Bryan Alvarez

The proper title should be "Mostly made up lies about WCW"

It's been about 20 years now, since Vince McMahon was able to buy his only real competition, thanks to the horrible Time Warner/AOL merger and people working hard to get rid of "rassling".
This book came out just a couple years after WCW folded and the WWE subsequently botched what should've been one of the biggest storylines in wrestling: WWE vs. WCW.

The authors are Bryan Alvarez, who ran a wrestling newsletter and R. D. Reynolds, who runs Wrestlecrap.com. Both people, in theory, should be knowledgable about wrestling and the history of WCW, but i guess they had a different agenda.

The book is usually hailed by marks, who simply don't know any better and take it as gospel. To actual wrestling fans, who listen to interviews, podcasts, shoot interviews and read other "behind the scenes" bookes though, this can be summed up in one word: Crap.

Why?
Well, there are a lot of true stories in here, how the nWo started, how it was turned from a great story to a never-ending horror, how Vince Russo came in and showed he wasn't a great booker/writer or how bad Hulk Hogan was.

But in between there are a lot of lies and made up stories. The book for example still calls out Jamie Kellner as the guy who "killed" WCW by removing Nitro from TNT. This has been debunked just a few weeks after the WWE bought WCW by one of their higher employees, Bob Ryder, in an interview with 1wrestling.com.

Another made up story is presented as a showcase of how idiotic WCW was booked, with a story involving Rick Steiner getting attacked by a masked man. In the book, it ends with "The masked man got unveiled and it was Rick Steiner". When you read that, it sounds incredibly stupid of course. But this isn't how the story played out in reality. In reality, the attacker turned out to be his brother Scott Steiner and they subsequently started a feud.
What is really baffling about this lie is, that R.D. Reynolds has this storyline in its correct form on his wrestlecrap website. So why did he feel the need to lie here in this book?

Another lie for example is their claim that WCW had an Ad in USA Today for a Nitro episode on Tuesday, when Nitro was usually shown on Monday. They word it as if they made the ad one day too late. Pretty dumb, huh? In reality though Nitro was moved to Thursday because of the NBA (not uncommon during the playoffs, which were shown on TNT) and that was, what they advertised on Tuesday.

As i said: I don't know what the agenda of the authors was, but it's just sad. Even sadder is the fact, that so many people still call this a great book and reccommend it.

If you want to read a great book with hard facts about the downfall of WCW, get Nitro by Guy Evans.… (meer)

Largely a recap of Nitros and PPVs, unsurprisingly comes to the conclusion that WCW failed due to poor TV product since that's all they have to go off of. Relies almost exclusively on old Meltzer newsletters for backstage information. Since Meltzer's sources were guys who were trying to influence WON's reporting to aid in their backstage politicking by portraying their enemies as idiots, the history presented in the book is that everyone involved in running WCW was a moron and they just had an inexplicable run of good luck from 1993-1998.

Reads more like a 400-page blog post than a nonfiction book, with the snark expressed with liberally applied exclamation points and rarely any subtlety.
Useful only as a chronological record of what happened week-by-week in the company.… (meer)