lol.
I talked about the invasion on WCW’s 900 number. Gave a deposition in a lawsuit filed by WWE. Protected my sources, like a journalist does. WWE said I wasn’t a journalist. Went all the way to the Supreme Court. Which said I wasn’t acting as a journalist. Oh, darn.
Like I said, time of my life.
WWE disavowed involvement. (But they started it with “The Nacho Man” and “The Huckster” on their TV.)
Hall and Nash admitted, on camera, that they didn’t work for WWE.
No biggie. By then, the audience was hooked.
Kids picked sides. Half the sixth grade was nWo, the other half WCW. (The cool half was nWo.)
The porno music. The promos. The spray paint. The starkness of black and white. Black and white TV ads: “The following announcement has been paid for by the New World Order.” Who’s going to join next?
It was perfectly orchestrated and executed. It was the creative height of episodic pro wrestling.
I wish I could live it all over again.
That was my team, and we won.
Everybody saw it on TV. But it was even better if you were there, and I was.
It wasn’t just what you saw. It was what you heard, what you felt, what you experienced.
Those were my guys: Hall, Nash, Sean Waltman, Eric Bischoff. They still are. I miss Scott every single day.
It had never happened before.
You couldn’t do it now.
People still talk about it.
It’s better than anything a wrestling company ever did, and ever will.
It made chaos an art form.
It set the bar.
It took over “The Tonight Show.”
It compromised the 1998 NBA Finals.
It was everywhere.
The 2002 comeback in WWE spawned Hogan vs. The Rock at that year’s WrestleMania in Toronto. The crowd memorably turned Hogan babyface. The nWo is even cooler than The Rock.
The logo still sells. It will be around forever.
nWo 4 Life.