Ted Turner Still The Guy
By Scott Keith on 1 August 2023
Interesting game for you and the blog. Let's say the mergers never occurred and Ted Turner was still the king of his empire calling the shots. Everything else happened exactly as it did. WCW gaining great success from 96-98 and then experiencing the lowest of the lows starting in 1999. It's now 2001 and there's no chance of WCW of closing. Ted is still “the guy” in his organization and making boatloads of money elsewhere and has a soft spot for WCW…so it lives. It's a complete mess but completely safe to keep chugging along.
If you're Ted and want to turn things around in 2001….what is your next move? You've tried Russo twice at this point with disastrous results. You've tried letting Nash and Sullivan run it with disastrous results. What do you do now? Who do you sign and who do you fire? Who do you put in charge? What shows do you keep on the air and what nights? Etc…
Turner was always very loyal to WCW and if AOL and Warner weren’t involved he probably would have pared it back down to WCW Saturday Night with the Sting / Luger / Flair crew again. There’s always money in the banana stand as the kids say. The death of syndication would have hurt a lot though. Basically you’re doing a ROH level indie at that point. Probably he would have picked up the scraps of ECW and brought in Heyman to book and RVD with him but I don’t think it would have ever competed again.