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CONTROVERSY = RATINGS!

Nobody seems to like WCW on the Net anymore. It's really funny how biased the whole Internet is towards the WWF and against WCW. People don't seem to appreciate what happens on Nitro every week. You would think WCW hurt the fans with bad television or something, but that's not possible because WCW is what sports-entertainment is all about! The best part about it is that WCW continues to change every week and it is all thanks to one man: Vince Russo.

Vince Russo is a true visionary for what wrestling is becoming in the 21st Century. He changed the way both WWF & WCW shows were presented every Monday night. Wrestling is based totally on storylines, in fact, there's not even a need for matches every night and, thanks to Vince Russo, these matches have been shortened accordingly so that we can get a great interview by Madusa and a Cruiserweight Title match ALL IN THE SAME 5 MINUTES!

Vince Russo has also executed his MASTER PLAN of bringing back the nWo. Now WCW is back where it SHOULD be at, with the WCW vs nWo feud that made WCW hot back in 1996. I'll never forget the Nitro where Scott Hall made that first appearance to declare war on WCW and now it lives on in the year 2000 so WCW and the nWo can fight it out for another 4 years! People don't seem to buy into it at first, but they'll come around and Vince Russo will keep putting on awesome Nitros and PROVE THE FANS WRONG!

People criticize the genius of Russo, but truthfully, it's Standards and Practices that has been holding WCW down from becoming the top sports-entertainment program every Monday night. Vince Russo created a world where unpredictable things happened that made Nitro exciting. I really thought Goldberg was going to beat Bret Hart for the title at Starrcade and send me home happy, but then Russo executed his MASTER PLAN and reformed the nWo. Standards and Practices probably tried to stop this plan from going through, but they couldn't get the job done and the nWo is back 4-life, baybee! If Standards and Practices would just get off his back, Vince Russo could get competitive with RAW and do what he does best: CREATE CONTROVERSY.

Controversy is what wrestling, as a whole, centers around. Without controversy, would the WWF be where it is today? The reason the WWF beat WCW in the ratings war has nothing to do with the great Austin-McMahon feud or WCW becoming the Hogan Show, it has to do with the CONTROVERSY created by the Bret Hart vs Shawn Michaels match. People wanted to see what would happen next, so they tuned in! Then, as the WWF quickly became successful during 1998 and 1999, Vince Russo kept the fans MORE interested with MORE CONTROVERSIAL TITLE CHANGES! Steve Austin kept losing the WWF Title to the evil Vince McMahon's corporation in more and more CONTROVERSIAL fashions and the fans wanted to watch RAW more and more! However, Vince McMahon held down Vince Russo's true creative genius as Russo wanted to control his own organization where there was an even playing field and people just did what they did best: get over.

We don't NEED faces or heels anymore. We can just cheer for whatever we want and it will get pushed totally based on the crowd reaction! I think Lex Luger and "SLAPNUTS!" are funny, so I hope to see Lex Luger & Jeff Jarrett more every week on Nitro. Vince Russo really hit the nail on the head with Jeff Jarrett, because he brought him right in from the WWF and made him one of the top stars on WCW that I turn on my T.V. to see EVERY WEEK! I'm glad he's in the nWo, because he's so popular he's one of my favorite stars and a year from now, he'll be WCW World Champion, on his 3rd reign!

Another thing Vince Russo did to better the wrestling industry was get rid of those stupid things called "pushes." We don't NEED pushes anymore. There's no such thing as a "push" in this day and age in WCW, because they don't exist. If you think a wrestler is being pushed, then you must be confusing their importance to the league and key placement in storylines with a "push," whatever THAT is. Now, if you look at WCW, you see that nobody gets a push and that everyone has an equal opportunity to get over. It doesn't matter if you're in the nWo, if your name is Goldberg, or if you were a big WWF star in the 80s/early 90s, you're going to get the same opportunity as the World Champion.

That's another thing that makes Vince Russo so great. While the World Champion is visible a lot, he doesn't get pushed more than anyone else. In fact, titles mean nothing! Titles have always meant nothing and are just pieces of gold attached to leather straps that wrestlers happen to carry around. The main event of WrestleMania doesn't HAVE TO be a world title match, it just is every year. Titles have no importance and are just toys that can be tossed around, because nobody really cares about them in the first place. What DOES make titles important is if you have a woman beat a man for a title, then that CREATES CONTROVERSY and gets everyone talking at the office Tuesday morning about what they saw last night on Nitro!

For those of you that still doubt Vince Russo's ability to write storylines for a major wrestling organization, just remember that the day after WCW Mayhem when they had a MORAL VICTORY and made a dent in the WWF's armor! Of course, Standards and Practices had to step in and tell Vince Russo that he had to be LESS CONTROVERSIAL and now wrestlers can't offend fat people or make fun of Bell's Paulsey or strip tease. So, if WCW sucks, it's not Vince Russo's fault, it's the people that are preventing Russo from doing his job, which is bringing up the RATINGS and CREATING CONTROVERSY!

I, as a fan, would much rather have a wrestling program I can talk about with my friends that's unpredictable rather than a program I actually enjoy. Why do wrestling fans not get it? I don't see why we wrestling fans should always be happy with wrestling shows. Look at all of the EXCITING CONTROVERSY that's being created right this very second! I don't know what's going to happen on Nitro next. Will the really cool nWo beat up someone? Will Hulk Hogan return? Who is going to turn nWo next? Whatever happens, I'm sure it will grab my attention and keep me watching. If only Standards and Practices would allow Vince Russo's true creative genius to shine every Monday night.

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Guest column text copyright (C) 2000 by the individual author and used with permission