| Hey Scott, I just recently watched an episode of Raw from early 1996, and at the end of one of the Billionaire Ted skits Vince mentions that the WWE paid for an ad in the New York Times warning stockholders in Time Warner of the millions of dollars that Turner Broadcasting was losing from propping up WCW. Was this the same merger that eventually did destroy WCW, or something else? If it was the same it's pretty amazing that Vince, or people around him, had the foresight to realize that WCW would probably have to go if a merger took place and that it was a big sticking point for the merger to even happen. |
Well, that would certainly be some misleading math. They were certainly not losing millions of dollars in 96. It wasn't like boom period numbers or anything, but Nitro was doing pretty damn well for them.
And really, WCW was not a sticking point for anything. It was always Ted Turner's cheap programming source and tax writeoff plaything and everyone knew it. If they weren't mismanaged into the ground in 2000 they'd probably have been kept around on TNT or at least TBS for that exact purpose. But nearing 100 million in losses for those couple of years was just too much to swallow, no matter who was running the company.