Talking to Myself: Rewriting History

Written for The Wrestling Game       Hello people of TWG™ and whoever stumbled upon this article! I am Ninoslav Maricic and I will be your host for another episode of "Talking to Myself". In this article, I will be talking about WWE and their everlasting need to change what has happened in the past just to make themselves and their stupid ideas look good.     Honestly, I had no idea what I was going to write about this week. I wanted to write about the Divas and Knockouts, but it seems one of the other writers was writing about Divas last week, so I was stuck with nothing to write about (well, there is always something to write about - I just couldn't think of a topic).     I was excited about Smackdown show last week. I couldn't wait to watch it just to see how the crowd will react after the best Raw episode ever (in my opinion) that I wrote about last week. If you read my article and watched Smackdown I am sure you know that I was disappointed. Raw was no better this week either. I guess CS was right when he wrote that if you want that kind of pop, you would have to have every Raw in NYC (read the comment on my last article).     Now, even though I was disappointed in both Raw and Smackdown shows, one thing caught my eye and gave me an idea for an article. I forgot which show had that segment, but WWE decided to show a recap of Cena's post Wrestlemania celebration on last week's Raw. Naturally, it was edited "slightly".     I am not going to lie. My memory is not very good. I work a lot, I don't sleep much, I am married and have a kid. The only time I have some peace is late at night while my wife and kid are sleeping, unless I work at night (which is often). Then I have some time while the wife is at work and the kid is in the kindergarten, but that also means I won't sleep much... and I digressed again.     Anyway, WWE showed the recap of Cena's .segment last week and even though I remember people booing so loud that you almost couldn't hear any cheers (but if you look at the paragraph above you will see why I could be wrong), the recap had nothing but cheers and happy faces in it. That reminded me of a little hobby WWE has: Rewriting history and selling people false information. For example, everybody loves The Rock, right? They like him so much that they are forgetting that in his "prime" the people's champion was like John Cena in some ways. One way is that (contrary to what WWE wants people to remember) not everybody liked The Rock. Just like there are "Lets go Cena" and "Cena sucks" chants alternating during John Cena's matches, "Lets go Rocky" and "Rocky sucks" chants were alternating during Dwayne's matches. I guess that after he left WWE to become a big movie star (which hasn't happened yet, no matter what WWE says) people forgot about that. I am sure that some people will say that The Rock already is a big movie star, but as long as people refer to him as "that guy from Scorpion King" and then other people ask "What is Scorpion King?", he will not be a big movie star in my eyes.     So, WWE has been doing things like that for a long time. Not only did they start storylines and then abandoned them pretending they never happened (kind of what TNA has been doing), they are also flat out lying about their biggest "win" ever. Their acquisition of WCW and their victory in "Monday Night War".     This story has been told over and over again. WCW and WWE were duking it out for ratings in the mid and late 1990's. WCW was on top for over a year and then WWE (WWF at the time) took over the rankings and eventually bought WCW. It was a great victory for WWE and their chairman Vince McMahon and everyone has been bowing down to him ever since. Like in every war, the winners wrote the history and soon Vince McMahon shaped the history the way he liked it. He bought WCW because his company was better, he bought WCW because WCW's ratings were so bad they had to sell it and the ratings were bad because Vince is a genius and he made WWE the best wrestling company in the world all by himself...  and WCW ruined everything.    Lets forget for a moment that all wrestling promotions have people that write storylines, people that work behind the scenes and (of course) people who perform in the ring and that all Vince had to do is say "We'll do this and won't do that" and concentrate a bit on the facts that actually "destroyed" WCW.     When WCW was at the top, it was owned by Time Warner company. WCW had a drop in ratings and WWF was at the top when they bought WCW, but the reason WCW was being sold was not bad ratings. The reason for sale was Time Warner merging with AOL who had no interest in WCW. Rumors are that Eric Bischoff had a group of investors that offered 60 million $ to buy WCW, but AOL was in charge of Time Warner and the ordered TNT and TBS to terminate all wrestling, basketball and baseball programs. Since there was no TV deal included in the sale of WCW, Eric Bischoff and his group of investors decided to back down and WWF remained the only interested party whose interest was WCW name, logo and video archive (30 or so years of footage that was worth a fortune all by itself). Rumors are that WWF bought WCW for 6 million $.     These days WWE has the largest archive of wrestling videos and they like to show them off as WWE's past events even though, at the time of the making, most of those videos had nothing to do with WWE (or WWF) or the almighty Vince McMahon and his team of trained monkeys.    Well, I could go on and on about this topic, but I would like to leave some material for another time and I don't want to stretch this article for too long (also, I just looked at the time and I have to go). I am Ninoslav Maricic and you were reading "Talking to Myself: Rewriting History". I will be back next week with another article and until then, I bid you adieu!