by Chad Morgan

Created on: March 28, 2008

Rewind if you will back to the summer of 1984. The WWE was by far the driving force in all of professional wrestling. They were infiltrating all of the major Northeast markets and were starting to venture into other parts of the country. WWE's main competition was Jim Crockett Promotions, the brainchild behind what was then Mid Atlantic and Georgia Championship Wrestling. Crockett was the main promoter of the Southeast and was backed by the NWA. His wrestling programs were being broadcast nationally on Ted Turner's TBS channel.

I was a huge fan of the Crockett wrestling programs on TBS. Saturday morning at 10am and I was glued to the TV set. This July morning though was a shocker. This was the day that the professional wrestling world dubbed 'Black Saturday'. At the beginning of the broadcast all of a sudden WWE's Vince McMahon came onto the set and said that WWE programming would be shown on TBS and the NWA shows would no longer be shown. This was the first evidence that we seen the capability of the WWE capitalizing on the failure of the WCW.

Fast foward to today and Vince McMahon is by far the biggest and richest professional wrestling promoter there ever was and there ever will be. He has built his product so much that is now a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. He was able to make his company so vast due to the fact that he was able to buy out his biggest competetor in WCW. The day he bought them out in 2001 was just like 'Black Saturday' in 1984. It was the Goliath crushing the David. It was the big man telling the little man what he could and couldn't do.

WCW failure started when the Crockett family decided to get out of the wrestling business. When that happen all of the wrestling responsibility fell squarely into the hands of Ted Turner. Turner not knowing a thing about the sport except that alot of people liked to watch it on his station, let the wrestlers run the wrestling venture. In the late 1980's through the early 1990's, the WCW was run mainly by Ric Flair. Alot of folks don't realize that it was Flair that was the promoter of the WCW during this time period. How can a full time wrestler run a full time business. WCW programming from this time period was cheesy as I don't know what.

Then came the infamous WWE/WCW battle of the late 90's. Nitro vs. Raw if you would like to call it. Wrestling was a fun thing to watch back in this time. It's popularity was compared right along to the Hulkamanina days of the 80's. One week WWE

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