Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW

NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW by Guy Evans
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Nitro is the story of the creation of Monday Nitro, the spark that set the Monday Night Wars ablaze, and its downfall.

As I've said before, I'm a wrestling fan from way back. Some of my earliest memories are of watching Wrestling at the Chase on Sunday mornings after church with my dad. Aside from the occasional indie show within a reasonable driving distance, I don't watch wrestling anymore but I'm up for pretty much any wrestling book that comes along so I was glad when my wife nabbed this one for me.

I was never a huge WCW fan when I was young. Even though the in-ring action was frequently better than the WWF's, the production always looked bush league and half assed to me. When Nitro premiered, I was skeptical but pleasantly surprised.

Anyway, this book deals with the creation of Nitro, the weeks it beat WWF in the ratings, and everything in the downward spiral after that. A lot of it has already been told in documentaries and other books. This one has statements from prominent people who were involved and paints a picture of constant chaos and backstabbing behind the scenes.

That's all well and good but this is a long ass book and a lot of it deals with behind the scenes dealings at Turner. I like the business side of wrestling but this is the business side of the business side of wrestling and I didn't find the corporate stuff terribly interesting. Part of it may be that I spend my working hours in a corporate setting and don't much care to read about meetings where they discuss wrestling using inane buzzwords.

Another part of my dislike for this book was the timing. We're so far removed from the death of WCW that most of the stories have already been told over and over. Nitro adds some wrinkles but I would have been more interested ten or fifteen years ago, when the wounds were still fresh. By the end, it was like being at my high school reunion for longer than I planned on and just wanting to go home.

All that being said, I did enjoy the wrestling bits quite a bit and the downfall of Vince Russo was enjoyable / infurating. Infuriating because an asshat was given the golden ticket and proceed to wipe his ass with it and enjoyable because he failed so spectacularly. WCW fans didn't want the WWF. That's why they were WCW fans. If the suits would have grasped that, WCW might still be around today. Bischoff is also a sleaze but at least he had some grasp of what wrestling fans wanted.

Even though it's a decade and a half past it's expiration date, I still found Nitro to be a pretty good read. Three out of five stars.



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